Today, a grey dawn and a quote from a text I read in college that I have carried around with me ever since. Those of you who were around for the first round might remember it, but the good oldies are worth rolling out, eh? And ok, so it’s not a picture of dawn today, but the most purple purple I’ve ever seen, which is saying something.

This whole is the earth and the sky, the ground on which we stand, and all the animals, plants, and other beings to which we are related. We come from earth and to earth we shall return. Life feeds on life. We live because others die, and we will die so that others may live. The divinity that shapes our ends is life, death, and change, understood both literally and as a metaphor for our daily lives. We will never understand it all. We do not choose the conditions of our lives. Death may come at any time. Death is never early or late. With regard to life and death there is no ultimate justice, nor ultimate injustice, for there is no promise that life will be other than it is. There are no hierarchies among beings on earth. We are different from swallows who fly in spring, from the many-faceted stones on the beach, from the redwood tree in the forest. We may have more capacity to shape our lives than other beings, but you and I will never fly with the grace of a swallow, live as long as a redwood tree, not endure the endless tossing of the sea like a stone. Each being has its own intrinsic beauty and value. There will be no end to change, to death, to suffering. But life is as comic as it is tragic. Watching the sun set, the stars come out, eating drinking, dancing, loving, and understanding are no less real than suffering, loss, and death. Knowledge that we are but a small part of life and death and transformation is the essential religious insight. The essential religious response is to rejoice and to weep, to sing and to dance, to tell stories and create rituals in praise of an existence far more complicated, more intricate, more enduring than we are…

I imagine, but I do not know, that the universe has an intelligence, a Great Spirit, that It cares as we care. I imagine all that is cares. Sometimes I feel I hear the universe weeping or laughing, speaking to me. But I do not know. What I do know is that whether the universe has a center of consciousness or not, the sight of a field of flowers in the color purple or the rainbow must be enough to stop us from destroying all that is and wants to be.

                  -Susan Christ