Pages tagged "Environmental action"

For decades, I’ve been talking publicly about the gathering catastrophes of climate change and social injustice, and about the decline of the Society of Friends. Sounds pretty gloomy, I know. My day job as a palliative care chaplain at a large urban hospital entails sitting at the feet of those very powerful teachers named in Buddhist tradition: old age, sickness, and death.

Dear Editor:

When I started attending Quaker meeting in my late twenties, I had a number of dramatic experiences of having a leading, jumping into it, and way opening. But that is not the story of faith and practice I am going to tell you today. Instead, I am going to tell you about a time when discernment was hard, and slow, and confusing.

Dear Friends: For the first time in thirty years, you can buy a new copy of: Arizona Quaker Jim Corbett’s book Goatwalking.

Last spring, Cynthia Black from Eugene Friends Meeting published an article in Extra! Extra! – Western Friend’s email newsletter – which described a project being organized by British Friends at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham, England. Called “The Loving Earth Project,” it invited Friends to reflect on persons or places they love that are endangered by climate breakdown and then express their love and concern by creating 12” x 12” fabric art panels. Friends from around the world have responded to this call, and the Loving Earth exhibit has grown to include over four hundred panels. This is the story of how the project has inspired Friends in the Sacramento Friends Meeting and how you can help to bring an exhibition of Loving Earth panels to the US in 2023.

One summer afternoon, I sat with a dozen other folks in the White Mountains of Arizona, listening to Aldo Leopold speak of witnessing the green fire fade from the eyes of a Mexican gray wolf, after he had shot it on the very spot where we stood. He spoke of that green fire as an image he could never forget, an image that brought him to an epiphany, challenging his belief in the superiority of man over nature. This experience left me with goose bumps and a wish that we all could face that fire (the Light?) within all animals, to become more (less?) human.