By Solveig Nilsen-Goodin, Wilderness Way Community, Portland, OR
“I heard something…” she said.
I had just spoken the final, “Amen,” closing the prayers at our weekly gathering as the Wilderness Way Community on a sunny Sunday afternoon in early June. But she had heard something. And she needed us to hear it too.
It was a message from the bees.
Continue reading “When Bees Talk…We Listen”
By Kyle Mitchell
Kyle lives with his wife Lynea on the 3rd floor of an old house in Cleveland. They have a couple egg-laying hens in the backyard and tons of red wiggler worms. Kyle spends his days working alongside folks with developmental disabilities on a 2-acre urban farm down the street from his house. In his spare time, he works alongside Lynea in the 2 youth gardens she started in the neighborhood. They are both passionate about growing food, spreading that knowledge, and figuring out ways to get healthy food to folks that don’t have access to it.
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A few years ago I was reading a book on permaculture and I came across a quote about soil that captured my imagination: “The soil is miraculous. It is where the dead are brought back to life.” This launched me into the slow process of being re-wired – seeing with new eyes, altering my actions, converting myself to the truth that the soil is not dead, but alive! I could no longer waste what I once thought was waste. I had to get in touch with the death-brings-life cycles of creation, and I had to do this through a tradition called composting. Continue reading “Composting as Spiritual Discipline”
“Bienvenidos al Laudato Z’ine,” say the Vati-Cats. Welcome!
If you are here, then you are one of a select group to have heard about the Laudato Z’ine project, a kitchen-table experiment to spread the word about Pope Francis’ circular letter to the world (or encyclical) about climate change and integral ecology.
This started as a fun weekend project and has continued to grow.
Here are the pdfs for you to make your own Laudato Z’ine at home (page 1 and page 2 on 11 x 17 inch paper).
LaudatoZine_page 1 and LaudatoZine_page2.
Click here, if you want to read the original and complete Laudato Si’: On Caring for our Common Home.
Continue reading “Laudato Z’ine & Vati-Cats”
By Katerina Friesen
Katerina wrote this for a chapel service on Sept 1, 2015 at AMBS on “Crying out with Creation.” Pope Francis declared Sept. 1 as the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, as the Orthodox Church has done since 1989.
O Lord of mercy,
We pray for Your tortured Earth.
For forests scorched by drought-fueled wildfires out west.
For island nations drowning in rising ocean waters:
Fiji, Palau, Cape Verde, Kiribati, Micronesia.
For the sinking boats of refugees,
fleeing resource wars and famine.
Continue reading “Prayer for the Tortured Earth”
From Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace, in a DemocracyNow.Org interview covering the creative and courageous action blocking Shell Oil ships heading to the Arctic to drill:
Well, yesterday was an absolutely incredible day, a display of people power. Throughout the day, the crowds just kept growing, as you said. There were hundreds of kayakers going in shifts, filling the river so that if the boat tried to leave, there would be both lines of defense—the aerial barricade and then the people.
Continue reading “People Power in Portland”
A little homage to my new place. By Sarah Holst
By Bill Wylie-Kellermann
Come spring and then through summer and fall, we used to take our daughters for regular walks in Elmwood Cemetery on the near east side of Detroit. A favorite photo has them looking up in sun, caught in delight. This European burial ground is the last surviving bit of pre-Columbian terrain in the city. All the remaining earth has been cleared and graded and leveled first as farmland, then paved as urban built environment. This is not to say it’s old growth forest (that wood is long hauled off and the transplants tended into a canopy of stately beauties) but the land has rocky outcrops, ridges, rills, and a stream that emerges from underground to pool before slipping back beneath the street toward the river.
Continue reading “A Covenant of Land & Waters”
This past weekend was the Detroit Spirit and Roots Gathering. Over the next few weeks we will post some reflections from the weekend. This event began with the idea from Word and World to host a Land and Water School in Detroit. Over almost two years of plannings and conversations, it shifted into a collaborative event called Detroit Spirit and Roots. This was a process with lots of struggle and learning along the way. This document is a list of things we learned in that process which we used as part of our framework for the event.
“Some Things that We have Learned”
Detroit Spirit & Roots Gathering
Summer 2015
The Local Committee has agreed that this will be the framework that will guide our participation in DSR
What are the spiritual resources that our movement needs? Continue reading “Some Things We’ve Learned”
Radical Discipleship 