"All of creation is pulsing with sentience: when the sunflower tracks the sun across the sky, when the maple tree withholds its sap in a windstorm so that if a big branch falls it will have enough sap to run to the wound. Appreciating these things elevates our reverence, awe, and wonder to a higher plane. When you kill something on a video game, you wait five seconds and it gives you a new icon. But when you go out to the garden and the tomato plant is dead, that’s it. The gravity of that situation helps to create a frame of reference to how we interact with each other. Sometimes we become so disconnected that we don’t have a frame of context for what true sacrifice is....
As people become more disconnected, they become disempowered. At the same time, government agents and the bureaucracy is addicted to this manipulative attitude: oh, we can just manipulate the market and health, as opposed to realizing that, fundamentally, we are very, very dependent and this is the posture that G_d wants us to have. It is the mutual dependency; a servant’s heart toward each other. When our hands are in the soil, when we are actually thinking about our dependence on air, soil, water, microbes, and the magnificence of life, it gives us a better perspective on what is at our fingertips. It makes us a little more humble and a little less manipulative, and a little more appreciative of other people’s abilities, gifts, and talents. I think that is true diversity."
Artwork from Eric Ravilious
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