Nick Routledge@nick_routledge
Reply to @joseph_gaglione

@joseph_gaglione Godding, ultimately, a homing instinct and, in consummation, one requiring a deepening and intensification of our life on earth at that “one good place” (Thomas Merton) where, Anita Lange observes, “we may become present with ourselves within the wholeness of the world.”

It has taken me half a lifetime of searching to realize that the likeliest path to the ultimate ground leads through my local ground. I mean the land itself, with its creeks and rivers, its weather, seasons, stone outcroppings, and all the plants and animals that share it. I cannot have a spiritual center without having a geographical one; I cannot live a grounded life without being grounded in a place. In belonging to a landscape, one feels a rightness, an at-homeness, a knitting of self and world. This condition of clarity and focus, this being fully present, is akin to what Buddhists call mindfulness, what Christian contemplatives refer to as recollection, what Quakers call centering down."

Scott Russell Saunders
Image description

Original X alt text

It has taken me half a lifetime of searching to realize that the likeliest path to the ultimate ground leads through my local ground. I mean the land itself, with its creeks and rivers, its weather, seasons, stone outcroppings, and all the plants and animals that share it. I cannot have a spiritual center without having a geographical one; I cannot live a grounded life without being grounded in a place. In belonging to a landscape, one feels a rightness, an at-homeness, a knitting of self and world. This condition of clarity and focus, this being fully present, is akin to what Buddhists call mindfulness, what Christian contemplatives refer to as recollection, what Quakers call centering down." Scott Russell Saunders

Quoted or linked post

Nick Routledge@nick_routledge · 21 May 2021

@poetinbabylon Coincidentally, no matter the limitless network of significance of McLuhan’s ‘global village’, any 'individual' attempt to give the prophetic “a local habitation and a name” will proceed only in so far as its unifying articulation is somatically and inalienably attuned to...

View this post’s context →

Context in the archive

Quoted bySam Gamgee: "The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm.”’ Ultimately, I find, true planetary living is a constant exercise in the wonder, greatness and humility of smallness. Rising early, say, to labor ahead of the sun.