Momentary Meditations

By Stephen Shick

Momentary Meditations are published every Monday to awaken what Rachel Carson called “the sense of wonder” and what Albert Schweitzer called “a reverence for life.”

Looking deeply into our interdependence with all life on earth helps us know what we must do.

In our harried world, these meditations are meant to serve as a renewable resource for compassion and love.

We hope that viewing Momentary Meditations will touch that part of you that seeks peace within yourself, with your fellow human beings, and with the wondrous world of which we are but a part.

Rachel Carson is best known for her book, Silent Spring, that exposed the dangers of pesticides and rekindled the modern environmental movement. But she also deeply believed that a sense of wonder, awe and imagination is critical to caring for both nature and human beings. Her small book, The Sense of Wonder, explores nature with children and caring, compassionate adults. Rachel Carson put it this way, “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”

Stephen Shick is the author of Be the Change and Consider the Lilies (Skinner Books). Shick has taught at the Harvard Divinity School and is the former head of the SANE Education Fund, the Unitarian Universalist Peace Committee, and Consider the Alternatives radio.

 

 


The Grace of an Eagle

Watching this eagle slowly and deliberately prepare for flight caused me to confess that too often I get lost in mindless waiting or unnecessary rushing and overlook the power of resting “in the grace of the world”, as Wendell Berry puts it in his poem The Peace of Wild Things:

The Peace of Wild Things – Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives for forethought of grief.

I come into the presence of still waters

and I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light.  For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.