On Love
Published in the Common Interests Newsletter – February 2022
It’s February, and who doesn’t think of love, nature, and fresh beginnings this time of the year? So, this month’s edition is a love letter – celebrating our love of nature, of beauty, and of each other. Some of our Common Earth community members have contributed their favourite thoughts and sayings for all of us to enjoy. If you would like to add to this list, please send them on and we can include them in future newsletters. We have so much to be thankful for in Common Earth, but also so much more that needs to be done to make a difference and love will help buoy us on this journey.
From Susie Chilcoat – Pod 1
When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.
– John Lennon
From Arlene Williams – Pod 7
Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.
– Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
From David Patterson
If you trust in Nature, in what is simple in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.
– Rilke
From Malene Falch – Pod 4
All we are is peace, love and wisdom and the power to create the illusion that we’re not.
– Jack Pransky
From Stephen Collette – Pod 2
Study Nature, love Nature, Stay close to Nature. It will never fail you!
– Frank Lloyd Wright
From Ian Lipton – Pod 1
Although life might be but a brief candle,
never, ever forget that your light
like the stars no longer there,
shall shine forever.
From Lucy Lynch – Pod 8
We cannot, of course, save the World because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. That is everyone’s calling, to lead a life that helps.
– Barry Lopez
From Stephen Patterson – Pod 6
Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness,
And the loveless never find love, only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it.
– D H Lawrence
From Katie Pita – Pod 1
A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers: the experience of knowing we always belong.
– Bell Hooks
From Amy Wigdor – Pod 5
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile, the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination,
Calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
– Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
From Rafaela Rolim – Pod 2
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
– Lao Tzu
From Kyle McKenna – Pod 1
For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.
– Carl Sagan
From Olivia Gonzalez – Pod 4
A world without beauty would be unbearable. Indeed for subtle touches of beauty are what enable most people to survive. Yet beauty is so quietly woven through our ordinary days that we hardly notice it. Everywhere there is tenderness, care and kindness, there is beauty.
–John O’Donohue
From Lucas Debaud – Pod 11
You don’t know how you manage to be conscious; how you manage to grow and shape this body of yours. That doesn’t mean to say that you are not doing it. Equally–you don’t know how the universe shines the stars, constellates the constellations, and galactifies the galaxies. You don’t know. ..But that doesn’t mean to say that you aren’t doing it in just the same way as you’re breathing without knowing how you breathe.
– Alan Watts
From Bob Chilcoat – Pod 1
The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers; he is one who asks the right questions.
-Claude Levi-Strauss
From Sarah Patterson
Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
–Rumi
From Cari Keller – Pod 10
In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.
– John Muir
From Marianne Patterson – Pod 1
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
– Ellen Bass
From Ekta Bromley – Pod 6
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
– William Shakespeare
From Kitty Slater – Pod 2
It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
From Judy Biedenharn – Pod 9
You come to fetch me from my work to-night
When supper’s on the table, and we’ll see
If I can leave off burying the white
Soft petals fallen from the apple tree.
(Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite,
Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea;
And go along with you ere you lose sight
Of what you came for and become like me,
*Slave to a springtime passion for the earth.
How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,
The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.
– Robert Frost