Sharifa Oppenheimer

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You Are Invited this Sunday Aug 21st!

You are invited to join me

and the Organization of Nature Evolutionaries

this coming Sunday Aug 21st 3:00 Eastern,

for their free monthly webinar.  This month the topic will be A Litany of Wild Graces:  Deepening into the Heart of Nature.  Through conversation the moderator and I will explore various  aspects of  Nature Connection and I will read some poems and essays from my new book A Litany Of Wild Graces: Meditations on Sacred Ecology. I'd love to see you there and have you join in the conversation!  Here is a link to ONE; to register, scroll down to Nature Evolutionaries Webinars and Events and click on the photo.  

https://www.natureevolutionaries.com

Here is a short essay that introduces many of the principles we will be discussing:

Litany is Ceremony

It is the twenty first century.  We have wrenched the Sacred from her tellurian home;  exiled her beyond the blue earth, the benevolent trees, and our bronze flesh. Drowning in wealth, we ache and grieve, alone  in night’s dark hour, asking “why?”  Why this hollow echo inside, why the flat emptiness of life, why this lonely despair?

 

Yet all the while, there is another way, just outside the door.  The perfumed spring time forest beckons, her elegant flowers are calling us away from the cyber-chains that bind us. A white-tail deer glimmer between tree trunks, stopping to turn liquid eyes toward us.  Birds wait to sing for us, each note a doorway to truth. Step into earth’s sanctuary and begin to know the nature of each being, the qualities of each plant medicine.  Learn the names and ways of these other than human persons ~ this litany of wild saints.  Bring joy and gratitude.  Call the names of these beings; know they are listening, they understand.  The language of the heart needs no translation.   May this litany be

 

Invocation; to call  forth

other-than-human presences.

 

Invitation; to join in  the great

conversation of beings.

 

Participation in a living

geography

            botany

            zoology

            cosmology

a vocabulary of Oneness.

 

This is litany in its most untamed and fecund form.  Call the names of

 

land formations

            water mothers

            plant beings

animal cousins

fire spirits.

 

A ripple of gratitude echoes toward the past, refracts into the future. The long round of time glistens with a thread of human remembrance.

 

Litany is creative word

Word is animate being

            Being is the breath that sings

among us.

 

Let us sing their names as we walk.