This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body....

Whatever mistake you have made about who you are is temporary.  Your true identity has remained untouched.  You have never sinned against it or affected it in any way except to lose touch with it. 

I invite you to discover your vocation in downward mobility.  It's a scary request...  The world is obsessed with wealth and security and upward mobility and prestige.  But let us teach solidarity, walking with the victim,s, serving and loving.  I offer this for you to consider - downward mobility.  And I would say in this enterprise there is a great deal of hope.

Have the courage to lose control.

Have the courage to feel useless.

Have the courage to listen.

Have the courage to recieve.

Have the courage to let your heart be broken.

Have the courage to feel.

Have the courage to fall in love.

Have the courage to get ruined for life.

Have the courage to make a friend.

And that lie that success was a rising upward.  What a crummy lie they kept us dominated by.  Not only could one travel upward toward success, but you could travel downward as well;  up and down, in retreat as well as advance, crabways and crossways and around in a circle, meeting your old selves coming and going and perahps all at the same time.

We are not alone in this struggle for the re-creation of our own lives and the life of our community.  It has long been written and known that those who choose to struggle for the life of the earth and its beings are part of an ageless, pulsating membrane of light that is filled with the lives, hopes, and beatific visions of all who have fought on, held o, loved well, and gone on before us.  For this task is tto magnificent to be carried by us alone, in our house, in our meeting, in our organization, in our generation, in our lifetime...  we are all a part of one another, and we are all part of the intention of the great creator spirit to continue being light and life.

[ We are to seek out ] ... a path that expresses our own searching - expanding the confidence in the healing power of the universe, in the presence of a loving, leading Power, exposing us always to the harsh and the tender, to the dreadful and the compassionate, prying our lives open to the evidence of things unseen.

There are a lot of things.

The Summer Day Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean- the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life?