Here are some readings we've used at our [[Weekly Service Calls]]
==== Lost (poem) ====
:''Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you''
:''Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,''
:''And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,''
:''Must ask permission to know it and be known.''
:''The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,''
:''I have made this place around you,''
:''If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.''
:''No two trees are the same to Raven.''
:''No two branches are the same to Wren.''
:''If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,''
:''You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows''
:''Where you are. You must let it find you.''
:: - David Wagoner
==== The Earth (poem) ====
:''Two-thirds water.''
:''One-third land.''
:''Valleys deep.''
:''Mountains grand.''
:''Sky of blue.''
:''Clouds of gray.''
:''Life here, too -- ''
:''Think I’ll stay.''
==== After the Gold Rush (third verse of a song) ====
:''Well, I dreamed I saw the silver''
:''Space ships flying'' (sic)
:''In the yellow haze of the sun,''
:''There were children crying''
:''And colors flying''
:''All around the chosen ones.''
:''All in a dream, all in a dream''
:''The loading had begun.''
:''They were flying Mother Nature's''
:''Silver seed to a new home in the sun.''
:''Flying Mother Nature's''
:''Silver seed to a new home.''
:: — Neil Young
==== Beyond Infinity; Part IV A Mad God; Chapter 4 Continents Alive; a few paragraphs from pp. 362-3 ====
Sandwiched between layers of grit and grime, even those earliest life forms had found a way to make war. Why should matters be different now? Some microbe mat three billion years before had used sunlight to split water, liberating deadly oxygen. They had poisoned their rivals by excreting the gas. The battle had raged across borad beaches bordered by a brown, sluggish sea. The victorious mats had enjoyed their momentary triumph beneath a pink sky. But this fresh gaseous resource in turn allowed new, more complex life to begin and thrive. Their heirs eventually drove the algae mats nearly to extinction.
So it had been with space. Planetary life had leaped into the new realm, first using simple machines, and later, deliberately engineered life forms. The dead machines had proved to be like the first algae. Instead of excreting oxygen, they brought life--inadvertently at first, then with deliberation. Compound forms arose.
In time the space-dwelling gray machines, adapting solely through unliving self-evolution, retreated. They were driven into narrow enclaves, like the early algae mats.
Out here, bordering the realm of ice, machines had finally wedded with plants to make anthology creatures. This desperate compromise had saved them.
The alliance of the gray machine and the living green drove a cornucopia of new forms. Once allied with the virtues of dead mass, synthesis life seethed across the vast volumes with prodigious invention. Nothing could stop--though some tried--the creative destruction of Darwin from fashioning human designs into subtler instruments. For a billion years life had teemed and fought and learned amid harsh vacuum and sunlight's glare. This opera in the sky played out with little aid from the planets.
Some time long ago, spaceborne life had begun to compete for materials with the planetary life zones. After all, most of the light elements in the solar system lay in the outer planets and cometary nuclei far beyond Pluto. In this competition the rocky worlds were hopelessly outclassed.
From the perspective of space, planetary life looked like those ancient algae mats--flat, vulnerable, trapped in a thin wedge of air, unaware of the great stretching spaces beyond. And now the true ancient mats survived only in dark enclaves on Earth, cowering before the ravages of oxygen.
Given a billion years, planetborne life had done better than the mats. Slowly the planetary biospheres forged connections to spaceborne life through great beasts like the Pinwheel, the Jonah, the Liviathan. But was this only a momentary pause, a temporary bargain struck before the blanets became completely irrelevant?
Or were they already?