Phoenix Climate March: The Blessing and Event Photos

ARIZONA CLIMATE MARCH :  A BLESSING

Steve Davis, Pastor and AZIPL Board Member

I remember reading somewhere of the person on a congested highway on his way to work, calling his boss letting her know he would be late for a meeting.  “I’m in traffic,” he said.  “You’re not in traffic,” she replied, “You are the traffic!”  And so too with us.  We are not in the environment.  We are the environment.  Not apart from but a part of this mystical and miraculous living planet parent.

So,  if you would. . .

Please feel free to join me and lift our hands upward in gratitude and in blessing. . .for the canopy of sky, the company of the stars, the protective coverlet of atmosphere, the precious air we breathe.  We lift our hands upward in this desert place, for clouds that shield and sustain us, their rains that feed the cactus and bring forth the poppy and the pomegranate, the storms that caution us how vulnerable we all of us are.

And. . . in gratitude and blessing for the sun, our daystar, allowing us warmth against the indifference and chill of the cosmos. . . and the light piercing the dark of deep space so that we might open our hands outward and apprehend such diversity of color, form, all around: sisters and brothers: two leggeds and four leggeds, feathered and finned, scales and plumage, the crawlers and the slitherers and the swimmers.

And now. . . as we turn them and open our hands and our hearts downward. . .in gratitude and blessing for Earth Herself, the womb of her oceans, the bio-secrets of her soil, her children the trees and the tendrils, the  plants and the grasses, the open yawn of her canyons and the upward thrust of her mountains, the arteries of her rivers and pools of her reservoirs and the wealth of their waters.

And, this day, to these hands of gratitude and blessing, we add our feet. . .or our wheels, or other conveyances. . .that we may go where we need to go, do what we need to do, be who we need to be:  we creatures and children, but also adults and activists, defenders and resisters when it comes to any entities whose greed or ignorance, may cause the unravelling of our precious web, the undoing our earthly home.

These thanksgivings and blessings and others we offer in the name of Life Itself.

May it be so.

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