Does anyone pray before they cut a tree? I haven't seen anyone do that yet in the timber industry. But my vision is that that day is coming. I have a vision of a world in which we relate to each other as souls - not as personalities - not as bodies and minds and capabilities to accomplish things in this domain of the five sense, but as immortal spirits learning together how to co-create this world.

To experience relationships of substance and depth requires approaching and entering into relationships with consciousness and concern for the other.

There comes a time when the pain of continuing exceeds the pain of stopping. At that moment, a threshold is crossed. What seemed unthinkable becomes thinkable. Slowly, the realization emerges that the choice to continue what you have been doing is the choice to live in discomfort, and the choice to stop what you have been doing is the choice to breathe deeply and freely again. Once that realization has emerged, you can either honor it or ignore it, but you cannot forget it. What has become known can not become unknown again.

When you know your intention, you are in a position to choose the consequences that you will create for yourself. When you choose an intention that creates consequences for which you are willing to be responsible, that is a responsible choice.

The only permanent and constructive changes you can make in the world are the changes that you make in yourself.

The journey to wholeness requires that you look honestly, openly, and with courage into yourself, into the dynamics that lie behind what you feel, what you perceive, what you value, and how you act. It is a journey through your defenses and beyond, so that you can experience consciously the nature of your personality, face what it has produced in your life, and choose to change that. Words lead to deeds. They prepare the soul, make it ready, and move it to tenderness.

Both the Winter and the Summer Solstices are expressions of love. They show us the opposition of light and dark, expansion and contraction, that characterize our experiences in the Earth school so that we can recognize our options as we move through our lives.