I'd like to begin in a personal way and say that before I had any concepts or notions

of spirituality and this is probably age 11 or 12. My family took a Easter school break vacation

down to the Shenandoah, down to the Blue Ridge. I was a Jersey girl and we made the big trip and

we had our Easter egg hunt on Easter Sunday. We actually, my father actually hid eggs outside.

I don't know how many creatures ended up finding them, but we had a hunt and then for whatever

reason I took off by myself for a little bit and found this outcropping of rocks that kind of

you know how it is on the Blue Ridge Park where you just look out at the mountains across the Shenandoah

and the sky and the turkey vultures and I was watching a turkey vulture in the movement. I felt

kind of that my body was making that soaring movement through the sky and for the first time

I just something in me felt like I was absolutely in love with beauty, with nature, with

aliveness, of the earth and and something in me registered that I was having an experience that

was beyond what I had experienced before. I didn't have any categories. I didn't add too much

onto it, but through the years over and over it's come back that in some way I woke up out of a

bubble of selfness and touched some larger belonging and nowadays when I'm suffering if I go to the

river or go into the woods I spend a lot of time by the river. In time a quietness that's just

aware of the currents or aware of the sounds of the birds are in some way feeling and smelling

there something sets in and the suffering that was there could be there but it's held in something

larger and some larger belonging and I'm okay and of course when I'm happy I look at nature and I see

in some way spirit the sacred is just animating everything and I know I'm not alone when I share

this that I'm and if you said even beyond the idea of a Buddhist or anything I'm a worshiper

of this natural world I'm not alone how many of you take refuge in nature like it is really

really matters and is special and for those of you that aren't here keep your hands up I want to

...