nature

Our scent guru, Eva-Marie passed along this link to Just-a-Minute, an organization encouraging us all to take just a minute here and there to quiet our minds and let peace and stillness rush in as a way to maybe get some of it to rub off on the world.

It’s feels so true to me that peacefulness is rapidly becoming an extinct quality. The general pace of human existence, at least here in America, just seems to get more maddening every year, the noise and static that much louder, the collective blood pressure that much higher. We’ve all but lost the ability to sit still and just be. Empty. Unexpectant.

Today is the year’s longest day. As we sit on this serendipitous ball of water-drenched rock, sailing through the space at 66,700 miles per hour, we will arrive this afternoon, at 2:06 pm Eastern Daylight Time, at that place in our annual 149.6 million mile journey around the sun at which the Earth’s gladfully tilted northern axis points most directly at the sun and our hemisphere is most fully bathed in its lifeforce.

I think it’s the year’s best moment to stop and contemplate the mysteries that surround us. And I think we very much need to find such moments wherever we can and whenever they present themselves. I think this is the amorphous hunger so many feel. A hunger for connection to something larger than themselves, something that reaches well beyond our daily banalities to penetrate deeper and get at the marrow of life, a spiritual hunger for a relationship with the divine. For me (and we each have our own definition), that divinity is embodied by nature, the sum of all things that sustain us and that bring to our senses and our hearts the inscrutable beauty that cannot be named but only known.

Even prior to joining the Seventh Generation team last fall, the term “environmentalist” left me feeling unsettled. It may be a moot point to many, but, as I reflect on the germination of my discomfort with the word, I hope to confirm that my foreboding instincts about its unfortunate evolution began, for me, not as an employee of an eco-responsible company, but as a regular-old citizen of the planet.