On a recent Connections Call we asked folks to share some readings and resources that give them strength. Here are some links and downloads per their suggestions. (To listen to the call, just click here.) Thanks to all the Green Shepherds on the call and bless your work!
- We Were Made for These Times, Essay By Clarissa Pinkola Estes – American poet, post-trauma specialist and Jungian psychoanalyst, author of Women Who Run With the Wolves.
- Consider reflections from environmental engineer/Lutheran Deaconess/LRC Board Member: Katrina Martich: Seeing Differently, Living Differently
- Marilyn Nelson’s article in Gather Magazine: It’s Something you Live
- America’s Holy Ground book
- Orion Magazine – especially the Winter 2019 issue including a piece from Meera Subramanian, United in Change – Compassion and the shared lament for the American landscape:
“. . . the political spectrum is not a spectrum at all. It is a Spirograph, with Earth Firsters and home-schooled Christians overlapping here and diverging there. You never knew who might own a gun or believe in God.”
- See if there is a health care professional in your midst who would like to open this conversation in your congregation: EAT Lancet Commission on Food, Planet & Health: Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems. The study is freely downloadable here.
- Recall that to wallow in anxiety and fear is a symptom/example of our natural fallen state – our baptismal vow calls us to renounce this. Download this baptismal service bulletin at which the renunciations are written to remind us of this.
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Monarch Watch gives out free milkweed to non-profit organizations for their properties (visit this link). Help provide a path for our winged neighbors! Also check out/give the gift of empowerment as you discover how our backyards can save a species – Watch Douglas Tallamy’s lecture here.
- Just for sheer joy… watch how this beluga appreciates the mariachi band (and keep exploring how many other times Juno has been serenaded!). While, many of us have mixed feelings about any animal in captivity, this is the only chance many have to experience face-to-face interactions with creatures and may lead to a lifetime of relationship that otherwise would never have been sparked.