Love This Place! Serve the Earth Week
Secret Agent of Green Compassion
Mission 004 - April 21, 2015
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Good Morning Agents!
Through your work this week, you are increasing your understanding of the interrelatedness of nature. As an example, consider how, in the process of gathering nectar from a flower, a bee pollinates the flower. So much does the flower need the bee and the bee need the flower, one could think of them as a single species. We've been referring to this interrelatedness as a conspiracy, and are being guided this week in better understanding it by David Spangler.
Retrieve the paper you've been working with each day this week and get ready to populate the fourth quadrant, "Spirit."
Day Four : Spirit
In this quadrant, each circle represents a way in which something in nature inspires you, makes you feel connected to a larger whole, plugs you in to the larger community of life, and so on. These circles show how nature takes you beyond your body, beyond your emotions, beyond your thinking into a deeper place, a place of connection and wholeness.
 As you've been doing each day, choose one of these circles and conceptualize a way for you to complete a compassionate act in acknowledgement of it. As an example, if you are inspired by the strawberries your garden produces, choose an action for today that supports gardening.
Throughout this week, we encourage you to share your experiences on Twitterwith the hashtag #LoveThisPlace2015. And, please, in celebration of our conspiracy of positively expressing life on earth, use this link to share a photo of a place you love and why you love it.
Good luck, agents. |
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Love This Place! Serve the Earth Week
Secret Agent of Green Compassion
Mission 003 - April 20, 2015
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Good Morning Agents!
 You are doing great work this week, better understanding our conspiracy with nature and performing actions that nurture it in positive ways. Our guide this week,David Spangler, is helping us with this work through a specific exercise.
Having placed ourselves in a circle in the center of a piece of paper and divided the paper into four quadrants, we have come to better understand our conspiracy with nature from the perspectives of "Body" and "Mind." Today we move on to the third quadrant, "Heart."
Day Three : Heart
In this quadrant, draw circles that represent specific emotional experiences you have with nature. For instance, what do you feel when you see a clear lake sparkling in sunl
ight (or in moonlight!)? What do you feel when you see a snow-capped mountain? A flower? A bird? What feelings does nature draw forth from you, and what in nature draws forth what kinds of feelings? Note, they don't all have to be positive. The disgust you may feel when seeing the ravages of pollution is one way you may conspire or breathe with the nature world.
As before, choose one of these circles and conceptualize a way for you to complete a compassionate act in acknowledgement of it. For instance, if one of your circles is the "peacefulness" you feel when sitting by a body of water, what action can you take to better ensure others can have this same experience in the future?
Throughout this week, we encourage you to share your experiences on Twitter with the hashtag #LoveThisPlace2015. And, please, in celebration of our conspiracy of positively expressing life on earth, use this link to share a photo of a place you love and why you love it.
Good luck, agents. |
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Good Morning Agents!
 As introduced yesterday, we are part of a conspiracy with nature, literally breathing together with every living thing on earth. David Spangler, free-lance mystic and a member of the International Kindness Team braintrust, has designed an exercise for us to better understand this conspiracy.
Yesterday, we divided a sheet of paper into four quadrants, having placed ourselves in a circle in the center. We populated the "Body" quadrant, and completed an act of compassion inspired by this exercise. It's time to move on to the next quadrant.
Day Two : Mind
In this quadrant, you are going to draw circles, too, but here each circle represents an idea or an image you have about nature. When someone mentions "nature" to you, what springs to mind? What memories do you have of places or events in nature you've experienced? 
What attitudes do you have about nature, particularly as you relate to it or it relates to you? How does your mind conspire with the natural world? These circles represent specific mental experiences you have with nature.
As you did yesterday, choose one of these circles and conceptualize a way for you to complete a compassionate act in acknowledgement of it. As an example, if one of your circles is specific to a place in nature that is important to you, perhaps you can visit that place, or one like it, and beautify it in some way.
Throughout this week, we are encouraging you to share your experiences onTwitter with the hashtag #LoveThisPlace2015. And, please, in celebration of our conspiracy of positively expressing life on earth, use this link to share a photo of a place you love and why you love it.
Good luck, agents. |
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Connect as many circles as you wish. Make sure to connect them all back to you at the center. What you have here is a map of how you and nature relate to each other on different levels of your experience. Such a map can show you how you receive sustenance and blessing from nature, how nature enriches your life. It can also suggest where and how you can return the favor. 
Next, pick up your penny and go out into nature where you can find some soil. Dig a small hole and put the penny into it. As you do, remember that you were able to enjoy all these pleasant moments because nature gives you life and nourishes you. So now you are saying thank you. By burying your penny, you are symbolically sharing your happy memories with nature and taking a moment to be grateful and aware of the earth that sustains you.
Today, please let your Double O Wonder license inspire you to perform a compassionate act for something in the natural world that gives you this opportunity for wonderment.
Beginning today, do this for each of the last three days of "Love This Place! Serve the Earth Week." At first you may forget, but when you feel the penny in your pocket, you'll remember. In time, it will become a habit. This will be your "joyous penny."
To be an effective secret agent, you have to be good at finding and decoding secret messages. The question above is a secret message. Your genuine and thoughtful answer is how the message is decoded. It will also serve as your guide to today's mission.
We assume we are seeing things because we can name them with familiar names. "Oh, that's my tree, that's my bush, that's my lawn." But these names can make us unconscious of what is happening around us. What, for instance, are the leaves on that tree like? What are they doing for the tree? How is the bush shaped? What kind of flowers are growing in my yard, not by name but by how they look, their colors, their aroma, and so on? What insects are attracted?
Take a sheet of paper and draw a small circle in the center, just big enough to write your name inside. This is you. Next, draw a vertical line up and down from this circle, and a horizontal line right and left from it, dividing the paper into four parts. Label these four parts Body, Mind, Heart, Spirit. Over the next four days, you are going to draw more circles in each of these quadrants, and by the end of the week have lines connecting these circles with each other and with the central circle that is you.
Choose one of these circles and conceptualize a way for you to complete a compassionate act in acknowledgement of it. As an example, if one of your circles is "Breath," you could plant a tree today, knowing that trees help clean the air.
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