All around us we see people living divided lives because they think they need to protect themselves from the planet and either wall it off or stand above it. But on this sacred day, this day of changing light, even as division lives all around us, may we pray to know that wholeness is always a choice. It would be easy to condemn humanity, but not today. Today we choose not the divided path of good and bad, but of unity.

May we come together to pray and sing and praise the beauty and wonder of Creation. May we come to bow at our spiritual estrangement from the earth. Not to wallow in melancholy nor to lament our actions because we did not do this to ourselves. This is the culture we were born into. This is our inheritance. But neither do we blame the ancestors. They did not know what they were doing when the separated themselves from the living earth. They had our best intentions in mind when they separated their consciousness. They could not have known what the consequences would be, but now we stand at the brink of an ecological collapse and the consequences of our separation from the earth have never been more apparent.

But this is not the end of the story.