by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, March 2021
First published by Dumbo Feather magazine in Australia
What is the world into which you are walking, and what is the landscape you will pass on to your children and grandchildren? Will it be alive with the truth of the Earth or the false promises of technology, the distortions of social media? What are the stories that will guide you, the communities that will support you? Read More
by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, August 2021
First published by Parabola
We waited through the Winter of the pandemic, wearing masks, hiding from our darker fears. And then Spring came—apple blossom pink, pear blossom white. The wisteria falling lavender-blue over the garden shed, and then the jasmine, a wall of bright white, filling the evening air with sweetness. Here was another story, each year returning, and longed for as the garden comes alive with colors and fragrance… Read More
by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, June 2021
First published by Resilience
Sometimes at night when sleep escapes me I walk along the road beside the bay. The cars are long gone, and there is only the sound of the wind and the egrets squawking in the nearby wetlands. Early this morning I encountered a family of deer watching me in the long grass, before they vanished into the silence. Then I found the blood moon eclipsed through the trees, an elemental mystery that reaches deep into our ancestral memories, before our consciousness was obscured by science and reason. Read More
by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, July 2020
First published in Parabola
The present pandemic, which in a few short months has wreaked havoc across our world, is most likely caused by an imbalance in the natural world, as loss of habitat and biodiversity is not only driving animals to extinction but directly causing animal viruses to spread to humans. In response our leaders are using the images of conflict: “We are at war with Covid 19,” we keep hearing; it is an “invisible enemy” we need to “vanquish.” But although this virus is disrupting our lives, causing sickness, death, and economic breakdown, it is itself a completely natural phenomenon, a living thing reproducing itself in the way nature intended. Are these images of conflict and conquest appropriate or even helpful? Do they help us to understand and to respond, to bring our world back into balance? Read More
by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, May 2020
First published in Parabola
Watching the sun rise over the wetlands, the mist fading, even here in the midst of nature there is the strange stillness of a world in lockdown—waiting, wondering, anxiety, and fear its companions. I am writing these words in the time of the great pandemic, when for a few brief months our world slowed down and almost stopped; when as the stillness grew around us there was a moment to hear another song, not one of cars and commerce, but belonging to the seed of a future our hearts need to hear. Read More
by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee February 2019
First published in Parabola
“With an open heart we can see and sense the sacred nature of all of life.”
A simple and essential spiritual truth teaches that only being awake in the moment is real. Only then can the strawberry be tasted in its full sweetness, the plum blossom be seen in its fragile beauty, without memory or preconception. This is the Zen moment of satori, when we are fully present in the experience, in life, as it is. It is a moment “in and out of time,” which we usually glimpse only for an instant before the thoughts and the patterns of our consciousness cloud over our eyes. Read More
by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, October 2019
First published in Kosmos Journal
We are living in a time of fundamental change, a period of increasing divisiveness, tribalism, isolationism, even as a global consciousness of oneness struggles to be born. Surrounded by accelerating ecological devastation, climate change, loss of species, many of us—and especially young people—are awakening to the need to respond, to care for climate justice and the living Earth—to embrace life’s interdependent unity, the web of life that supports us all. Read More
By Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, April 2019
Chapter 3 from Including the Earth in Our Prayers: A Global Dimension to Spiritual Practice
Collectively we are walking along a fault line. There are vast pressures building up under our feet, primal powers in the depths which have been moving for centuries. We feel tensions in the air around us, the threat to the ecosystem, the conflicts of terrorism. But within the ground, greater forces are building, forces that belong to the future and not the present. Mostly we walk unknowingly, sensing something but having little knowledge of these vaster forces that are shaping our collective destiny. Read More
by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, February 2019
First published by Huffington Post
These articles, written from 2010 until 2017 for the Huffington Post, and gathered together here as a small booklet, were a small response to a collective forgetfulness—a trail of breadcrumbs hoping to attract the attention of those seeking real nourishment, needing to find their way back to their soul and the real ground of being. Read More
By Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, November 2017
Published in Garrison Institute
For our ancestors the rhythms of the seasons were their calendar, the rising and setting of the sun their only clock. Today our clocks seem to spin much faster and it is easy to ignore—or even forget—these more primal seasons and their meaning. And yet as our world appears to spin more and more out of balance—temperatures and sea levels rising, species depleted—there is a pressing need to return to a deeper rhythm, to the cycles that belong to healing and transformation, to the seasons of the Earth and the seasons of the soul. Read More
