Today, we are charged to remember. To know that as we live together in community, we are also in community with the silently singing lives in the vast congregation of the earth as well... Let us remember, and then act.

Crows found ways to adapt to our concrete forests but we have not yet found ways to make sure we are in balance with the rest of creation.

All organisms make ecological living places, altering earth, air, and water... In the process, each organism changes everyone’s world.

Is it not a marvel?

Remind me that life is magical and mysterious.

One of the Goddess’s best friends was a cardinal—a bright red bird who loved to play with the Goddess and the Sun.

The changes that take place in winter are a kind of alchemy, an enchantment performed by ordinary creatures to survive.

We already have everything we need within us to meet the life that is before us.

Maybe hope is fleeting. It leaves and returns again; there’s beauty in its impermanence.

Arm's length: What was once a defensive or suspicious expression has now become a gesture of care, an indication of love and protection.

Tip if you are video recording this story: you can have a clip of an adult stretching out their arm in one direction, then another clip of a different adult stretching out their arm in the other direction, so that when you edit it, it looks like they are stretching towards each other. It would be...

Part of being in community is noticing what's needed. Part of being in community is doing what is necessary but unclaimed.

We light this chalice in honor of the animal realm, Furred and hoofed, two-legged, four-legged, many-legged, Fanged and clawed, gentle and fierce, wild and tame. May we remember that all animals are our relatives, Worthy of our care and respect.

In my chapel, redwing blackbird unravels her liquid song in the cattails.

There is relief and remorse equally in my heart as the growing season comes to a close.

If justice is to be realized, our voices must speak loudly—even boisterously—of love.

Surrender is the last thing, often the only thing, available. And so we give ourselves to it. We fear it is our end. Sometimes—with grace or luck—we find it is our liberation.

Who are the angry birds in my life? What are the sticks I carry in my heart so as not to be hurt again?

Leader: Ours is a world alive and aloud with the presence of creatures and critters. Animals abound, interwoven in our human lives and wholly independent. This is the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part....

May we recognize and abandon the familiar attitudes and practices that do not serve the whole. We are who we are and we have the opportunity to be who we want to be, to create a new inheritance for the future....