It is my hope that all the children, the children of the deer and the wolf, the whale and other marine forms of life; the children of the osprey and the bluebird and the butterfly; the children of the oak and the pine and the dogwood; the children all together with the human children will go into the future in oneness "as a single sacred community." ... The human is less a being on the earth or in the universe than a dimension of the earth and indeed of the universe itself. We cannot discover ourselves without first discovering the universe, the earth, and the imperatives of our own being. Each of these has a creative power and a vision far beyond any rational thought or cultural creation of which we are capable. Nor do we think of these as isolated from our own individual being or from the human community. We have no existence except within the earth and within the universe.
I was looking at the peach tree in blossom, and then I suddenly felt that it was not just the tree that was beautiful, but LIVING BEAUTY seemed to be coming through it, and it was in touch with me. It was an intensely personal contact, and it was like some BEING was communicating with me in a wordless way. It was like meeting some very special person who had an extraordinary effect on me. This eternity, I felt, was seeking itself through the activity of innumerable forms of life -- through nature, as with a flower or spider weaving a web, or through a human being creating a work of art, so that the same life would express itself through me... I was flooded by an overwhelming sense of harmony. In a flash countless aspects of beauty were revealed to me which I had never realized before.