All Our Relations

At a fundamental level, science and spiritual wisdom agree that all life is interconnected, an elegantly beautiful reality. Global Climate Change and mass extinction are consequences of failing to understand this. . . how might we respond from the heart?

Michelle Berry Lane
11 min readNov 2, 2020
“The Wisdom of the Universe” Photo of a painting by artist, Christi Belcourt, 2014
found at The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (photo by author, all rights reserved)

“To dream of the universe is to know that we are small and brief as insects, born in a flash of rain and gone a moment later. We are delicate and our world is fragile.”

~Linda Hogan

In June of 2019, I went with my family to New York City. (Remember when we could travel to other cities and visit museums?) While there, I spent a couple of hours in the American Museum of Natural History and found myself lingering in the Hall of Biodiversity which presents the abundance of life on earth and the factors that threaten it. An exhibit within that hall, called “The Spectrum of Life”, contains a collection of over 1500 preserved organisms and models that are artfully mounted in a dense, floor-to-ceiling display that stretches for 100 feet.

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Michelle Berry Lane

Earthling, Writer, Teacher, Learner; Attending to thresholds and the uncovering of meaning. MA in Theopoetics & Writing (ESR ‘23); taught kids sci/nature 25+y