Lisa María Madera
  • Home
    • About the Author
    • Contact
  • My Blog
    • A Flor de Piel
  • Odds and Ends
    • The Empathy of Birds
    • Luz María
    • Orchids
  • Home
    • About the Author
    • Contact
  • My Blog
    • A Flor de Piel
  • Odds and Ends
    • The Empathy of Birds
    • Luz María
    • Orchids
Search by typing & pressing enter

YOUR CART



​
​A Flor de Piel


6/30/2021 0 Comments

Gratitude

Grateful for a WhatsApp message received after midnight from a former student simply expressing gratitude for the support I offered years ago. That simple message of thanks brightened my spirit, inspired my heart, providing strength for the journey ahead.

We live, love, breathe, create, play, and work in a world of relations.
​
We are impossibly born, living products of billions of connections formed through attraction and reaction across space and time.

​We are alive today because of the relations our ancestors maintained with the world.
Picture
Some of those relations were life-giving.
Some of those relations were life-taking.

But here we are.

Born to each other.
Born to this place.
Born to this time.

Here we are.
We have survived.
And because we have survived, our knowledge, our gifts and experience are critical to this next step that we are taking as a living community, as a species, as a planet.

Our gifts have helped us survive this far. And now we must join together, collectively and use our gifts strategically, to live collaboratively and step back into relation with this living, breathing, spinning world.

My health. Your health. The health and well-being of our living loved ones and our loved ones to come depends on it. The health and well-being of this planet depends on it.

Take time today to thank those behind you, those ahead of you, those below you, those above you, those beside you--those who have accompanied you all along the way.

Take time to thank this time, this place that has received you.

Our spirits are fed through gratitude. Thank someone around you. Out loud. Write a letter. Send a message. A WhatsApp. Call.

Reach out and affirm and nourish your relations.

Gratitude warms the heart.
Strengthens the spirit.
Nourishes the soul.

Gratitude is the fiber that weaves together our world of relations.

As I write this, the faces of my loved ones, of my family, my friends, my teachers, my mentors, my students, and colleagues, my clients, my bosses, my ancestors, the beloved plants and beloved animals, beloved trees and beaches, beloved rivers and mountains, beloved hot springs, lakes, and water falls, beloved stars--and even my enemies--all these faces flash across my mind.

I am grateful.

I am grateful for you.
Picture
0 Comments
    Picture

    About the Author

    Lisa Maria Madera is an Ecuadorian American writer and educator whose work explores how cultural narratives shape our individual and communal relation to the Earth and her creatures.

    Madera's work has appeared in Ecopsychology, Hypertext, JSRNC, Minding Nature and in Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations forthcoming from the Center for Humans and Nature. Her short story Luz Maria has been nominated for consideration in Best American Short Stories 2021.

    ​Dedicated to fostering compassionate and resilient communities connected to Nature, Madera also designs and hosts trips to Ecuador providing opportunities for observation and reflection on how our relationship to the world is shaped by the cultural narratives that define us.


    ​Madera offers her work in a vision of hope and blessing that these reflections might empower all of us to realign our relationship in kinship to the Earth, to her many creatures, and to each other, ultimately realigning ourselves in right relation to the world around us so that we might live sustainably and in community.

    Madera is currently working on a memoir entitled The Covid Chronicles: Lessons from Pacha Mama in the Face of Despair.     

    Archives

    December 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    June 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    May 2020
    April 2020
    February 2020
    June 2019
    February 2019
    May 2018

    Categories

    All Snakes

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly