December 22 Advent Meditation

As Advent Advances, and the Immaculate Mary as Earth
a series of daily contemplations on birth through the eyes of earth

It is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live. Ages and people which sever the earth from the poetic spirit, or do not care, or stop their ears with knowledge as with dust, find their veins grown hollow and their hearts an emptiness echoing to questioning. 

For the earth is ever more than the earth, more than the upper and the lower field, the tree and the hill....It is this earth which is the true inheritance of man, his link with his  human past, the source of his religion, ritual and song, the kingdom without whose splendor he lapses from his mysterious estate.

-- Henry Beston, Herbs and the Earth