Sustainability can best be understood, felt, and experienced holistically through body, heart, mind, relationship, and spirit. We must learn sustainability in all aspects of our lives, including our health care, energy and transportation needs, and food and water.

A Spiritual Foundation for Sustainability
In order to lay a foundation for sustainable behavior, we need to help ourselves and our children to approach the natural world with “radical amazement,” to use the words of Rabbi Michael Lerner, co-founder of the Network of Spiritual Progressives. Awe, wonder, and a spiritual appreciation for the sacred in nature are necessary for children as well as adults so that we learn to follow the guidance of the Creation, to see her as a holy teacher, rather than an object to be subjugated.

A Foundation of Love and Healthy Relationship.
In working toward the goal of sustainability, we also need to learn how to love ourselves and others in our changing world. We must all become learners from one another of how to cultivate what the Dalai Llama sees as a state of right heart/mind, where virtues and ethics are not simply intellectual ideas, but felt responses imbued with compassion. Himayat Inayati, formerly head of the Sufi Healing Order, has said that compassion is “a true understanding of cause and effect.”

Our feelings, concepts, and human relationships form the lenses through which we view our Mother Earth and her children. If these lenses are shaped by gratitude, care, love, and authenticity, we will express these essential qualities toward the Earth.

All this, and then emptiness-to make room for the mustard seed.

A Mysterious Alchemy.
We will all, children and adults, best be able to treat the environment with love, care and respect, if we feel safe and loved. We also need to learn how to handle and honor all our feelings and how to express our true feelings honestly, but without hurting others. Combining this foundation with learning about the basics of care and respect for the environment will open us and our children to the mysterious alchemy of oneness with nature and of living in a sustainable relationship with her.

Presence with Gratitude. 
The Reasonable Father (trans. by Coleman Barks)
The world is a form of Divine Law,
Your reasonable Father [Mother].
When you feel ungrateful to Him,
The shapes of the world seem mean and ugly.

When you make peace with that Father,
The elegant patterning
And every experience will fill with immediacy.
Because I love Him
I am never bored.
Beauty constantly wells up,
A noise of spring water in my ear. 
And in my inner being.

                        From Rumi: Voice of Longing, Tape 2, Sounds True Audio (1994)