I’m a recovering atheist… I’m starting to explore things for which I don’t want a rational explanation. My connection to the forest, to the mushrooms, to the stars, to all the things that vibrate. I want to feel reverence and awe, not academic curiosity.
And yet… I’m also a little lost. Healing my relation with the patriarchal catholics might not be feasible at this point 
Searching for other kinds of guidance, I found these academic courses 
This is a prompt for others to join me exploring how religions have related to ecology and preservation.
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The course follows the book that the teachers wrote: https://islandpress.org/books/ecology-and-religion
From chapter 2, I liked these ideas of orienting, grounding, nurturing, and transforming:
Religious ecologies can be seen, then, as ways of orienting humans to the universe, grounding them in the community of nature and humans, nurturing them in Earth’s fecund processes, and transforming them into their deeper cosmological selves.
Religious ecologies in their fullest potential orient individuals to their larger role in the cosmos, in Earth’s ecosystems, and in human societies. Religious ecologies thus help humans see themselves not as isolated beings in a vast and indifferent universe but as embedded in the cosmic and Earth communities from which they draw nurturance.
Religious cosmologies and religious ecologies—through orienting stories and practices, symbols and rituals, meditation and prayer—are the means by which humans integrate themselves into these interpenetrating communities. They help humans find grounding to negotiate tragedy and
loss, contingency and finitude. They nurture individuals and communities to live amid uncertainty and pain with joy, hope, and even laughter. They transform the human to activate healing and reconciliation so that comprehensive compassion may flow into the world.
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