2025 THEMES: OCTOBER
OCTOBER'S THEME: WILDERNESS
Katrina, a member of the Baha'i faith and WIN Board Chair, offered the following:
Across many traditions, the wilderness is a place of testing and transformation where the heart seeks clarity and the spirit learns reliance on something greater than itself. In the Bahá’í writings, we’re reminded that true victory lies not in contention but in unity, and that divine wisdom can guide us out of the wilderness of doubt toward peace:
"Fear ye God and sow not the seeds of dissension amongst men. Observe ye that which hath been enjoined upon you by your Lord, the Almighty, the All-Knowing. He knoweth the reality of victory and hath taught it to you with an utterance that the vain imaginings of them that rove distraught in the wilderness of doubt can never corrupt."
Tablets of Baha'u'llah
Maia offered the following quote by Terry Tempest Williams:
To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.
Liz, who is a Druid, sent the following:
An invocation of Cernunnos, a wilderness deity.
I am the face within the leaves.
I’m the voice within the trees.
I am boy; I am man,
The face of the changing land.
And I have been your constant guide.
From your caves on the mountainside,
We have walked hand in hand.
And everywhere that I have been
My passing turns the grey to green.
The birds sing to the dawn,
And the land has awoken.
And now my Lady lays with me
And our love weaves a tapestry,
Eternal threads, unbroken.
Chorus: I am lover; I am father.
I am Horned God and King.
I’m the life in all of nature
That is reborn every spring.
Call of stag and cry of eagle,
I am child of barleycorn,
And I am the antlered crown and standing stone!
I am the oats, the corn and grain,
A bearded man with a crooked cane.
Cut me down; I must die
For the land to be born again.
But don’t you cry, and don’t you grieve
For soon the Wild Hunt I will lead
On the night of Samhain.
[Chorus]
The air is cold; the sky is grey.
Where am I this winter’s day?
Bones of trees, fallen leaves,
The time of the Winter Queen.
But through the wind and snow and rain
Know that a part of me remains.
Holly stands, evergreen.
[Chorus]
“Antlered Crown and Standing Stone” by Damh the Bard
Kim shared the following:
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.
Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water
