“Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with colored flowers and herbs.” – Saint Francis of Assisi, canticle.

There is an apocalyptic quality to this winter at times. We woke this morning to howling winds rattling our windows, cold pushing through the frames and into the house, outside driving ice and snow and bitter cold, we are back below zero again.

There is a different quality to the winter this year so far, sometimes I think it is telling me our time is coming, we are losing the right to fruit with colored flowers and herbs.

This winter has awakened me once again to what I have come to believe are the cries of Mother Earth, who now cries out to us because of the great harm we are inflicting on her by our greedy and reckless use an abuse of her.

“We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters,” wrote Pope Francis in his beautiful and timely encyclical “Laudato Si,” last year, “we feel we are entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected i the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth itself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor, she “groans in travail.”

I was deeply touched by the Laudato Si, I keep a copy of it by my computer and sometimes read it in the morning, before I work. We seem in our country to worship the economy, if everyone is making lots of money then the world is good and our work is done. We need not worry about the awful price we are inflicted.

“We have forgotten,” wrote Francis, “that our very bodies are made up of her elements, we ourselves are dust of the earth,  we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.”

Living in the country, on my farm, I have come to consciousness about our Sister, Mother Earth, and more and more, I see this cold, these storms, these winds and fires as inevitable. The prophets in the Kabbalah wrote of God’s warning, that if we did not care for Mother Earth and love her, she would turn against us to save herself.

Money matters, but the earth is more precious, and cannot be banked or replaced. When it is broken, it can never be fixed.

This is what I see and feel in this weather, in this cold, in the raging fires and destructive storms. In the furious winds this morning, I heard her voice, soft and wounded, clear and piercing.

It is all a clear message to me, to give thanks to she who sustains and governs us, and who produces fruit with colored flowers and herbs. She is talking to me. I am listening to her.