January 3rd, 2009 
admin I just saved a Bull Frog in the cistern we are restoring our 100 year old barn. It is a beautiful creature and has lived there for perhaps more than a year. But since we are about to do some heavy construction on the basis of the barn, I had to go through a very narrow hole to retrieve her.
I grabbed it with both hands and looked into their eyes before it in a plastic glass on hand to Tom, my man, who had a large pool for her in the basement.
A moment of Saint Francis, in fact.
Saint Francis, there are moments here at Blue Heron Farm, we call this beautiful place.
We live on the winding Conestoga River, the geese, herons, ducks and birds to us in abundance. And frogs, of course.
We have deer friends who are here for our eighteen years of residence.
A friend is mainly a deep brown color and we have a tomato plant garden for them and their families each year.
And it stands with us in the early spring of each year, as if to say: Hey! Do not forget to plant my garden!
People are not the most trustworthy types, as far as deer are concerned.
The fifth of Pananjali aphorism says: “If a person is steadfast in his abstention from harming others, then all living things is no longer the feeling of enmity in his presence.”
The deer, raccoons, geese, frogs and herons all use our property as a refuge.
They know that they are safe, and we admire in their businesses.
Hanging out with these creatures of God-ess reminds me of Saint Francis and I call it the Saint Francis effect.
My dogs are the recipients of the great love in what they teach us in this life time: unconditional love, forgiveness, and a lot of patience, given the human weakness.
The greatest book ever written about Saint Francis reads: “God’s Pauper: St. Francis of Assisi” by Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek.
The book has been out of print for many years, but then was republished in paperback in 1999. I have a copy as soon as I heard, circa 2002.
Reading the book transports consciousness to a mystical perspective.
The prologue of the book serves as an example:
“If I have omitted many of Francis’s sayings and deeds and if I have changed, others, and added still others who do not take place, but might have taken place, I have done, not out of ignorance or insolence or disrespect, but from a necessity, with the Saint’s life with his myth is that life as fully consistent with its nature as possible.
“The art has its law, and not only the right but the duty of every other issue to its essence. Feeds on the story, then it assimilates slowly, cunning, and converts it into the legend.
“While writing this legend, which is even truer than truth, I was overwhelmed by the love, reverence and admiration for Francis, the great hero and martyr. Often large tears smeared the manuscript, and often a hand in front of me floated in the air, a Forever with a hand-wound renewed: someone seemed to have driven a nail through it, seemed to be driving a nail through them for all eternity.
“Everywhere around me, as I write, I felt the Saint’s invisible presence, because for me, Saint Francis is the model of dutiful husband, the man who by incessant, extremely cruel struggle that succeeds in fulfilling our highest duty, something even higher than the morality or truth or beauty: the obligation to transubstantiate the matter which God has entrusted to us and turn it into spirit. “Nikos Kazantzakis
Have we all have the same commitment? transubstantiate to the matter which God entrusted to us and turn it into the Spirit?
Only Nikos Kazantzakis could or would ask this question and have made us wonder if we also can test for this human potential?
Communication with the animals from Mother Nature in the last eighteen years remains a spiritual practice: riveted that in the present moment reality of experiencing compassion and love for all creatures great and small, and in these spaces of infinite consciousness, we perceive the fragile preciousness of this world and beyond.
The statue of Saint Francis, which embellishes the flower garden is also a reminder of the fragile equilibrium.
The Bullfrog in their new home is typical of many additional hour of mercy, how we care for her. The dogs know she is here to stay, probably knew this long before I did.
The effect of Saint Francis is now clear. All these years of animal communication and the exchange of land and our homeland, reading and Nikos Kazantzakis words today, this simplified.
As we look at the Saints and in this case, Saint Francis of advice, we will automatically conversion of matter into spirit.
God-ess has this beautiful planet to us, our families, homes, our very lives; May we all care and love and transform IT and ask the infinite realms that surround us, at any time to remind ourselves their presence and leadership to learn to access it at the moment we ask.
May we know that these wishes are granted incessantly.
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