Diane Varner gets her own page, because you have to know about her. It’s a privilege for me to introduce her, a friend, artist, and poet. Diane’s photograph entitled the journey home frames this each page of this website and the book which prompted it. Our capacity to heal what has become a planet in peril hangs upon our willingness to make the journey home. It depends upon our capacity to remember and reclaim our proper place within and intrinsic to the earth community, not separate and clothed in human privilege and entitlement.

Diane is a gentle soul. With a camera on her shoulder, she offers a vision of mystery, awe, diversity, and intense beauty that call us to make that journey home. It’s a journey that begins with a single step, back into the web of life from which we foolishly and falsely think we’ve emerged.

Through Diane’s eyes, we have the opportunity to discover for ourselves that the journey home is need not be threatening nor impossible. First it requires that we put on the mantle of mindfulness and gratitude. Then we are able to begin the journey home – to our world of origin – to recover all that we’ve lost, and all that our wandering has cost this sacred universe. I am grateful to Diane for the online gallery of her many images, for the journey home, so green, and quiet no. 2 here with her own poetry.

into the dream

we catch

glimpses

shimmering

sunlight

shifting winds

pass over

our barriers

into the forest

of memories

graced with

so much green

with deep,

deep breaths

a sacred sigh

remembering

the roots of

our own story

— Diane