“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
(Julian of Norwich)
Julian of Norwich, a contemporary of Chaucer, is credited with doing for prose what Chaucer did for poetry: Writing in English instead of Latin. She lived as an anchoress and wrote of her visions. She heard from God that all shall be well.
Next to Julian of Norwich, in a wishing season, is another woman grounded in what she terms “the simple rituals and practices that deeply connect us to the more-than-human world.”
”… I let the tree know about my presence before making contact by closing my eyes and whispering words — hola, ¿puedo acercarme? hello, can I approach?”
(Leonora Simonovis, Poetry, December 2025)
Leonora Simonovis’s mother died in Caracas, Venezuela in 2021. From San Diego, CA, Simonovis recalls her mother’s genius for nurturing plants: In the ravines around our neighborhood, she’d prop up weaker plants with stakes, so they were supported as they grew, and check on them periodically, softly whispering words of encouragement.
She concludes:
I live far from my roots, but I firmly believe this land where I live now is firmly connected to the one I once called home — by the roots of trees, by migrating species, by the mycorrhizal networks that expand and weave entire communities of living beings under the earth.
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
EthicalDative 
“There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives – unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation – not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as an attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.”
T.S.E from “Little Gidding”.
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“T.S. Eliot explicitly quotes the medieval English mystic Julian of Norwich multiple times in his poem ‘Little Gidding’, which is the final poem of his Four Quartets series.
The quoted phrases are:
* ‘Sin is Behovely’
* ‘All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’
“Eliot uses these phrases in the third and fifth sections of the poem to explore themes of sin, redemption, and the ultimate hope for unity and peace, even amidst the suffering and division he witnessed during World War II. Julian of Norwich’s message of radical optimism, derived from her 14th-century work ‘Revelations of Divine Love,’ provides a powerful spiritual affirmation within the context of Eliot’s work.”
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