Quotes from Lyanda Lynn Haupt

What art is asked of us? The gift offered is different for each but all are equal in grandeur. To paint, draw, dance, compose. To write songs, poems, letters, diaries, prayers. To set a violet on the sill; stitch a quilt; bake bread; plant marigolds, beans, apple trees. To follow the track of the forest elk, the neighborhood coyote, the cupboard mouse. To open the windows, air the beds, sweep clean the corners. To hold the child's hand, listen to the vagrant's story, paint the

Whenever I renew a commitment to studying raptors or gulls or crows or the birds in my backyard, more are given, more show themselves. Our efforts are rewarded, our studies are enhanced in experience. I cannot explain this, and I am reluctant to sound to woo-woo but we can take this as confidently as if it came from the Oracle at Delphi: the more we prepare, the more we are allowed somehow to see.

Here is the dream of the earth: continuance.

We practice wonder by resisting the temptation to hurry past things worth seeing, but it can take work to transcend our preconceived standards for what that worth might be.

be expectant, do not be dull, but bring the lost fullness of your intelligence to this endeavor as you come quietly into the presence of wild things. -- Haupt quoting Darwin

But the earth and its beings are extravagantly wild, full of unexpected wonders. It is time to turn from our textbooks and listen to the birds themselves.

It is from this beautiful, feral place that we are able to respond to the breath of inspiration that summons us to the fullness of our creativity. Full, because we are cognizant that we are not a lone pair of hands or a single voice, that we do not create in isolation but bring our gift, the art of our lives, to one another, to the earth. We each touch the seven starlings closest to us in our own mumuration, and the ripple spreads faster than we could have imagined. .

But in the bare practical outlines, we are two writers, sitting at our desks, with starlings on our shoulders

The rooted pathways offered here are not meant as a definitive list but as waymarkers and fortification for all of us seeking our unique, bewildering, awkward way through the essential question of how to live on our broken, imperiled, beloved earth. It is the question Thoreau asked. The one that Mary Oliver, who passed just before I wrote these words, has perhaps framed most beautifully: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Somehow, in our language and in our psyches, we have come to equate good with light and evil with darkness. The symbolism runs deep. We see it in our poetry, our religion, our songs, and our cultural mythology.

Who wants an everyday path—paved and void of danger—when we can have beasts and shadows and secret flowers and unexpected visits from the feral wolf of our imaginations?

Thanks to a confluence of demographics and technology, we've pivoted further away from nature than any generation before us. At the same time, we're increasingly burdened by chronic ailments made worse by time spent indoors, from myopia and vitamin D deficiency to obesity, depression, loneliness and anxiety.

When the fraught name God comes up in conversation or reading, I always remind myself that whatever the source or language used, we are at root on common ground—invoking the graced, unnamable source of life, the sacredness that cradles and infuses all of creation, on earth and beyond.

I have always thought of all creatures-all organisms, really-as relations. Whether wandering alone in deep wilderness or just leaning against a tree growing beside an urban sidewalk, I have had no difficulty feeling, as if in dreamtime, the roots of our relatedness-ecologically, yes, but also with an overlay of the sacred, the holy.

I waited so eagerly for Carmen to mimic back the concerto's motif. Now I see that she has been calling out something much bigger, much more vital; she has been singing back the song of life, all of life, all the time.

I realize that in giving birth, managing a household, raising a child, and composting potato peels in a city, I have learned some things about wildness that even Thoreau could not have known.

Hope is not a remedy or even a substitute for the despair and anxiety we face in the modern world, but a companion to these things. Mature hope involves a willingness to allow that brokenness and beauty sometimes intertwine.

both confidence and consolation. E. O. Wilson wrote: "You start by loving a subject. Birds, probability theory, stars, differential equations, storm fronts, sign language, swallowtail butterflies.… The subject will be your lodestar and give sanctuary in the shifting mental universe.

philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed, "The more ingenious and accurate our instruments, the more unsusceptible and inexpert become our organs: by assembling a heap of machinery about us, we find afterwards none in ourselves.

Kindness is both wild and wise.

Global avian populations are perilously declining because of human-wrought habitat degradation, and many individual avian injuries are at root human-caused.

I am armed with a tenacious conviction that somehow the presence of the people who live in a home reside in the atmosphere of the walls forever.

It is from this beautiful, feral place that we are able to respond to the breath of inspiration that summons us to the fullness of our creativity. Full, because we are cognizant that we are not a lone pair of hands or a single voice, that we do not create in isolation but bring our gift, the art of our lives, to one another, to the earth. We each touch the seven starlings closest to us in our own murmuration, and the ripple spreads faster than we could have imagined..

Humans are more creative, physically hale, and less depressed after walking in a forest; wandering barefoot upon the earth improves podiatric health and increases the physical intelligence of our whole being. Our bodies, minds, and spirits stand in ancient communion with the soil.