Quotes from Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Carmen [pet starling] brings joy and depth and insight to our family. I believe she has a good life, and I am glad she did not die with her nest mates. But not one single day passes that I do not wish I could see her fly free.

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.

But unlike most birds, crows also appear to fly for reasons that defy scientific explanation, though to us it seems obvious. They fly for fun. Any windy day will fling crows into the air like leaves, diving, wheeling, rising, tumbling. I see them, and think that if I were a bird, I would want to fly like a crow—with enough of a brain to love it. It might even make it worth it having to eat dead city rats if I could fly like that.

My grail chalice has been filled with an elixir that is perhaps headier than the wine of fact-it is filled with swirling, essential uncertainty and the difficult, mature task of dwelling in such a state.

I am not suggesting that a bird, say, with her fleet heart, experiences more in a short life of three years than we do in that same period but that her actual perceived life may be longer than three years. The measure is mysterious; the time of the bird's life expands beyond our typical calculation in ways that we cannot understand, at least not yet. is it possible that some people, too, experience this time/space portal, allowing more experience to billow within and around them?

The word is Latin, from monastic ritual dating back to the sixteenth century: adsum. I am here.

Crows can get us out of bed. And they can do a lot more than that for us if we allow them.

Our new ways are disruptive. They will look weird. This is good. Let us not care, but enjoy that glimpse in another's eyes that we will find sometimes—the one that says, "You're not crazy. I feel it, too.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.")

We enter as pilgrims, as wayfarers—knowing there is something we are seeking, something nameless, beautiful, waiting, wanting. Something that will change us so thoroughly that our cozy slippers will no longer fit, that our cat will, at first, hiss upon our return, our hair tinted green with lichen, sweet root tendrils among our toes.

How easy it is to feel paralyzed by obligations. How easy it is to feel lost and insignificant and unable to know what is best, to feel adrift while yearning for purpose.

In spite of the string of magazine covers announcing the contrary, we all know that ten simple things will not save the earth. There are, rather, three thousand impossible things that all of us must do, and changing our light bulbs, while necessary, is the barest beginning. We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want.

hope is 'that virtue by which we take responsibility for the future.' ...hope is our positive orientation toward the future, a future in which we simultaneously recognize difficulty, responsibility, and delight. Hope is not relative to the present situation, nor is it dependent upon a specific outcome... Hope is not an antidote to despair, or a sidestepping of difficulty, but a companion to all these things.

Rooted ways embolden us to remember that with our complex minds we can feel—and live—more than one thing simultaneously. Anxiety, difficulty, fear, despair. Yes. Beauty, connectedness, possibility, love. Yes.

Our bodies, minds, and spirits stand in ancient communion with the soil.

We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want.

While we have more scientific knowledge of the universe than any people ever had, it is not the type of knowledge that leads to an intimate presence within a meaningful universe.… The difficulty is that with the rise of the modern sciences we began to think of the universe as a collection of objects rather than as a communion of subjects.

Our hands imbibe like roots, so I place them on what is beautiful in this world. —Francis of Assisi

Birds will give you a window, if you allow them. They will show you secrets from another world– fresh vision that, though it is avian, can accompany you home and alter your life. They will do this for you even if you don't know their names– though such knowing is a thoughtful gesture. They will do this for you if you watch them.

Wonder feeds our best intelligence and is perhaps its source.

This is one of the blessings of the urban nature project: without the overtly magnificent to stop us in our tracks, we must seek out the more subversively magnificent. Our sense of what constitutes wildness is expanded, and our sense of wonder along with it.

With my new habit of carrying binoculars everywhere, I feel imbued with a readiness to see, an attitude that my life itself is a kind of field trip. The urban naturalist has the terrific luxury of stepping out her door and into "the field," without long rides or carpools, or putting money in for gas and Dairy Queen. When does the field trip being? Whenever we start paying attention.

Questions lead to further questions, and inquiry breeds insight. Gathering expertise brings 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.

Surely there is a continuum from a pure, undefiled wilderness to a trammeled concrete industrial area. But there is no place, we now know, as the relentlessly global impacts of climate change become increasingly understood, that humans have left untouched; and there is no place that the wild does not, in some small way, proclaim itself.