Quotes from Kathleen Dean Moore

You could cut off my hand, and I would still live. You could take out my eyes, and I would still live. Cut off my ears, my nose, cut off my legs, and I could still live. But take away the air, and I die. Take away the sun, and I die. Take away the plants and the animals, and I die. So why would I think my body is more a part of me than the sun and the earth?

Equality is what happens when the people who decide how to cut the cake (senators, for example) can't rig the division to favor themselves.

To love a person or a place is to take responsibility for its well-being.

I don't know any other way to move through darkness, but to put one foot ahead of the other and listen for the exact sound of our footsteps. If we have to drop to our knees sometimes and press the palms of our hands against the duff and damp of the earth, then that is what we will do.

When you are quiet, the silence blows against your mind and etches away everything that is soft and unimportant. What is left is what is real: pure awareness and the very hardest questions.

We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy Earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank, but you can't print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it "gross domestic product.

We must live according to the principle of a land ethic. The alternative is that we shall not live at all.

I know that whatever is left of the planet when the pillage ends that's the world that the children will live in. Whatever genetic song lines, whatever fragments of whale squeal and shattered harmonies are life, that's what evolution has got to work with. Music is the trembling urgency and exuberance of life ongoing.

If we are not afraid, if we keep our balance, if we let our anxious selves dissolve into the beauties and mysteries of the night, we will find a way to peace and assurance. Signal fires burn all over the land.

I have sought out storms all my life, without thinking much about why. Long before we knew better, my sisters and I played with lightning on the crest of the Rocky Mountains, reaching our hands towards rocks. The closer we came, the more furiously the rocks buzzed with electricity. We skipped and spun mindlessly in the electric charges, creating music with our bodies…what reed in the human spirit vibrates with the violence of storms?

Disaster calls us to action. They call us to levels of compassion and courage we did know we could reach. They smash us with sorrow and lift us with determination and moral resolved, the way a wave both makes and lifts us in the same wild movement. Disaster transforms sorrowful love into a force strong enough to change the trajectory of history….Dear Mary Oliver, do you think this might now be how we do the work of loving a weary, reeling world? And don't we have to try?

There is necessary beauty in the world, I understand this. Beauty to attract mates, to attract prey, to attract pollinators. But so much of beauty seems to be bycatch, "unnecessary beauty," waste products of essential processes. The opalescence of the inside of an oyster shell, a rainbow around the moon, a baby's dreaming smile. Profligate beauty is a mystery to me. Sing praises.

Listen to. To hear with thoughtful attention. To hold something close, to attend to it, to be astonished by it, to devote your life to its mysteries, to name it precisely, to wonder how it comes to be. To stay awake to it. To move closer to the wild and twittering night. To let it cover you and keep you safe. To me, listening is starting to sound a lot like love.

I came in friendship, but how do you convey intention to a harbor seal? I thought later that I should have left offerings on the island—silvery fish heads, glistening blue necklaces of entrails and bracelets of feathery gills. But I never thought of it then.

How can we live as if we were in the wilderness, with that same respect and care for what is beautiful and beyond us?

Aeschylus. He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

Grief is healing, so grieve. But regret is poison. No looking back.

To love a person or place is to take responsibility for its well-being.

You have to be able to make them silent; it's the silence that allows you to hear that glorious moment when the middle C vibrates with the middle tone of all things, the center of time, the hum of tide through a sea urchin's spines, the golden mean that is the exact middle between two extremes, the way courage exactly cuts the difference between recklessness and cowardice.

and deflects the love of the giver.

Try to go infinitely deep into any piece of the distance of time. If there is eternal life, a friend says, it will not be in the length of your life, but in its depth…I don't think there is any limit to the depth of each moment, and I am going to try to live in a way that plumbs those depths, to live thickly, expanding the reach of my moment down into the mire of detail and up into the damp and cry-filled air.

This is our work in the world: to pull on rubber boots and stand in this lively, dangerous water, bracing against the slapping waves, one foot on stone, another on sand. When one foot slips and the other sinks, to hop awkwardly to keep from filling our boots. To laugh, to point, and sometimes to let this surging, light-flecked mystery wash into us and knock us to our knees, while we sing songs of celebration through our own three short nights, our voices thin in the darkness.

I don't know what despair is, if it's something or nothing, a kind of filling up or an emptying out. I don't know what sorrow does to the world, what it adds or takes away. What I think I do know now is that sorrow is part of the Earth's great cycles, flowing into the night like cool air sinking down a river course. To feel sorrow is to float on the pulse of the Earth, the surge from living to dying, from coming into being to ceasing to exist.

Maybe this is why the Earth has the power over time to wash sorrow into a deeper pool, cold and shadowed. And maybe this is why, even though sorrow never disappears, it can make a deeper connection to the currents of life and so connect, somehow, to sources of wonder and solace. I don't know. And I don't know what gladness is or where it comes from that feels like a splitting open of the self. It takes me by surprise.