Quotes from Gretel Ehrlich

Islands are emblematic not only of solitude but of refuge and sanctuary, the way a small boat is an island in rough seas.

Doctoring sick calves becomes my sole work. I don't even notice when or where the new ones were born. My days and nights are lived in the herd, and an intimacy blossoms as it does when one attends any gravely ill being, after talk becomes impossible or unnecessary to exchange.

He knew that sick land meant a sick society, that the loss of biodiversity meant the end of life

To yield is to be preserved whole. To be bent is to become straight. To be hollow is to be filled. To be tattered is to be renewed. To be in want is to possess. To have plenty is to be confused," Lao Tzu wrote.

But ranchers who cherish the western life and its values also pray for oil wells in their calving pasture or a coal lease on prime grassland. Economics has pressed them into such a paradoxical state. For years, they've borrowed $100,000 for operating costs; now they can't afford interest. Disfigurement is synonymous with the whole idea of a frontier. As soon as we lay our hands on it, the freedom we thought it represented is quickly gone.

There's so little to do except work that people wind up in a state of idle agitation that becomes fatalistic, as if there were nothing to be done about all this untapped energy.

It was all of a piece, all a form of aggression. Pimping the land and animals. Profit at the expense of all else. Exclusion and exclusivity. Willful ignorance and denial. As I drove, I tried to register how it felt "not to be.

Loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.

Nikki gets a Tweet about the Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, who donated a million dollars to Tohoku's disaster relief fund.

I hold the Big Ben clock taken from a dead sheepherder's wagon. The clock measures intervals of time, not the speed of time, and the calendar is a scaffolding we hang as if time were rushing water we could harness. Time-bound, I hinge myself to a linear bias—cause and effect all laid out in a neat row.

Space is an arena where the rowdy particles that are the building blocks of life perform their antics. All spring, things fall; the general law of increasing disorder is on the rise. What is it to be a cause without an effect, an effect without a cause, to abandon time-bound thinking, the use of tenses, the temporally related emotions of impatience, expectation, hope, and fear? But I can't. At the edge of the lake I watch ducks. Like them, my thinking rises and falls on the same water.

I felt light and heavy at the same time. I wondered if the itako we visited had really talked to my dead friend, if they actually talk to anyone, or were they simply meting out consolation at two thousand yen a shot? I didn't care. We are always looking for difficult truths in easy contexts and demanding simple answers within complicated wholes.

When you're riding, it should look like a bird flying," Ray says, smiling. "Not a gut-shot bird … it should be smooth as silk. And I'll tell you what it takes to accomplish this: self-discipline. We humans only know how to put pressure on. We're good at making war, but it's a hell of a trial for us to make peace. Peace means respond and respect, not fear and escape.

You see, poor land leads to poor people, conflict, disease. To heal the planet, you have to heal the whole.

everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are

It had occurred to me that comfort was only a disguise for discomfort; reference points, a disguise for what will always change.

It's said that if we can drop the bothersome appendages of egos and sugar lumps, we will begin to feel an immense caring for others, for otherness, for all kinds of suffering, and in doing so, we will be able to exchange ourselves for others. If we try, strange sympathies will fill us and the power of empathy will fuel us forward.

Water is how time plays its notes, announcing mortal wounds, unvoiced regrets, unexpected spurts of joy. It is time's unbroken medium; it carries us. Water is alive; it remembers how it has been treated.

Solace doesn't arrive on a silver platter

One hectare of land burned equals the emissions from more than six thousand cars, but they continue to burn more than a billion hectares in Africa per year.

Ice lies on water as far as the eye can see: scattered rhinestones, spiral arms of ice, ice walls and icebergs, and bits of ice that have splintered off larger pieces whose translucent edges are shaped like miniature whales.

Crush the rich, take food from the poor, keep them barefoot, hungry, uninformed, uneducated, and moneyless. That's how a dictator rises to power.

In his journal, Emerson wrote: "Everything teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis….We dive & reappear in new places.

Japanese ideas about religion, architecture, theater, and literature are based on wa and shunyata—concepts of plentitude and uncertainty, of togetherness framed by impermanence.