Quotes About Nature

One day, after I'm a daffodil, I will be able to photosynthesize. It's something to look forward to.

In reciprocity, we fill our spirits as well as our bellies.

The sunrise ceremony is our Potawatomi way of sending gratitude into the world, to recognize all that we are given and to offer our choicest thanks in return.

we are rooted in cultures of gratitude.

After the drumbeat of my mother's heart, this was my first language.

Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.

Puhpowee, she explained, translates as "the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.

Perpetual growth is simply not compatible with natural law

We know that appreciation begets abundance.

Einstein himself said that "God doesn't play dice with the universe." What is the source of this pattern? Why is the world so beautiful? It could so easily be otherwise: flowers could be ugly to us and still fulfil their own purpose. But they're not.

But I notice that my eyes and my thoughts pass quickly over the plastic on my desk. I hardly give the computer a second glance. I can muster no reflective moment for plastic. It is so far removed from the natural world. I wonder if that's a place where the disconnection began, the loss of respect, when we could no longer easily see the life within the object.

Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own. I think now that it was a longing to comprehend this language I hear in the woods that led me to science, to learn over the years to speak fluent botany.

For people, the pulse of abundance felt like a gift, a profusion of food to be simply picked up from the ground.

There ain't hardly no hurt the woods don't have medicine for.

how their friendship was medicine for each other.

It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a "species loneliness"—estrangement from the rest of Creation.

I open the cupboard, a likely place for gifts. I think, "I greet you, jar of jam. You glass who once was sand upon the beach, washed back and forth and bathed in foam and seagull cries, but who are formed into a glass until you once again return to the sea. And you, berries, plump in your June-ness, now in my February pantry. And you, sugar, so far from your Caribbean home—thanks for making the trip.

ecotheologian Thomas Berry has written, "we must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.

Puhpowee, she explained, translates as "the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight." As a biologist, I was stunned that such a word existed. In all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery. You'd think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life. But in scientific language our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed.

Slow down— it's thirty years of a tree's life you've got in your hands there. Don't you owe it a few minutes to think about what you'll do with it?

Sweetgrass pickers collect properly and respectfully, for their own use and the needs of their community. They return a gift to the earth and tend to the well-being of the wiingashk.

Even the surfaces of individual cells have their own descriptors—mammillose for a breast-like swelling, papillose for a little bump, and pluripapillose when there are enough bumps to look like chicken pox. While they may initially seem like arcane technical terms, these words have life to them. What better word for a thick, round shoot, swelling with water than julaceous?

I hadn't realized that I had come to the lake and said feed me, but my empty heart was fed.

Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating the knowledge of other beings.