Quotes About Nature

The earth, that first among good mothers, gives us the gift that we cannot provide ourselves. I hadn't realized that I had come to the lake and said feed me, but my empty heart was fed. I had a good mother. She gives what we need without being asked.

It was a kind of respect, a kind of thanks. On a beautiful summer morning, I suppose you could call it joy.

The Honorable Harvest asks us to give back, in reciprocity, for what we have been given. Reciprocity helps resolve the moral tension of taking a life by giving in return something of value that sustains the ones who sustain us.

When I ask my elders about the ways our people lived in order to keep the world whole and healthy, I hear the mandate to take only what you need. But we human people, descendants of Nanabozho, struggle, as he did, with self-restraint. The dictum to take only what you need leaves a lot of room for interpretation when our needs get so tangled with our wants.

But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.

objects . . . will remain plentiful because they are treated as gifts.

Clumsy at first, from generations of sitting on the sidelines, we stumble until we find the rhythm. We know these steps from deep memory, handed down from Skywoman, reclaiming our responsibility as cocreators. Here in a homemade forest, poets, writers, scientists, foresters, shovels, seeds, elk, and alder join in the circle with Mother Cedar, dancing the old-growth children into being. We're all invited. Pick up a shovel and join the dance.

Are all the pieces of the ecosystem still here and doing their duty?

We tend to respond to nature as a part of ourselves, not a stranger or alien available for exploitation.

How generously they shower us with food, literally giving themselves so that we can live. But in the giving their lives are also ensured. Our taking returns benefit to them in the circle of life making life, the chain of reciprocity...We reciprocate the gift by taking care of the grove, protecting it from harm, planting seeds so that new groves will shade the prairie and feed the squirrels.

The behavior of these three blurs the distinction at the edge between life and death.

When we can no longer see the stars because of light pollution, the words of Thanksgiving should awaken us to our loss and spur us to restorative action.

When we can no longer see the stars because of light pollution, the words of Thanksgiving should awaken us to our loss and spur us to restorative action. Like the stars themselves, the words can guide us back home.

Hierochloe odorata, meaning the fragrant, holy grass. In our language it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn't know you'd forgotten.

To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.

When we forget how to live in harmony, they remind us of the way we were instructed to live as people.

This is the grammar of animacy.

beginning with where our feet first touch the earth, we send greetings and thanks to all members of the natural world.

the role of land as renewable resource of knowledge and ecological insight

It is understood that these gifts have a dual nature, though: a gift is also a responsibility. If the bird's gift song, then it has a responsibility to greet the day with music.

all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become.

map of balance and harmony.

I am afraid. As afraid today as I was then. For my children, and for the good green world.

The organic symmetry of forms belongs together; the placement of every leaf, the harmony of shapes speak their message.