Quotes About Community

Today we have gathered and when we look upon the faces around us we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now let us bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as People. Now our minds are one.*

In a garden, food arises from partnership.

They taste good together, and the Three Sisters also form a nutritional triad that can sustain a people.

a way that contributes to the good of the whole.

Doing dishes has gotten a bad rap, but everyone who migrates to the kitchen after a meal knows that that's where the laughter happens, the good conversations, the friendships. Doing dishes, like doing restoration, forms relationships.

I worry who will get to the crossroads first, who will make the choices for us all.

Imagine if a developer, eying open land for a shopping mall, had to ask the goldenrod, the meadowlarks, and the monarch butterflies for permission to take their homeland. What if he had to abide by the answer? Why not?

Every one of them is beautiful. Every one of them is different and yet every one of them began in the same tree. They are all made of the same stuff and yet each is itself. That's the way it is with our people, too, all made of the same thing and each their own kind of beautiful.

We may forget the teacher, but our language remembers: our word for the giveaway, minidewak, means "they give from the heart.

Individuality is cherished and nurtured

when three hundred voices all joined together, all those voices, in measured cadence, from the gray-haired school nurse's to the kindergarteners', made me feel part of something. It was as if for a moment our minds were one.

in order for the whole to flourish, each of us has to be strong in who we are and carry our gifts with conviction, so they can be shared with others.

made me feel part of something. It was as if for a moment our minds were one.

what a community can become when its members understand and share their gifts.

we are rooted in cultures of gratitude.

Maybe we've all been banished to lonely corners by our obsession with private property.

The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective.

a back strong enough to carry a load for others.

But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual.

communal generosity

Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land. Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as reestablishing proper hydrology or cleaning up contaminants. It is medicine for the earth.

we make a grave error if we try to separate individual well-being from the health of the whole.

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

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