Quotes About Community

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.

Across the market stalls and blankets, warmth and compassion were changing hands.

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.

I love to hear elder Tom Porter hold a circle of listeners in the bowl of his hand.

Respect one another, support one another, bring your gift to the world and receive the gifts of others, and there will be enough for all.

cooperating, not competing.

When we call a place by its name, it is transformed from wilderness to homeland.

I hope I am also teaching them to know the world as a neighborhood of nonhuman residents

Leave this place better than you found it," she admonished. And so we did. We also had to leave wood for the next person's fire, with tinder and kindling

But the Mohawk call themselves the Kanienkeha - People of the Flint - and flint does not melt easily into the great American melting pot

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.

Stick together, act as one.

The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.

Pecans have learned that there is strength in unity

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

Leave this place better than you found it," she admonished. And so we did. We also had to leave wood for the next person's fire, with tinder and kindling carefully sheltered from rain by a sheet of birch bark. I liked to imagine their pleasure, those other paddlers, arriving after dark to find a ready pile of fuel to warm their evening meal.

It is said that the people were instructed to stand and offer these words whenever they gathered, no matter how many or how few, before anything else was done. In this ritual, their teachers remind them that every day, "beginning with where our feet first touch the earth, we send greetings and thanks to all members of the natural world.

Wealth meant having enough to give away, social status elevated by generosity.

The Wisdom of the Elders

despite our fears of falling, the gifts of the world stand by to catch us

For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place nears living as if your children's future mattered

Through reciprocity the gift is replenished. All of our flourishing is mutual.

All flourishing is mutual