Quotes About Interconnectedness

People have no corner on curious behavior. Other creatures—bigger, slower, older, more durable—call the shots, make the weather, feed creation, and create the very air.

Neelay, please

It's a grand, luxurious act of self-deceit, an outright lie, that claim of Kant's: As far as nonhumans are concerned, we have no direct duties. All exists merely as means to an end. That end is man.

Trees trade airborne aerosol signals, the article says. They make medicines.

You're studying what makes some people take the living world seriously when the only real thing for everyone else is other people. You should be studying everyone who thinks that only people matter.

These people are nothing to Plant-Patty. And yet their lives have long been connected, deep underground. Their kinship will work like an unfolding book. The past always comes clearer, in the future.

Join enough living things together, through the air and underground, and you wind up with something that has intention. Forest. A threatened creature.

The wounded trees send out alarms that other trees smell. Her maples are signaling. They're linked together in an airborne network, sharing an immune system across acres of woodland. These brainless, stationary trunks are protecting each other.

Life is talking to itself, and she has listened in.

It's sometimes hard to say whether a tree is a single thing or whether it's a million.

That's the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count. A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning. The pine she leans against says: Listen. There's something you need to hear.

We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. . . . In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness

If we knew what green wanted, we wouldn't have to choose between the Earth's interests and ours. They'd be the same!

How fragile is a world so connected and tied together that a change in food fashion in one place can lead to starvation halfway through the world?

The energy in the universe is not in the planets, or in the protons or neutrons, but in the relationship between them.

You know after any truly initiating experience that you are part of a much bigger whole. Life is not about you henceforward, but you are about life.

Having looked at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one, nor any particle of one, but has reference to the Soul. —Walt Whitman

All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency on them.

What we all desire and need from one another, of course, is that life energy called eros! It always draws, creates, and connects things.

Don't start by trying to love god, or even people. Love rocks and elements first. Move to trees, then animals, and then humans… It might be the only way to love, because how you do anything, is how you do everything.

The nuclear family has far too often been the enemy of the global family and mature spiritual seeking.

Hope cannot be had by the individual if everything is corporately hopeless. It is hard to heal individuals when the whole thing is seen as unhealable.

Matter and Spirit mirror one another and reveal the depths of one another.

What if Christ is another name for everything—in its fullness?