Quotes About Interconnectedness

The question of goldenrod and aster was of course just emblematic of what I really wanted to know. It was an architecture of relationships, of connections that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together. And I wanted to know why we love the world, why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.

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

the thriving of one in the best interest of the other. This, to me, sounds a bit like love.

But the pond has shown me that being a good mother doesn't end with creating a home where just my children can flourish. A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn't end until she creates a home where all of life's beings can flourish.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

I envision a time when the intellectual monoculture of science will be replaced with a polyculture of complementary knowledges. And so all may be fed.

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.

there is something like a mycorrhizal network that unites us, an unseen connection of history and family and responsibility to both our ancestors and our children. As

a way that contributes to the good of the whole.

The young and the old are linked in one long breath, an inhalation that calls for reciprocal exhalation, nourishing the common root from which they both arose. New leaf to old, old to new, mother to daughter—mutuality endures. I am consoled by the lesson of lilies.

with a bond physical, emotional, and spiritual.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Just about everything we use is the result of another's life, but that simple reality is rarely acknowledged in our society.