Quotes About Interdependence

Biologists will teach us that the survival of the species depends on cooperation, not competition.

One man gathers what another man spills

For none of us lives to himself, and no one dies to himself. – Romans 14:7

We have both lost ourselves and created something else, something that exists only as an interlacing of the two of us.

Where there is not community, trust, respect, ethical behavior are difficult for the young to learn and for the old to maintain.

If two partners in a relationship work on their own levels of differentiation, their relationship will automatically improve. If even one of the partners works to raise his or her level of differentiation, the relationship will do better over the long term.

The human dyad is so unstable that when two people who are important to each other develop a problem, which they invariably do, they automatically look around for a third person to include in the anxious situation in some way. The third person is brought into participation in the anxiety of the original twosome, and thus anxiety flows around the triangle.

The central dilemma in managing the individuality/togetherness force for each person is how to keep the focus on one's own life and life direction but still stay in open, clear communication with the other significant people in that life.

Sometimes relationships are an attempt to complete the self the same way it was completed in the original family system.

Family systems theory tells us that each partner in a relationship is exactly as differentiated or emotionally mature as the other; otherwise the two wouldn't attract.

To begin the work of changing a relationship of overfunctioning/ underfunctioning reciprocity, one must not ask, "How can I change this troublesome partner of mine?" Instead the question is, "What is my contribution to this relationship pattern?

The real problem is, to some degree, that the partners in a difficult relations are "no-selfs." Too much of each self has been absorbed into the relationship.

In some Native languages the term for plants translates to "those who take care of us.

There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents. This is what has been called the dialect of moss on stone - an interface of immensity and minute ness, of past and present, softness and hardness, stillness and vibrancy, yin and yan.

The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don't yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together.

Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream's gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human's education is to know those duties and how to perform them.

I knew we were better together than we were alone, and better still than everyone else, and that was enough.

Chess looks like a zero-sum game; if one loses, the other wins—until a dog trots by and knocks over the table, spills the beer, and leaves you both worse off than before.

People discovered, in their personal lives, that civil society is not goal-directed. It comes into being, in whatever circumstances, as an end in itself, a form of life that is appreciated for what it is, not for what it does.

And, in any case, the idea of independence was a fantasy. Everyone depended on someone.

Credit is an entire thing. Every part of it has the nicest sympathy with every other part. Wound one limb and the whole tree shrinks and decays.

As we say out West, if a man can't skin he must hold a leg while somebody else does.

Adam means "human." Eve means "life." A human needs another for "life" to come alive and become living. Identity can't grow ferally, only communally. We were meant to eat together, not solo. Eve's solitary eating is what got her in trouble.

True love frees us, and at the same time it binds us: