Quotes About Interdependence

spill over into the world and the world spills over into us

Robin Wall Kimmerer

One thing I've learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.

Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity. 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.

We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath.

I hope I am also teaching them to know the world as a neighborhood of nonhuman residents, to know that, as ecotheologian Thomas Berry has written, "we must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

As the scholar and writer Lewis Hyde notes, "It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people.

We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn - we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They've been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out. They live both above and below ground, joining Skyworld to the earth. Plants know how to make food and medicine from light and water, and then give it away.

There was a time when I teetered precariously with an awkward foot in each of two worlds - the scientific and the Indigenous. But then I learned to fly. Or at least try. It was the bees that showed me how to move between different flowers - to drink the nectar and gather pollen from both. It is this dance of cross-pollination that can produce a new species of knowledge, a new way of being in the world. After all, there aren't two worlds, there is just this one good green earth.

The lesson God engraved on my heart that day was while I didn't necessarily need the money, she needed to give it. The exchange itself—both the giving and the receiving—illustrates a key characteristic of Christian community. To open-handedly bless others from the riches God has so generously given us and to open-handedly receive blessings from others binds believers together in an interdependent, Jesus-and-others-oriented web of grace.

We were to be like long vines with entwined roots, like trees that stand a thousand years, like a pair of mandarin ducks mated for life

Pocos hombres pueden salir adelante sin una mujer, mientras que las mujeres no necesitamos tener a un hombre al lado.

Nothing we do is ever done entirely alone. There is a part of us in everyone else—you, of all people, should know that. From what I hear, you have been as impetuous as your friend Fflewddur; I have been told, among other things, of a night when you dove head first into a thornbush. And you have certainly felt as sorry for yourself as Gurgi; and, like Doli, striven for the impossible.

I have studied the race of men, Medwyn continued. I have seen that alone you stand as weak reeds by a lake. You must learn to help yourselves, that is true; but you must also learn to help one another.

It's not true. I need all of you. We need each other.

Fours, Fives, and Sixes all wore jackets that fastened down the back so that they would have to help each other dress and would learn interdependence.

Fours, Fives, and Sixes all wore jackets that fastened down the back so that they would have to help each other dress and would learn interdependence. The front-buttoned jacket was the first sign of independence, the first very visible symbol of growing up.

You connect everything you can think of with everything else you can think of until there is no "anything" left.

Everything in Heaven and Earth is connected to everything in Heaven and Earth.

each of them was better together than either of them could have been apart.

We had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two. Louis de Bernieres as quoted in Underland by Robert Macfarlane.

It takes two flints to make a fire.

You can't live on friends, try it and see how cool they'll grow. He hasn't any business, has he? (Aunt March.)