Quotes About Understanding

I think it is this that it is this that draws me to the pond on a night in April, bearing witness to puhpowee. Tadpoles and spores, egg and sperm, mind and yours, mosses and peepers - we are all connected by our common understanding of the calls filling the night at the start of spring. It is the wordless voice of longing that resonates within us, the longing to continue, to participate in the sacred life of the world.

A teacher comes, they say, when you are ready. And if you ignore its presence, it will speak to you more loudly. But you have to be quiet to hear.

Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world.

Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion---until we teach them not to.

Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other but with the living world.

The listeners reciprocate the gift of the speaker's words with their attention

Of course you should write about it. It's supposed to be shared, otherwise how can it work? We've been waiting five hundred years for people to listen. If they'd understood the Thanksgiving then, we wouldn't be in this mess.

Native scholar Greg Cajete has written that in indigenous ways of knowing, we understand a thing only when we understand it with all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit.

For what good is knowing, unless it is coupled with caring? Science can give us knowing, but caring comes from someplace else.

They love to hear the old language," he said, "it's true." "But," he said, with fingers on his lips, "You don't have to speak it here." "If you speak it here," he said, patting his chest, "They will hear you.

Ignorance makes it too easy to jump to conclusions.

To be heard, you must speak the language of the one you want to listen.

We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species.

We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species. But imagine the possibilities. Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us.

Skywoman's first people lived by their understanding of the Original Instructions, with ethical prescriptions for respectful hunting, family life, ceremonies that made sense for their world.

I wanted to know where he felt most nurtured and supported. What is the place that you understand best? That you know best and knows you in return?

toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion—until we teach them not to.

made me feel part of something. It was as if for a moment our minds were one.

After the drumbeat of my mother's heart, this was my first language.

Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own. I think now that it was a longing to comprehend this language I hear in the woods that led me to science, to learn over the years to speak fluent botany.

Puhpowee, she explained, translates as "the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight." As a biologist, I was stunned that such a word existed. In all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery. You'd think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life. But in scientific language our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed.

Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating the knowledge of other beings.

Traditional Onondaga understand a world in which all beings were given a gift, a gift that simultaneously engenders a responsibility to the world.

Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion—until we teach them not to. We quickly retrain them and make them forget.