Quotes About Connection

I played around our yard some and talked to the fence posts, sung songs and made the weeds sing . . . —WOODY GUTHRIE

Our sensitivity to nature, and our humility within it, are essential to our physical and spiritual survival. Yet, our growing disconnection from nature dulls our senses, and eventually blunts even the sharpened sensory state created by man-made or natural disaster.

The more high tech we become the more nature we need.

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." —CROWFOOT, CHIEF OF THE SIKSIKA FIRST NATION, 1890

As we grow more separate from nature, we continue to separate from one another physically.

Genetically, we are essentially the same creatures as we were at the beginning. We are still hunters and gatherers.

Roszak argued that modern psychology has split the inner life from the outer life, and that we have repressed our "ecological unconscious" that provides "our connection to our evolution on earth.

thoughtful exposure of youngsters to nature can even be a powerful form of therapy for attention-deficit disorders and other maladies.

As an adult, giving presentations at local high schools, I noticed that I can get teenagers to focus and calm down by showing images of the natural world. Being close to nature saved my life.

Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.

Nature offers a well from which many, famous or not, draw a creative sense of pattern and connection.

This seems clear enough: When truly present in nature, we do use all our senses at the same time, which is the optimum state of learning.

The pleasure of being alive is brought into sharper focus when you need to pay attention to staying alive. Alive in the larger universe, alive in time.

isolated patches of wild land are valuable to know, as are isolated people.

just as children need good nutrition and adequate sleep, they may very well need contact with nature.

When I lie tangled in her hair,And fettered to her eye,The gods that wanton in the airKnow no such liberty.

Going at it alone had been my badge of honor. How foolish. I confused silence with strength.... Shutting out others is weak and grossly unfair to those around us.

By the time a tree is full-grown, the underground root system is enormous; a mature oak tree, for example, has literally hundreds of miles of roots to tap the soil's resources in an endless quest for water. Each drop is collected by the root hairs and passed along, from one cell to the next, up the trunk and to the leaves, and in such a way that none of the precious moisture and minerals collected by the roots leaks back into the soil.

I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.

Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created.

To be without trees would, in the most literal way, to be without our roots.

Those who hate are kin.

But more importantly, I think he remembered how very close I was with my own dad, who had died in 1997.

I will always try To hold my head up to the sky If only just to let you know That straight from my heart I still miss you so.