Quotes About Connection

How, in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again?

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

This is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage. The fields made a gift of berries to us and we made a gift of them to our father. The more something is shared, the greater its value becomes.

Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.

It is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.

we all live downstream

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

They live both above and below ground, joining Skyworld to the earth. Plants know how to make food from light and water, and then they give it away. I like to imagine that when Skywoman scattered her handful of seeds across Turtle Island, she was sowing sustenance for the body and also for the mind, emotion, and spirit: she was leaving us teachers. The plants can tell us her story; we need to learn to listen.

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.

Is the land a source of belongings, or a source of belonging?

Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop.

When we call a place by name it is transformed from wilderness to homeland.

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.

There is such tenderness in braiding the hair of someone you love. Kindness and something more flow between the braider and the braided, the two connected by the cord of the plait.

Doing science with awe and humility is a powerful act of reciprocity with the more-than-human world.

That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mingled with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist.

People understood that when lives are given on their behalf they have received something precious. Ceremonies are a way to give something precious in return.

It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave.

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

A fishnet catches fish, a bug net catches bugs. But a water net catches nothing, save what cannot be held. Mothering is like that, a net of living threads to lovingly encircle what it cannot possibly hold, what will eventually move through it.

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.

What does a good mother do when mothering time is done? As I stand in the water, my eyes brim and drop salt tears into the freshwater at my feet. Fortunately, my daughters are not clones of their mother, nor must I disintegrate to set them free, but I wonder how the fabric is changed when the release of daughters tears a hole. Does it heal over quickly, or does the empty space remain? And how do the daughter cells make new connections? How is the fabric rewoven?

If grief can be a door way to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again

To plant trees is an act of faith.