Quotes About Connection

Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities.

A place becomes a home when it sustains you, when it feeds you in body as well as spirit.

Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention. If you stand together and profess a thing before your community, it holds you accountable.

people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a "species loneliness"—estrangement from the rest of Creation.

appreciation begets abundance.

But when the food does not come from a flock in the sky, when you don't feel the warm feathers cool in your hand and know that a life has been given for yours, when there is no gratitude in return—that food may not satisfy. It may leave the spirit hungry while the belly is full. Something is broken when the food comes on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in slippery plastic, a carcass of a being whose only chance at life was a cramped cage. That is not a gift of life; it is a theft.

Sweetgrass is best planted not by seed, but by putting roots directly in the ground. Thus the plant is passed from hand to earth to hand across years and generations. Its favored habitat is sunny, well-watered meadows. It thrives along disturbed edges.

But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.

A printmaker I know showed me that if you stare for a long time at a block of yellow and then shift your gaze to a white sheet of paper, you will see it, for a moment, as violet. This phenomenon—the colored afterimage— occurs because there is energetic reciprocity between purple and yellow pigments, which goldenrod and asters knew well before we did.

It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people.

When we tell them that the tree is not a who but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation...If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice.

The world is more than your thoughtless commute.

Joanna Macy writes that until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But 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.

It reminds the whole community that leadership is rooted not in power and authority, but in service and wisdom.

Linked by sweetgrass, there is reciprocity between you, linked by sweetgrass, the holder as vital as the braider.

So I offer, in its place, a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world.

The storytellers begin by calling upon those who came before who passed the stories down to us, for we are only messengers.

When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into "natural resources." If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice.

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

We have enjoyed the feast generously laid out for us by Mother Earth, but now the plates are empty and the dining room is a mess. It's time we started doing the dishes in Mother Earth's kitchen. Doing dishes has gotten a bad rap, but everyone who migrates to the kitchen after a meal knows that that's where the laughter happens, the good conversations, the friendships. Doing dishes, like doing restoration, forms friendships.

It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a "species loneliness"—estrangement from the rest of Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night.

We need to unearth the old stories that live in a place and begin to create new ones, for we are storymakers, not just storytellers.

They weave a web of reciprocity, of giving and taking. In this way, the trees all act as one because the fungi have connected them. Through unity, survival. All flourishing is mutual. Soil, fungus, tree, squirrel, boy—all are the beneficiaries of reciprocity.

the chain of reciprocity. Living by the precepts of the Honorable Harvest—to take only what is given, to use it well, to be grateful for the gift, and to reciprocate the gift