Quotes About Connection

with a bond physical, emotional, and spiritual.

We may forget the teacher, but our language remembers: our word for the giveaway, minidewak, means "they give from the heart.

when three hundred voices all joined together, all those voices, in measured cadence, from the gray-haired school nurse's to the kindergarteners', made me feel part of something. It was as if for a moment our minds were one.

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

In reciprocity, we fill our spirits as well as our bellies.

we are rooted in cultures of gratitude.

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

Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.

A great-grandmother from the circle pushes her walker up close to the microphone. "It's not just the words that will be lost," she says. "The language is the heart of our culture; it holds our thoughts, our way of seeing the world. It's too beautiful for English to explain." Puhpowee.

Maybe we've all been banished to lonely corners by our obsession with private property.

We know that appreciation begets abundance.

For people, the pulse of abundance felt like a gift, a profusion of food to be simply picked up from the ground.

There ain't hardly no hurt the woods don't have medicine for.

how their friendship was medicine for each other.

It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a "species loneliness"—estrangement from the rest of Creation.

I open the cupboard, a likely place for gifts. I think, "I greet you, jar of jam. You glass who once was sand upon the beach, washed back and forth and bathed in foam and seagull cries, but who are formed into a glass until you once again return to the sea. And you, berries, plump in your June-ness, now in my February pantry. And you, sugar, so far from your Caribbean home—thanks for making the trip.

ecotheologian Thomas Berry has written, "we must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.

Slow down— it's thirty years of a tree's life you've got in your hands there. Don't you owe it a few minutes to think about what you'll do with it?

Sweetgrass pickers collect properly and respectfully, for their own use and the needs of their community. They return a gift to the earth and tend to the well-being of the wiingashk.

I hadn't realized that I had come to the lake and said feed me, but my empty heart was fed.

The earth, that first among good mothers, gives us the gift that we cannot provide ourselves. I hadn't realized that I had come to the lake and said feed me, but my empty heart was fed. I had a good mother. She gives what we need without being asked.

It was a kind of respect, a kind of thanks. On a beautiful summer morning, I suppose you could call it joy.

The Honorable Harvest asks us to give back, in reciprocity, for what we have been given. Reciprocity helps resolve the moral tension of taking a life by giving in return something of value that sustains the ones who sustain us.

We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don't have to avert our eyes with shame, wo that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgement of the rest of the earth's beings.