Quotes About Connection

Across the market stalls and blankets, warmth and compassion were changing hands.

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 would be so satisfying to provide for the well-being of others— like being a mother again, like being needed.

Clumsy at first, from generations of sitting on the sidelines, we stumble until we find the rhythm. We know these steps from deep memory, handed down from Skywoman, reclaiming our responsibility as cocreators. Here in a homemade forest, poets, writers, scientists, foresters, shovels, seeds, elk, and alder join in the circle with Mother Cedar, dancing the old-growth children into being. We're all invited. Pick up a shovel and join the dance.

We tend to respond to nature as a part of ourselves, not a stranger or alien available for exploitation.

Like the stars themselves, the words can guide us back home.

Hierochloe odorata, meaning the fragrant, holy grass. In our language it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn't know you'd forgotten.

To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.

When we forget how to live in harmony, they remind us of the way we were instructed to live as people.

This is the grammar of animacy.

beginning with where our feet first touch the earth, we send greetings and thanks to all members of the natural world.

map of balance and harmony.

I love to hear elder Tom Porter hold a circle of listeners in the bowl of his hand.

The organic symmetry of forms belongs together; the placement of every leaf, the harmony of shapes speak their message.

Respect one another, support one another, bring your gift to the world and receive the gifts of others, and there will be enough for all.

Let us pile up our thanks like a heap of flowers on a blanket. We will each take a corner and toss it high into the sky. And so our thanks should be as rich as the gifts of the world that shower down upon us

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

What would it be like, I wondered, to live with that heightened sensitivity to the lives given for ours? To consider the tree in the Kleenex, the algae in the toothpaste, the oaks in the floor, the grapes in the wine; to follow back the thread of life in everything and pay it respect? Once you start, it's hard to stop, and you begin to feel yourself awash in gifts.

and we stand there together, grateful in the rain of blessings.

You can tell they are sisters: one twines easily around the other in relaxed embrace while the sweet baby sister lolls at their feet, close, but not too close

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.

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

Someone's already been this way this morning." "Someone is in my hat," she says, shaking out a deerfly. Someone, not something.

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.