Quotes About Connection

You don't show your love and care by putting what you love behind a fence. You have to be involved.

In return for the privilege of breath

Mothering is like that, a net of living threads to lovingly encircle what it cannot possibly hold, what will eventually move through it.

Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity. Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them.

It seems hard to argue with gratitude for berries.

It is not the land that has been broken, but our relationship to it.

Our gift was time and attention and care and red-stained fingers. Heart berries, indeed.

Maybe we've all been banished to lonely corners by our obsession with private property. We've accepted banishment even from ourselves when we spend our beautiful, utterly singular lives on making more money, to buy more things that feed but never satisfy. It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave.

A gift creates ongoing relationship. I will write a thank-you note. I will take good care of them

It's been a balanced exchange: I worked on the pond and the pond worked on me, and together we made a good home.

To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language. Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own. I think now that it was a longing to comprehend this language I hear in the woods that led me to science, to learn over the years to speak fluent botany.

We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath.

You can't listen to the Thanksgiving Address without feeling wealthy. And, while expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it is a revolutionary idea.

Yes, I have learned the names of all the bushes, but I have yet to learn their songs.

Everybody lives downstream.

Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery—as with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source.

Recent research has shown that the smell of humus exerts a physiological effect on humans. Breathing in the scent of Mother Earth stimulates the release of the hormone oxytocin, the same chemical that promotes bonding between mother and child, between lovers. Held in loving arms, no wonder we sing in response.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

As I listen to them, I hear another whisper from the swaying stand of cattails, from spruce boughs in the wind, a reminder that caring is not abstract. The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack.

By those (ceremonial) words we said "Here we are," and I imagined that the land heard us—murmured to itself, "Ohh, here are the ones who know how to say thank you.

biocultural or reciprocal restoration.

They succeed by matching the unique properties of their form to the physical laws of interaction between air and earth.

Breathe in its scent and you start to remember things you didn't know you'd forgotten.

Wealth among traditional people is measured by having enough to give away. Hoarding the gift, we become constipated with wealth, bloated with possessions, too heavy to join the dance.