Quotes About Connection

He knew that I was living in loss. He knew, if anybody did, that there was nothing that could be done about it, nothing certainly that he could do, and yet he came. He came to offer himself, to be with us in Virgil's absence, to love us without hope or help, as he had to do. This was a baby that needed to be stood by, and he stood by her.

the intimacy the mind makes with the place it awakens in.

We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.

Loving the forest, you enter it to walk and watch. As you observe its manifold and comely life, it enters familiarly into imagination, and so into sympathy. By sympathy the mind in the forest is made at home.

The English philosopher and geometer, Keith Critchlow, brings his own light to the same point: "The human mind takes apart with its analytic habits of reasoning but the human heart puts things together because it loves them . . ."18

But if nobody can ever quite be nothing to you in Port William, then everybody finally has got to be something to you.

For a long time then I seemed to live by the slender thread of faith, spun out from within me. From this single thread I spun strands that joined me to the good things of the world. And then I spun more threads that joined all the strands together, making a life.

There is a sense in which I no longer "go to work." If I live in my place, which is my subject, then I am "at" my work even when I am not working. It is "my" work because I cannot escape it.

Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.

The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical—in short, a victim. When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous.

No matter what laws or governments say, men can only know and come to care for one another by meeting face to face, arduously, and by the willing loss of comfort.

felt older. I felt that I had seen ages of the world come and go. Now, finally, I really had lost all desire for change, every last twinge of the notion that I ought to get somewhere or make something of myself. I was what I was. "I will stand like a tree," I thought, "and be in myself as I am." And the things of Port William seemed to stand around me, in themselves as they were.

The love he bore to me was his own, but also it was a love that had been borne to him, by people he knew, people I now knew, people he loved. That, I think, is what put tears in his eyes when he looked at me. He must have wondered if I would love those people too. Well, as it turned out, I did. And I would know them as he had never known them, for longer than he knew them. I knew them old, in their final years and days. I know them dead.

For in that little while Port William sank into me, becoming one with the matter and light, and the darkness, of my mind, never again to be far from my thoughts, no matter where I went or what I did.

As I buried the dead and walked among them, I wanted to make my heart as big as Heaven to include them all and love them and not be distracted. I couldn't do it, of course, but I wanted to.

While we live our bodies are moving particles of the earth, joined inextricably both to the soil and to the bodies of other living creatures. It is hardly surprising, then, that there should be some profound resemblances between our treatment of our bodies and our treatment of the earth.

It was like falling in love, only more than that; we knew too much by then for it to be only that. It was knowing that love was what it was, and life would not complete it and death would not stop it.

I never shed a tear that day, but all day long I saw Margaret as her father and her grandfather saw her. I loved her that day with my love but also with theirs.

our great modern error is the belief that we must invariably give up one thing in order to have another. But it is possible, for instance, to find comfort, pleasure, and beauty in food, clothing, and shelter. It is possible to find pleasure and beauty and even recreation in work. It is possible to have farms that do not waste and poison the natural world.

it is by the place we've got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.

he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no better place than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we've got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.

To be creative is only to have health: to keep oneself fully alive in the Creation, to keep the Creation fully alive in oneself, to see the Creation anew, to welcome one's part in it anew.

Every community needs to learn how much of the local land is locally owned, and how much is available for local needs and uses.

That we live now in an economy that is not sustainable is not the fault only of a few mongers of power and heavy equipment. We all are implicated. We all, in the course of our daily economic life, consent to it, whether or not we approve of it. This is because of the increasing abstraction and unconsciousness of our connection to our economic sources in the land, the land-communities, and the land-use economies.