Quotes About Connection

But we had a year when even to look at one another would make us grieve.

The Bible's aim, as I read it, is not the freeing of the spirit from the world. It is the handbook of their interaction.

No longer does human life rise from the earth like a pyramid, broadly and considerately founded upon its own sources. Now it scatters itself out in a reckless horizontal sprawl, like a disorderly city whose suburbs and pavements destroy the fields.

Whatever happens, those who have learned to love one another have made their way to the lasting world and will not leave, whatever happens.

What I am has been to a considerable extent determined by what my forebears were, by how they chose to treat this place while they lived in it;

Be still and listen to the voices that belong to the stream banks and the trees and the open fields. Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.

Before he started to school he knew this farm as he knew the inside of his clothes.

Farming by the measure of nature, which is to say the nature of the particular place, means that farmers must tend farms that they know and love, farms small enough to know and love, using tools and methods that they know and love, in the company of neighbors that they know and love.

You can't know who you are until you know where you are.

But it was her eyes that most impressed me, they were nearly black and had a liquid luster. The brief laughing look that she had given me made me feel extraordinarily seen, as if after that I might be visible in the dark.

Grandpa had owned his land and worked on it and taken his pride from it for so long that we knew him, and he knew himself, in the same way that we knew the spring. His life couldn't be divided from the days he'd spent at work in his fields. Daddy had told us we didn't know what the country would look like without him at work in the middle of it; and that was as true of Grandpa as it was of Daddy. We wouldn't recognize the country when he was dead.

To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.

The healing that is ours and nature's will come if we are willing, if we are patient, if we know the way, if we will do the work.

And in the fields and the town, walking, standing, or sitting under the trees, resting and talking together in the peace of a sabbath profound and bright, are people of such beauty that he weeps to see them. He sees that these are the membership of one another and of the place and of the song or light in which they live and move.

I had made a significant change in my relation to the place: before, it had been mine by coincidence or accident; now it was mine by choice. My return, which at first had been hesitant and tentative, grew wholehearted and sure. I had come back to stay. I hoped to live here the rest of my life. And once that was settled I began to see the place with a new clarity and a new understanding and a new seriousness.

A spring wind blowing the smell of the ground through the intersections of traffic, the mind turns, seeks a new nativity- another place, simpler, less weighted by what has already been.

Sometimes he would be finished talking before we had started listening.

He has to reach down with his feet to tread the floor.

To have the two of them there, at opposite corners of the table, with their long endurance in their faces, and their present affection and pleasure, was a blessing of another kind.

I have pondered for years and I still can't connect Port William and war except by death and suffering. No more can I think of Port William and the United States in the same thought. A nation is an idea, and Port William is not. Maybe there is no live connection between a little place and a big idea. I think there is not.

When we convene again to understand the world, the first speaker will again point silently out the window at the hillside in its season… and we will nod silently, and silently stand and go. Sabbaths 2000 II

It is not that we want to deceive... but with other people we cannot help our human condition of obscurity. We are not wholly there for them, nor they for us. We are simply not able to be so. Nor should we be. No human occasion calls for our total presence, even were it within our power to offer it.

I like to think of the figures I make as companions for a personal journey. I try to fill each one with healing energy that responds to the person who owns it, and conversely, I hope that the person who owns it will respond with a true heart connection. I feel that my work is a sign post to the half forgotten world that we all carry inside of us. When people look at my work, I want them to think Oh, now I remember. If they do that then I know that they have been successful.

Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times.