Quotes About Connection

By seeing ourselves honestly, we have the capacity to understand others more deeply.

Each holy woman in this book made specific decisions based on her individual feelings, but her decisions represent universal impulses. In this sense, her private life translated into political and cultural statements. Whatever form it took, her mission was to end separation and restore connection. She opened her arms and brought others into the experience of love and belonging. Her actions sent the message that no person is excluded from the human family and the love of God.

Like oceans, we ebb and flow and are in constant motion. We have a deep desire to keep things as they are, and a contradictory desire to expand beyond our current limits. Times of relative equilibrium allow us to build the strength we need for times of movement. It can be difficult for us to know which stage we are in and whether we are moving forward at all. But underneath our seemingly individual current, we are ultimately being pulled forward toward a connection with the greater whole.

They could not make a deep and powerful connection to the larger world until they were able to connect to themselves. And, in an example of the kind of feedback loops that characterize all living systems, they were not able to connect to themselves until they were in authentic relationship with others.

My deepest wounds and greatest strengths lie in my ability to see the potential for relationship in my life.

An astute observer might suggest that my emphasis on connection probably comes from experience of its opposite. And that's true. I know what it's like to feel disconnected, on the outside, estranged, not only from other people, but also from myself. I spent many years trying to reassemble the fragments of my divided self and reconnect them.

When we work through our own grief, we can cut to the heart of the common universal experience, which opens us to feel for others.

Our relationships are the crucible of our greatest growth.

If we don't tell our stories to each other, we lose the opportunity to find what binds us together, as human beings and spiritual beings.

We need not the king's horses and men but do need each other to put ourselves back together again.

Hands are for other human hands to hold.

Hunting makes you animal, but the death of an animal makes you human.

Watching, not doing. Seeking safety in not being seen. It's a habit you can fall into, willing yourself into invisibility. And it doesn't serve you well in life. Believe me it doesn't. Not with people and loves and hearts and homes and work. But for the first few days with a new hawk, making yourself disappear is the greatest skill in the world.

I've learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not.

So many of our stories about nature are about testing ourselves against it, setting ourselves against it, defining our humanity against it.

We so often think of the past as a something like a nature reserve: a discrete, bounded place we can visit in our imaginations to make us feel better. I wonder how we could learn to recognise that the past is always working on us and through us, and that diversity in all its forms, human and natural, is strength.

Hands are for other human hands to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks. And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.

At times of difficulty, watching birds ushers you into a different world, where no words need to be spoken.

Someone once told me that every writer has a subject that underlies everything they write. It can be love or death, betrayal or belonging, home or hope or exile. I choose to think that my subject is love, and most specifically love for the glittering world of non-human life around us.

Sometimes, a few times, I felt my father must be sitting near me as I sat on a train or in a café. This was comforting. It all was. Because these were the normal madnesses of grief.

I think of what wild animals are in our imaginations. And how they are disappearing – not just from the wild, but from people's everyday lives, replaced by images of themselves in print and on screen. The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of.

I look. There it is. I feel it. The insistent pull to the heart that the hawk brings, that very old longing of mine to possess the hawk's eye. To live the safe and solitary life; to look down on the world from a height and keep it there. To be the watcher; invulnerable, detached, complete. My eyes fill with water. Here I am, I think. And I do not think I am safe.

Wild things are made from human histories.

I roll a magazine into a tube and peer at her through it as if it were a telescope...She pushes her beak into it as far as it will go, biting the empty air inside. Putting my mouth to my side of my paper telescope I boom into it: 'Hello, Mabel.' She pulls her beak free. All the feathers on her forehead are raised. She shakes her tail rapidly from side to side and shivers with happiness.