“A community is a place of self-definition. Any group of people meeting with the intention of connecting to the power within is a community. People who regroup under a different banner to take care of themselves are attracted to indigenous culture. In these new formations, people seek to explore what has frustrated, betrayed and constituted a deep wound in their hearts. What they are trying to do is restore their inner power, which has been tarnished. Because they are trying to fight the servitude in which corporate power holds them prisoner, they are redefining themselves. They are moving themselves away from the magnetic visibility of externalized power. But to regroup against the Machine is to get out of control. However, one must not only be aware of this moving away, one must also be prepared to go all the way. To leave behind society and culture, one has to be prepared to do battle in order to be who you want to be. Without a community you cannot be yourself. The community is where we draw the strength needed to effect changes inside of us.”

― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

“Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out,” says Jim Burden, the narrator of Cather’s “My Ántonia.” “I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.”

“Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become part of something entire,” Cather wrote, “whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

from an article about the endangered North American great plains in NYThttps://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/opinion/prairie-great-plains-trees.html 

"...he wants to challenge readers’ assumptions once
again with this book, which reflects his “restlessness with form.” He draws a parallel with the work of jazz musicians who are constantly creating anew.
“That’s what trying to work with unconventional forms feels like: You’re crossing the bridge while you’re constructing the bridge,” he said. “I want people to read my work and think, ‘Wait, I didn’t know that was allowed.’ Any book that is finding its own form is implicitly saying, ‘Well, it’s allowed now.’” Teju Cole interview in NYT

“The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside by a generous hand. But- and this is the point- who gets excited by a mere penny? But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.” Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"If stories come to you, care for them.
And learn to give them away where they are needed.
Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive."
- Barry Lopez

”While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity .” Hermann Hesse

"There is never a day spent outside that you don't learn something. It might be something small, but that small thing might also be a key to something very big. The discovery of those small things and of the ways they connect to one another and ripple through the whole web of life that is one of the true beauties of nature. That is what I sought to understand and cultivate." Diana Beresford-Kroeger from To Speak for the Trees

 "Her virtuosity resided in her capacity to observe, and to process and interpret what she observed. As she grew older, it became less and less possible to delegate any part of her work; she was developing skills that she could hardly identify herself, much less impart to others. /The nature of insight in science, as elsewhere, is notoriously elusive. And almost all great scientists--those who learn to cultivate insight--learn also to respect its mysterious workings. It is here that their rationality finds its own limits. In defying rational explanation, the process of creative insight inspires awe in those who experience it. They come to know, trust, and value it."- Evelyn Fox Keller about Barbara McClintock

 "Ceremonial Garment, Late 21st Century, Jones Falls Settlement"
made from tin cans found in urban streams and junk shop raccoon coat.

 “Creative was just a state of being...It wasn’t a means to an end.” Mark Bradford

“The Inuit have a particular kind of person, an isumataq. “An isumataq is not an elder; an isumataq is a person who creates the atmosphere, or the place, within which wisdom may reveal itself. I think Barry (Lopez) was absolutely an isumataq. And that’s what I’m looking for in my own work, and have been looking for all my life. It’s not because I think I know anything. I don’t. I’m probably more clueless than the next person. It’s precisely because I don’t know, that I do what I do.” John Luther Adams in NYT 3/30/23

“To be truly visionary, we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.” - bell hooks

"... what makes a poem be a poem, is that it is not an advertisement. It is not a piece of propaganda. It is not a screed. It is something which tries to see the wholeness of things from every angle and every side in order to see more clearly, truly, to feel more deeply, widely, and, perhaps, tenderly." Jane Hirshfield during Ezra Kelin NYT interview

 "Turkey Vulture Reliquary, Late 21st Century,   Jones Falls Settlement"

 Artists need to create at the same scale that society has the capacity to destroy" — Sherrie Rabinowitz, 1984

 “The wild spirit of unspoiled nature worked its way in to the folk of the backwoods, an ancestral legacy, handed down from generation to generation. And its fundamental gift the cherishing of that which is most precious, freedom. And to be fully free one had to embrace the organic rights of the earth.
Humankind, no matter how powerful, cannot take away the rights of the earth. Ultimately, nature rules. That is the great democratic gift earth offers us - that sweet death to which we all inevitably go - into that final communion. No race, no class, no gender, nothing can keep any of us from dying into that death where we are made one. To tend the earth is always then to tend our destiny, our freedom, and our hope.”- bell hooks

 In Native science, the metaphoric mind is the facilitator of the creative process; it invents, integrates, and applies the deep levels of human perception and intuition to the task of living. Connected to the creative center of nature, the metaphoric mind has none of the limiting conditioning of the cultural order. Its processing is natural and instinctive. It perceives itself as part of the natural order, a part of the Earth mind. It is inclusive and expansive in its processing of experience and knowledge. It invented the rational mind, and the rational mind in turn invented language, the written word, abstraction, and eventually the disposition to control nature rather than to be of nature. But this propensity of the rational mind also leads to the development of anthropocentric philosophy and of a science that would legitimize the oppression of nature, and consequently, its elder brother, the metaphoric mind.- Gregory Cajete

“…because objects from this astonishing place carry the aura of this astonishing place with them even after they have been detached from it, and travelled/ traded to a distant region. Story moves with them; people speak, as they pass them on, of the skein of something-like-sacredness that these special stones carry. Their power is far greater than their function alone.”-Robert Macfarlane

 

"Its journey took the black swan over the place where hungry warrki dingoes, foxes and dara kurrijbi buju wild dogs had dug out shelters away from the dust, and lay in overcrowded burrows in the soil; and in the grasses, up in the rooftops, in the forests of dead trees, all the fine and fancy birds that had once lived in stories of marsh country, migrating swallows and plains-dancing brolgas, were busy shelving the passing years into a lacy webbed labyrinth of mud-caked stickling nests brimmed by knickknacks, and waves of flimsy old plastic threads dancing the wind’s crazy dance with their faded partners of silvery-white lolly cellophane, that crowded the shores of the overused swamp." - Alexis Wright from The Swan Book

 

“Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares as at us with the horror of abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily, there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes - the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations. We can catch the scent of the latent commons - and the elusive autumn aroma. - Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility’s of Life in Capitalist Ruins

"The planet will never come alive for you unless your songs and stories give life to all beings, seen and unseen, that inhabit a living Earth – Gaia."- Amitav Ghosh

"To love a place is not enough. We must find ways to heal it."
Robin Wall Kimmerer

"There is another world, but it is in this one."
Paul Éluard.

 “When I’m photographing in clear-cuts, I know that what has brought me there is a sense of the world coming apart...But after I’ve been there long enough to get over my shock at the violence, after I’ve been working an hour or two and am absorbed in the structure of things as they appear in the finder, I’m not thinking only about the disaster. I’m discovering things in sunlight. You can stand in the most hopeless place, and if it’s in daylight you can experience moments that are right, that are whole.”- 1981, Robert Adams photographer

“There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimmoir for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness. And I believe that this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a Shaman." - Alan Moore

"The first step is to get an idea. Not an easy idea but one that makes me go, “Oh my god. No, no, no, no.” An idea that gets stuck in my stomach. Then, I get obsessed and, finally, I say, “OK, I’m going to do it.” That moment of decision is very important. Then I do it. But a piece always starts with an idea that I don’t like — something I’m afraid of — and going into the unknown." - Marina Abramović in NYT

"The words make a kind of poem, and when the children pull the words apart, stories of plants and animals emerge and fill their dreams. If their future is not to be made from nuclear families and cities and countries and governments and nations and wars, perhaps it will be made of stories connecting all forms of existence, a story in which even their humanity is just a thread, like the harmony of cosmic strings in space.
She wants to show the children how to memorize the story, to change it with their own tongue and breath and song. She wants to give them the words as if they were objects you could hold in your hand and use to turn time. She wants the words to become fluid in time and space, untethered from law and order and institutions that towered into collapse. She wants the words to rearrange, to locate differently, the way language itself could if you loosened it from human hubris and let it flow freely again as a sign system, as the land and water did, as species of plants and animals did, everything in existence suddenly again in flux, everything again possible." Lidia Yuknavitch from Thrust

“Homophrosyne, for me, is an ecological term, too large for heteronormative pairings. It is a recognition and homecoming between a person and a place. The shared mind of this recognition has little to do with human intellect. This is a multi-species mind with no central node of cognition. It is slipping your uprooted body back into a root system that knows how to feed you sunlight and hold your trunk steady.”- Sophie Strand

 

"One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience...Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want."- Ursula K. Le Guin

"Your passion or your empathy for the Earth, is the beginning of your recognition of indigeneity within yourself"- Tiokasin Ghosthorse

"... in a fully indigenous, tribal context where the magic is not being used ever for entertainment. It is being used as a way of keeping the world alive and healthy, and of keeping humans in a healthy connection with the rest of the natural world....
I discovered that very few of the medicine people that I met considered their work as healers to be their primary role or function for their communities. So even though they were the healers, or the medicine people, for their villages, they saw their ability to heal as a by-product of their more primary work. This more primary work had to do with the fact that these magicians rarely live at the middle of their communities or in the heart of the village. They always live out at the edge or just outside of the village — out among the rice paddies or in a cluster of wild boulders — because their skills are not encompassed within the human modality. They are, as it were, the intermediaries between the human community and the more-than-human community — the animals, the plants, the trees, even whole forests are considered to be living, intelligent forces. Even the winds and the weather patterns are seen as living beings. Everything is animate. Everything moves. It's just that some things move slower than other things, like the mountains or the ground itself. But everything has its movement, has its life. And the magicians were precisely those individuals who were most susceptible to the solicitations of these other-than-human shapes. It was the magicians who could most easily enter into some kind of rapport with another being, like an oak tree, or with a frog." David Abram from an interview with Scott London

"Then they grow away from the earth, then they grow away from the sun, then they grow away from the plants & the animals. They see no life. When they look they see only objects. The world is a dead thing for them; the trees & the rivers are not alive. The mountains & stones are not alive. The deer & bear are objects.

They see no life.

They fear.

They fear the world.

They destroy what they fear.

They fear themselves."
- Leslie Marmon Silko

“I believe that our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have even been in existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What's more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes that we have triggered are unlikely to spare us.”― Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

"I could always draw. You learn first to express yourself in certain parts of the body. And whether it was actually playing in dirt, making marks, circles, playing marbles — the aesthetic category became certain physical things. And in school, art was a reward. If you finished your work, you could go to the table, draw, make papier-mâché. As I grew, my mother would say, ‘Leave him alone. He has talent!’ It became multiforms: I could sing, could dance, did not play a musical instrument but could draw. Your actions are about the transformation of the whole of the human experience. It’s a visual communication, and it’s also emotional and ritual. It’s a form of being alive." Sam Gilliam interviewed in NYT

"It struck me then that perhaps the bareness and wrongness of the world was an illusion; that things might still be real, and right, and beautiful, even if I could not see them- that if I stood in the right place, and was lucky, this might somehow be revealed to me." Helen Macdonald

In her last interview before she died, published in January, she was asked what she had learned from nature, having dedicated her life to it. “Love,” she responded. “Nature has given me love.” From a NYT article about Adriana Hoffmann, Chilean botanist

“A Herring Gull gliding overhead is as beautiful as any idea perfected. Their abundance tends to render them invisible; it’s to everyday miracles that we’re most blind.” Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point

 “My attention is the most valuable thing I have that I can offer to the world, and capitalism benefits from our distraction.” Adrienne Maree Brown

 "Goddess of the Spring Winds"

made from things found along the shore- wood, shotgun shells, plastic bottle caps, feathers, etc...

“If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

"It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti 

"One evening in the driest grasses in the world, a child who was no stranger to her people, asked if anyone could find hope. The people of parable and prophecy pondered what was hopeless and finally declared they no longer knew what hope was. The clocks, tick-a-ty tock, looked as though they might run out of time. Luckily, the ghosts in the memories of the old folk were listening, and said anyone can find hope in the stories. The big stories and the little stories and the ones in between." -Alexis Wright, Carpentaria

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead.” -Albert Einstein

"You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer." Thich Nhat Hanh

 "Evolutionarily speaking, our bodies are forests, are wildernesses. Billions of years ago the ancestors of our living cells decided to live together as community so that they could survive better, express better, do more. Our identities arise from a murmuration of cellular and microbial living entities who have decided in deep-time to live as a community. This is a biological truth. The structure of formal education goes against this…”- Yuvan Aves

"The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is

- it's to imagine what is possible."

- bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations

 "Life sometimes is hard. There are challenges. There are difficulties. There is pain. As a younger man I sought to avoid them and only ever caused myself more of the same. These days I choose to face life head on—and I have become a comet. I arc across the sky of my life and the harder times are the friction that lets the worn and tired bits drop away. It's a good way to travel; eventually I will wear away all resistance until all there is left of me is light. I can live towards that end."- Richard Wagamese, Embers

“Words were and are inadequate to all that we felt, all that we knew, all that I have lost. Words were part of it, but they were also cages in search of a bird.” Richard Flanagan

"To write, to make art and film, to work as a journalist or an educator can be a radical act, one that blurs the lines between action and contemplation by employing ideas as tools to make the world as well as understand it.....As citizens engaged in the daily task of remaking the world, we get to choose our stories — the stories that divide and conquer or those that tie things together with possibility."- Rebecca Solnit in 'Our Storied Future' for Orion Magazine

 

“Acknowledging the gifts that surround us creates a sense of satisfaction, a feeling of enough- ness which is an antidote to the societal messages that drill into our spirits telling us we must have more” —Robin Wall Kimmerer (Citizen Potawatomi Nation, scientist, writer, teacher, activist) this sculpture is in my Invocations exhibit 

 "Wonder and enchantment require us to disengage from culturally constructed norms of rationality for adult humans and allow ourselves to be affected by the astonishing world that enfolds us always."
from Rooted- Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”

― Mary Oliver

“Wherever forests have not been mowed down, wherever the animal is recessed in their quiet protection, wherever the earth is not bereft of four-footed life - that to the white man is an 'unbroken wilderness.'

But for us there was no wilderness, nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly. Our faith sought the harmony of man with his surroundings; the other sought the dominance of surroundings.

For us, the world was full of beauty; for the other, it was a place to be endured until he went to another world.

But we were wise. We knew that man's heart, away from nature, becomes hard.”
― Chief Luther Standing Bear

“Our very philosophy of who we are is based on the elements of the Earth, fire being one of them,” she said. “When you believe the land is yourself, the last thing you want to do is kill it.” 
Dr. Kelly Tikao, a researcher of Māori traditions at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand who is of Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Māmoe and Waitaha ancestry

 "...I was turning outward and starting to take the non-human world seriously, my sense of meaning was shifting from something that was entirely about me and authored by me outward into this more collaborative, reciprocal, interdependent, exterior place that involved not just me but all of these other ways of being that I could make kinship with. And when you make kinship beyond yourself, your sense of meaning gravitates outwards into that reciprocal relationship, into that interdependence." Richard Powers in 9/28/2021 Ezra Klein interview

 "I believe that work just doesn’t exist inside of the bubble of the art world; I want it to exist within the world as we live in it... I see it as a kind of moral responsibility to engage with some of the difficult aspects of the world, to make work that matters beyond its own material and formal existence and to make work that provokes questions." 
Dawoud Bey (interview with NYT 2021)

 “One of the things story tells us is that things keep evolving and changing, that the story is dead if you don’t change it, it won’t be relevant, it won’t be compelling, if you don’t keep making something new out of it.” Maria Tatar

 “I think art is another way to try to exercise your imagination at connecting incongruous things. It’s a way to say, hey, reader, let’s work together and practice and train our imagination to connect things that you don’t readily think of as connected. And then that maybe becomes a little bit political, because I think the solution going forward is we need to have a much more planetary perspective.”
Anthony Doerr

"But it feels dangerous, half buried, damaged. I love it because of all the wild places I know in England, it feels to me the wildest. It's not an untouched wilderness like a mountaintop, but a ramshackle wildness in which people and the land have conspired to strangeness." Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“Our kinship with Earth must be maintained; otherwise, we will find ourselves trapped in the center of our own paved-over souls with no way out.” 

Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World

"She learned to speak for the ground, the voice coming through her like roots that have long hungered for water. "

Joy Harjo in the poem "For Alva Benson, And For Those Who Have Learned To Speak" from She Had Some Horses, 1997

"Perhaps such a search for the individuals, the 'units' of biology is misguided. The fundamental nature of life may not be atomistic but relational. The essence of the community...is the network of interactions, not the collection of selves." David George Haskell from The Song of Trees

"There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are."
Helen Macdonald from H is for Hawk

"Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn't ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before."  Colson Whitehead, Zone One

"Every ecology, every community of plants and animals and soil, has its own particular kind of personality, or intelligence, which affects the people who live in it … Modern science might use different words, but it tells us exactly the same thing: the topography of a place, its geology, its weather, the flora and fauna which inhabit it alongside us – all of these aspects of a place contribute to the character and sense of identity of the people who live there." Sharon Blackie

"To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields ..." Patrick Kavanagh

"By facing what is happening and rendering it visible, artists challenge and empower viewers to confront and comprehend as well, offering footholds as we search our way forward." Julie Reiss from Brooklyn Rail essay "Art in the Climate Crisis"