"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"

"The universe is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper."  Eden Phillpotts

 "Much opportunity is heading toward us disguised as loss. And we’re going to need stories—deep, powerful, alchemical stories—to help guide us through such a time." Martin Shaw

 “He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together—the old stories, the war stories, their stories—to become the story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time.” Leslie Marmon Silko

 “It’s no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the world, just as it’s no metaphor to hear the radiocarbon chronometer, the Geiger counter amplifying the faint breathing of rock, fifty thousand years old. (Like the faint thump from behind the womb wall.) It’s no metaphor to witness the astonishing fidelity of minerals magnetized, even after hundreds of millions of years, pointing to the magnetic pole, minerals that have never forgotten magma whose cooling off has left them forever desirous. We long for place; but place itself longs. Human memory is encoded in air currents and river sediment.” Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

"Pay attention. Be honest. Tell about it."  Mary Oliver

 “Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war...And he does at his best what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and with that revelation to make freedom real.” James Baldwin from a 1962 essay "The Creative Process"

"When we commit to action, the universe comes to meet us in unforeseen and providential ways as though it holds the extra firestick needed to ignite the fire. It only does this once the leap into the unknown has been taken." Lucy Neal in Playing for Time: making art as if the world mattered 

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
Howard Thurman

 "The civilizing process sought to do away with two attributes that today are the cause of the terminal crisis being suffered: by the negation of the spirit and the destruction of nature. Both phenomena lie at the bottom of the malaise of modernity.
Sooner or later, every human being faces the challenge of recognizing their own spirit. Spirituality does not appear, except as a result of their confronting, not fleeing from, the world. It is the response of being ‘in front of the abyss’. Faced with the lack of logic or meaning of existence, faced with the incommensurability of the universe."
Victor M. Toledo in Resilience, 9/2020

"If you have looked hard at the manner of things, if you have surveyed the troubles of our time, and cannot discover a way forward, do not despair. Do better. Grieve: mount an altar to the sensuous feelings of loss that swim through you. In the stinging fumes that redden the eyes, you might partly recover a clear vision of where to go.

You might come to see that forward movement is no longer possible in these moments, and that the way to go was never forward anyway – but awk-ward: into the blackness of catacombs, into the shadows of sanctuary, into the riven cracks signed with the pen of the trickster, into the heat of compost, into the position of a prostrated man who knows that when the storm roars the thing to do is to be still. In that stillness, entire worlds churn."

Bayo Akomolafe

 “...stretches of a path might carry memories of a person just as a person might of a path.”

Robert Macfarlane in Ghostways