“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