“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

"If we surrendered to the earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees" - Rainer Maria Rilke

"... 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