"Each person creates a moral ecology around them, one that either elevates the people they touch or degrades them."
David Brooks 01/30/2026 NYT farewell column

 

 “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