"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