"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

“…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