"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

“…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