The storytellers begin by calling upon those who came before who passed the stories down to us, for we are only messengers.
The student told me that, when she came to the United States, the greatest culture shock she experienced was not language or food or technology, but waste.
It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave.
How do we show our children our love? Each in our own way by a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons.
We need to unearth the old stories that live in a place and begin to create new ones, for we are storymakers, not just storytellers.
They weave a web of reciprocity, of giving and taking. In this way, the trees all act as one because the fungi have connected them. Through unity, survival. All flourishing is mutual. Soil, fungus, tree, squirrel, boy – all are the beneficiaries of reciprocity.
All those nutrients field the growth of more new plants, in an accelerating cycle. This is the way for many ponds–the bottom gradually fills in until the pond becomes a marsh and maybe someday a meadow and then a forest. Ponds grow old, and though I will too, I like the ecological idea of aging as progressive enrichment, rather than progressive loss.
To plant trees is an act of faith.
If you didn’t know better, you might not recognize raindrops and rivers as kin, so different are the particular and the collective.
The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity.
Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth.
All amphibians are tethered to the pond by their evolutionary history, the most primitive vertebrates to make the transition from the aquatic life of their ancestors to life on land.
Plants know how to make food and medicine from light and water, and then they give it away.
A language teacher I know explained that grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language. Maybe it also reflects our relationships with each other. Maybe a grammar of animacy could lead us to whole new ways of living in the world, other species a sovereign people, a world with a democracy of species, not a tyranny of one – with moral responsibility to water and wolves, and with a legal system that recognizes the standing of other species. It’s all in the pronouns.
It is not just changes in policies that we need, but also changes to the heart. Scarcity and plenty are as much qualities of the mind and spirit as they are of the economy. Gratitude plants the seed for abundance.
Gardens are simultaneously a material and a spiritual undertaking. That’s hard for scientists, brainwashed by Cartesian dualism, to grasp.
It was an architecture of relationships, of connections that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together.
The more something is shared, the greater its value becomes.
Many of our ancient teachings counsel that whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again.
A harvest is made honorable when it sustains the giver as well as the taker.