Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.
A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.
The river’s injury is its shape.
Education has increasingly been reduced to job training, preparing young people not for responsible adulthood and citizenship but for expert servitude to the corporations.
A music attends the things of the earth. To sense that music is to be near the possibility of health and joy.
This is the man who will be my grandfather – the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The tenses slur and slide under the pressure of collapsed time.
For what seemed a long time Mat knelt there with his father’s dead wrist in his hand, while his mind arrived and arrived and yet arrived at that place and time and that body lying still on the soiled and bloodied stones.
It is the privilege and the labor of the apprentice of creation to come with his imagination into the unimaginable, and with his speech into the unspeakable.
People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.
We don’t have a right to ask whether we’re going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what’s the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?
The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.
You can’t know where life will take you, but you can commit to a direction.
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
Unexpected wonders happen, not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen, but if you keep hanging around, they do happen.
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.
All right, every day ain’t going to be the best day of your life, don’t worry about that. If you stick to it you hold the possibility open that you will have better days.
Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.
The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.
When I rise up, let me rise up joyful like a bird. When I fall, let me fall without regret like a leaf.