Human beings are what I think of as “biomythic” animals: we’re controlled largely by the stories we tell. When we get the story wrong, we get out of harmony with the rest of the natural order.
The best practice is to follow the advice posted on every railroad crossing: Stop. Look. Listen.
There is a saying in Bali: “We have no art. We do everything as beautifully as possible.” This reflects my philosophy of practice. I try to remember daily what a gift it is to have the privilege of living in this wondrous world.
What happens if I try to build a life dedicated to avoiding all danger and all unnecessary risk?
I think there are families that are very kind and supportive of people’s ability to change. People who come from such families may go through life without dipping into the dark night.
I think that critiquing the myths of our society and helping people find their way through them is a very important thing. It’s a theme that goes through all of my work.
It’s interesting that the worse things get, the more we believe the next technological fix is going to get us out of it. But it’s like being in quicksand: the more you struggle the deeper you sink.
If we don’t preserve forest habitat for spotted owls, then soon we won’t have trees to refresh the air we breathe. And we’re realizing that this applies to social ecology, as well.
We now realize that we’re not living in a piecemeal world, but a world where everything is linked together.
There is the extreme of hopelessness and the inevitability of doom, a deep despair that comes from the sense that our industrial, consuming society is jeopardizing the planet.
Throughout my life, I’ve had different metaphors for freedom. At one time, it was skin diving. In the ocean you feel weightless; you escape from gravity.
There has always been a part of me that saw wilderness and risk-taking as the path to freedom.
I think we’re inevitably going to be depressed when we focus the major part of our energy and attention on something that doesn’t give us meaning, only material things.
It’s perfectly possible to spend forty hours a week on a job that’s meaningless, as long as you know what your real vocation is and find some way to express it. Then you won’t confuse your job with the meaning of your life.
To really love a person completely is to come to a point where your stories are intertwined.
The deepest mystery comes not when we don’t know somebody well, but when we do.
I’ve spent my life cultivating knowledge of myself. But the more I know myself, the more utterly mysterious I become.
The more we chase away the false mysteries – those things we think we know about ourselves and others – the more mysterious our existence becomes.
I fall into all kinds of inauthenticity when I conspire to forget my mortality.
At thirty I lived in a world where death wasn’t immediately real; it was always something “out there.” My deeply held illusions of immortality – a product of my very conservative religious upbringing – were still pretty much intact.
Every time I come across a rattlesnake on my farm I initially react in fear and am tempted to kill it. Then I realize I wouldn’t want to live in a world where all wild things – without and within – are domesticated.