With words at your disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see.
Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other but with the living world.
The word ecology is derived from the Greek oikos, the word for home.
Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.
caring is not abstract. The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack.
To love a place is not enough. We must find ways to heal it.
Plants are also integral to reweaving the connection between land and people. A place becomes a home when it sustains you, when it feeds you in body as well as spirit. To recreate a home, the plants must also return.
Something is broken when the food comes on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in slippery plastic, a carcass of a being whose only chance at life was a cramped cage. That is not a gift of life; it is a theft.
All powers have two sides, the power to create and the power to destroy. We must recognize them both, but invest our gifts on the side of creation.
The very earth that sustains us is being destroyed to fuel injustice. An economy that grants personhood to corporations but denies it to the more-than-human beings
Ruined land was accepted as the collateral damage of progress.
I wonder if much that ails our society stems from the fact that we have allowed ourselves to be cut off from that love of, and from, the land. It is medicine for broken land and empty hearts.
In some Native languages the term for plants translates to “those who take care of us.
That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage.
Balance is not a passive resting place—it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the raking out and the putting in.