“I’ve found that the greatest joys come from the confluence of brain, heart and hand.
P.S. Positive thinking alone does not work.”

“Love is the intelligent, kind but stern expression of kinship of one individual for another having as its purpose the maintenance and furtherance of life at its highest level.”

“Kinship

Very slowly burning, the big forest tree
stands in the slight hollow of the snow
melted around it by the mild, long
heat of its being and its will to be
root, trunk, branch, leaf, and know
earth dark, sun light, wind touch, bird song.

Rootless and restless and warmblooded, we
blaze in the flare that blinds us to that slow,
tall, fraternal fire of life as strong
now as in the seedling two centuries ago.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin, Late in the Day: Poems 2010-2014
(PM Press, 2016).”

“To divert the beam of your attention to nature, to take in the the staggering scale of spacetime under the starlit sky or the miniature cosmos of aliveness on the scale of moss or the blooming of a single potted flower, is to step beyond the smallness of your own experience, beyond its all-consuming sorrows and its all-important fixations, and into a calibrated perspective that arrives like a colossal exhale from the lung of life.”

““We have brought this on ourselves because of our absolute disrespect for animals and the environment.. Our disrespect for wild animals and our disrespect for farmed animals has created this situation where disease can spill over to infect human beings.””

““Time for Serenity, Anyone?”

I like to live in the sound of water,
in the feel of mountain air. A sharp
reminder hits me: this world still is alive;
it stretches out there shivering toward its own
creation, and I’m part of it. Even my breathing
enters into the elaborate give-and-take,
this bowing to sun and moon, day or night,
winter, summer, storm, still—this tranquil
chaos that seems to be going somewhere.
This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it.
This motionless turmoil, this everything dance.”

“ “The current virus may well be the equivalent of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Because sometimes, the system has to be destroyed in order to be liberated — and to make room for evolution.””

“A Purification

At start of spring I open a trench
in the ground. I put into it
the winter’s accumulation of paper,
pages I do not want to read
again, useless words, fragments,
errors. And I put into it
the contents of the outhouse:
light of the sun, growth of the ground,
finished with one of their journeys.
To the sky, to the wind, then,
and to the faithful trees, I confess
my sins: that I have not been happy
enough, considering my good luck;
have listened to too much noise;
have been inattentive to wonders;
have lusted after praise.
And then upon the gathered refuse
of mind and body, I close the trench,
folding shut again the dark,
the deathless earth. Beneath that seal
the old escapes into the new.”

“Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

~ Rumi”

““Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,
committed citizens can change the world; indeed,
it’s the only thing that ever has.”
”

“The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.
”

““Whenever we look at life, we look at networks.” ”

“Over the next fifty years we will see a return of the ancient tradition of “universal history”; but this will be a new form of universal history that is global in its practice and scientific in its spirit and methods”

“The arch of the Cathedral itself takes on the shape
Of the uplifted throat of the wolf
Lamenting our present destiny
Beseeching humankind
To bring back the sun
To let the flowers bloom in the meadows
The rivers run through the hills
And let the Earth
And all the living creatures
Live their
Wild
Fierce
Serene
And Abundant life ”

“Much of our troubles during these last two centuries has been caused by our limited, our microphase modes of thought. We centered ourselves on the individual, on personal aggrandizement, and on a competitive way of life, and on the nation or the community of nations as the guarantor to pursue these purposes. A sense of the planet Earth never entered into our minds”

“Don’t Hesitate”
By Mary Oliver

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
”

“. . . We must now, in a sense, reinvent the human as a species within the community of life species”

“This process whereby random movements of waves are replaced by a coherent order is how the universe’s creativity proceeds. Random collisions of dust give rise to the Earth. Random collocations of organic molecules give rise to living cells the chaos of meaningless noise becomes transparent for an instant. In such a moment, we catch a glimpse of our destiny. This glimpse doesn’t take the pain away, but things are different now. One sees the path toward fulfillment. With a sight that comes from the imagination, we see through the pain into the larger meaning of our life, a meaning that comes from the action of the whole of things, a meaning that even includes the waves of chaos in which we find ourselves.”

““It is clear that the “rich” are in the process of stripping the world of its once-for-all endowment of relatively cheap and simple fuels. It is their continuing economic growth which produces ever more exorbitant demands, with the result that the world’s cheap and simple fuels could easily become dear and scarce long before the poor countries had acquired the wealth, education, industrial sophistication, and power of capital accumulation needed for the application of alternative fuels on any significant scale”