“I’m trying to imagine what it would be like going through life not knowing the names of the plants and animals around you... I think it would be a little scary and disorienting- like being lost in a foreign city where you can’t read the street signs. Philosophers call this state of isolation and disconnection ‘species loneliness’- a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship. As our human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors.”

-Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass

“A tree can only be as strong as the forest that surrounds it.”

-Peter Wohlleben in The Hidden Life of Trees

“The very same brain centers that interpret and ‘feel’ physical pain also become activated during the experience of emotional rejection [social ostracism]. The question is never, ‘Why the addiction?’ but ‘Why the pain?’

-Gabor Maté in In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts

“Therapy gives you a predictable, controlled environment for your brain and neurons to shift and form new connections.”

-Hilary Jacobs Hendel in It’s Not Always Depression

“It takes tremendous energy to keep functioning while carrying the memory of terror and the shame of vulnerability.”

-Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score

“If you want a tree to grow, it won’t help to water the leaves. You have to water the roots.”

-Thich Nhat Hanh in The Miracle of Mindfulness

“The brain is a cultural organ- experience shapes the brain.”

-Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score

“Boredom, rooted in a fundamental discomfort with the self, is one of the least tolerable mental states.”

-Gabor Maté in In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts

“Mindfulness helps frontal lobes restore balance; it means being able to hover calmly and objectively over our thoughts, feelings, and emotions… it is a lens, taking the scattered and reactive energies of the mind and focusing them into a coherent source of energy for living, problem-solving, and healing.”

-Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score

“Don’t think the garden loses its ecstasy in the winter. It’s quiet, but the roots are down there riotous.”

-Rumi

“Meditation is not evasion; it is a serene encounter with reality.”

-Thich Nhat Hanh in The Miracle of Mindfulness

“I have been able to do this work for so long because it drew me to explore our sources of joy, creativity, meaning, and connection- all the things that make life worth living.”

-Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score

“We cannot change the past but we can change how we FEEL about the past.”

-Hilary Jacobs Hendel in It’s Not Always Depression

“When we learn to stop, we become calmer, and our mind becomes clearer, like clear water after the particles of mud have settled.”

-Thich Nhat Hanh in How to Focus

“Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop.”

-Rumi

“Transformation is not accomplished by tentative wading at the edge.”

-Robin Wall Kimmerer

"Humans are tuned for relationships. The eyes, the tongue, ears, and nostrils- all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness. This landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams- these breathing shapes are our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate.”

-David Abram

“The story that we have to illuminate is that we don’t have to be complicit with destruction. That’s the assumption: that there are these powerful forces around us that we can’t possibly counteract. The refusal to be complicit can be a kind of resistance to dominant paradigms, but it’s also an opportunity to be creative and joyful and say, I can’t topple Monsanto, but I can plant an organic garden; I can’t counter fill-in-the-blank of environmental destruction, but I can create native landscaping that helps pollinators in the face of neonicotinoid pesticides. So much of what we think about in environmentalism is finger-wagging and gloom-and-doom, but when you look at a lot of those examples where people are taking things into their hands, they’re joyful. That’s healing not only for land but for our culture as well — it feels good. It’s also good to feel your own agency.”

-Robin Wall Kimmerer (from this NYT article)

“It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air, that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.”

–Robert Louis Stevenson

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. ”

― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“In this very moment, we face a potent intersection of crises: ecological destruction, climate breakdown, rising inequality, exploitation, racial injustice, and the lasting impacts of a devastating pandemic… we need to find ways to strengthen our clarity, compassion, and courage. Cultivating a strong training in meditation and mindfulness is not an opiate to escape what’s going on but a way for us to truly still the mind and look deeply, in order to see ourselves and the world clearly.”

-Sister True Dedication in Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet