Nothing Is Ever Separate. Nothing Is Alone.
“…ecology is the observation that everything is connected to everything else and that there is no organism on earth that is not part of a web of connections and relationships; every particle in space emerged from the same cosmic birth, and every object in existence is linked by gravitational and physical forces.
Nothing is separate, nothing is alone. For many activists, this is a vital and transformative truth; the more we can accept our interconnections with all other things, the more we will respect and conserve the world around us rather than dismissing and consuming it.”
Whitney A. Bauman, Richard R. Bohannon II, and Kevin J. O’Brien, “Ecology: what is it? why does it matter?“ from Groudning Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology.
Image courtesy of Kevin Dooley
“Instead I just stand there, tears running down my cheeks in nameless emotion that tastes of joy and grief. Joy for the being of the shimmering world and grief for what we have lost.
The grasses remember the nights they were consumed by fire, lighting the way back with a conflagration of love between species. Who today even knows what that means? I drop to my knees in the grass and I can hear the sadness, as if the land itself was crying for its people: Come home. Come home.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.”
A project of the wilderness, of Uncivilisation:
The civilised eye seeks to view the world from above, as something we can stand over and survey. The Uncivilised writer knows the world is, rather, something we are enmeshed in – a patchwork and a framework of places, experiences, sights, smells, sounds. Maps can lead, but can also mislead. Our maps must be the kind sketched in the dust with a stick, washed away by the next rain. They can be read only by those who ask to see them, and they cannot be bought.
This, then, is Uncivilised writing. Human, inhuman, stoic and entirely natural. Humble, questioning, suspicious of the big idea and the easy answer. Walking the boundaries and reopening old conversations. Apart but engaged, its practitioners always willing to get their hands dirty; aware, in fact, that dirt is essential; that keyboards should be tapped by those with soil under their fingernails and wilderness in their heads.
Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, “The Dark Mountain Manifesto”
“Place of Healing” courtesy of Angela Marie Henriette
“Earth hand” from Jonas Bengtsson.
Courtesy of the Creative Commons license. No changes made.