Kathleen Dean Moore Quotes

You could cut off my hand, and I would still live. You could take out my eyes, and I would still live. Cut off my ears, my nose, cut off my legs, and I could still live. But take away the air, and I die. Take away the sun, and I die. Take away the plants and the animals, and I die. So why would I think my body is more a part of me than the sun and the earth?

We must live according to the principle of a land ethic. The alternative is that we shall not live at all.

Equality is what happens when the people who decide how to cut the cake (senators, for example) can't rig the division to favor themselves.

To love a person or a place is to take responsibility for its well-being.

When you are quiet, the silence blows against your mind and etches away everything that is soft and unimportant. What is left is what is real: pure awareness and the very hardest questions.

I don’t know any other way to move through darkness, but to put one foot ahead of the other and listen for the exact sound of our footsteps. If we have to drop to our knees sometimes and press the palms of our hands against the duff and damp of the earth, then that is what we will do.

We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy Earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank, but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it “gross domestic product.

I know that whatever is left of the planet when the pillage ends that’s the world that the children will live in. Whatever genetic song lines, whatever fragments of whale squeal and shattered harmonies are life, that’s what evolution has got to work with. Music is the trembling urgency and exuberance of life ongoing.

Grief is healing, so grieve. But regret is poison. No looking back.

How can we live as if we were in the wilderness, with that same respect and care for what is beautiful and beyond us?

The earth offers gift after gift—life and the living of it, light and the return of it, the growing things, the roaring things, fire and nightmares, falling water and the wisdom of friends, forgiveness. My god, the forgiveness, time, and the scouring tides. How does one accept gifts as great as these and hold them in the mind? Failing to notice a gift dishonors it, and deflects the love of the giver. That's what's wrong with living a careless life, storing up sorrow, waking up regretful, walking unaware. But to turn the gift in your hand, to say, this is wonderful and beautiful, this is a great gift—this honors the gift and the giver of it. Maybe this is what [my friend] Hank has been trying to make me understand: Notice the gift. Be astonished at it. Be glad for it, care about it. Keep it in mind. This is the greatest gift a person can give in return. 'This is your work,' my friend told me, 'which is a work of substance and prayer and mad attentiveness, which is the real deal, which is why we are here.

Aeschylus. He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

I came in friendship, but how do you convey intention to a harbor seal? I thought later that I should have left offerings on the island—silvery fish heads, glistening blue necklaces of entrails and bracelets of feathery gills. But I never thought of it then.

May the light that reflects on water be this wild prayer. May water lift us with its unexpected strength. May we find comfort in the "repeated refrains of nature," the softly sheltering snow, the changing seasons, the return of blackbirds to the marsh. May we find strength in light that pours in under snow and laughter that breaks through tears. May we go out into the light-filled snow, among meadows in bloom, with gratitude for life that is deep and alive. May Earth's fire burn in our hearts, and may we know ourselves part of this flame--one thing, never alone, never weary of life. So may it be. "Never Alone or Weary

Listen to. To hear with thoughtful attention. To hold something close, to attend to it, to be astonished by it, to devote your life to its mysteries, to name it precisely, to wonder how it comes to be. To stay awake to it. To move closer to the wild and twittering night. To let it cover you and keep you safe. To me, listening is starting to sound a lot like love.

There is necessary beauty in the world, I understand this. Beauty to attract mates, to attract prey, to attract pollinators. But so much of beauty seems to be bycatch, “unnecessary beauty,” waste products of essential processes. The opalescence of the inside of an oyster shell, a rainbow around the moon, a baby’s dreaming smile. Profligate beauty is a mystery to me. Sing praises.

I have sought out storms all my life, without thinking much about why. Long before we knew better, my sisters and I played with lightning on the crest of the Rocky Mountains, reaching our hands towards rocks. The closer we came, the more furiously the rocks buzzed with electricity. We skipped and spun mindlessly in the electric charges, creating music with our bodies…what reed in the human spirit vibrates with the violence of storms?

Disaster calls us to action. They call us to levels of compassion and courage we did know we could reach. They smash us with sorrow and lift us with determination and moral resolved, the way a wave both makes and lifts us in the same wild movement. Disaster transforms sorrowful love into a force strong enough to change the trajectory of history….Dear Mary Oliver, do you think this might now be how we do the work of loving a weary, reeling world? And don’t we have to try?

As the Earth swung heavily on its bell-chain, the night began to toll. Deep, soft belling seemed to roll over the desert, and ancient stone and ancient bone resounded. The saguaros sang out. Sand sifted down the flank of the moon-borne ridge. A drop of water popped onto the pool. Another. The poorwill called again. Profundo, adagio, deeply, slowly, the music pulsed through the dark amphitheater. I lay still, shaken by the night’s extravagant expressions of profound joy. I would make myself silent and resonant, tuned to the wild Earth.

We hear most acutely in the range of 2.5 megahertz, which is the peak of birdsong. Human speech is pitched much lower, one kilohertz or below, and so is less central to our hearing. Why is this? Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton surmises that our bodies evolved not for cocktail party conversation but rather to harvest sounds from wild creatures. These are the aural signals on which our species’ success depended: Birds chatting, unconcerned. Herds gathering. Corvids flocking. Sudden silence. They spoke clearly: Here is safety. Here is water. Here is food. Here is danger.

In the green, light-shot sea along the Oregon coast, bullwhip kelp lean toward land on the incoming tides and swirl seaward as the water falls away, never letting go of their grip on the ocean floor. What keeps each plant in places is a holdfast, a fist of knobby fingers that stick to rock with a glue the plant makes from sunshine and salt water, an invisible bond strong enough to hold against all but the worst winter gales. The holdfast is a structure biologists don’t entirely understand. Philosophers have not even begun to try. I resolve to study holdfasts. What will be cling to, in the confusion of the tides? What structures of connection will hold us in place? How will we find an attachment to the natural world that makes us feel safe and fully alive, here, at the edge of water?

Human ears are built to hear birdsong, we hear most acutely in the range of 2.5 megahertz, which is the peak of birdsong. Human speech is pitched much lower, on kilohertz or below…Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton surmises that our bodies evolved not for party conversation but rather to harvest sounds from wild creatures… the aural signals on which our species’ success depended. But that’s just the beginning of the meaning we harvest by listening. Victor Hugo reminded us that ‘music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.’ Listen. Breathe Earth’s wild music into you body. You are not alone. Here is the harmony of which you are a part. Your joy is the exhilaration of birds…The depth of your feelings is the depth of time. Your longing is a spring chorus of frogs, ‘the wordless voice of longing that resonates within us, the longing to continue, to participate in the sacred life of the world,’ as Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote

Did dinosaurs sing? Was there a teeming, singing wilderness with all the species thumping around, tuning up for the next millennia? Of course, dinosaurs sang, I thought. They are the ancestors of the singing birds and cousins to the roaring crocodiles…turns out, no. Turns out the syrinx, the organ that produces birdsong and the larynx, the organ that produces operatic arias, didn’t evolve until after the dinosaur extinction event…Some dinosaurs blew air into their closed mouths and through nasal cavities into resonance chambers, which we see in fossils as bony crests. They made the forest echo with clear, ominous tones, eerily like a cello. I have heard it in recordings scientists made of the sound they produced when they blew air through crests constructed to mimic lambeosaurus’s. Some dinosaurs cooed to their mates like doves…turns out that even if dinosaurs didn’t sing, they danced. There is evidence in vigorous scrape marks found in 100-million year old Colorado sandstone. From the courting behavior of ostriches and grouse, scientists envision the dinosaur males coming together on courting grounds, bobbing and scratching, flaring their brilliant feathers and cooing. Imagine: huge animals, each weighing more than a dozen football teams, shaking the Earth for a chance at love. What the story of the dinosaurs tells me is that if the earth didn’t have music, it would waste no time inventing it. In birds, tantalizing evidence of birdsong is found in 67-million-year old fossils, marking the first know appearance of the syrinx. Now the whole Earth can chime, from deep in the sea to high in the atmosphere with the sounds of snapping shrimp, singing mice, roaring whales, moaning bears, clattering dragonflies, and a fish calling like a foghorn. Who could catalog the astonishing oeuvre of the Earth? And more songs are being created every year.

Deciding we won't drive to that chain grocery store and buy that imported pineapple is a path to liberation. Deciding to walk to the farmers' market and buy fresh, local peas is like spitting in the eye of the industries that control us. Every act of refusal is also an act of assent. Every time we way no to consumer culture, we say yes to something more beautiful and sustaining. Life is not something we go through or that happens to us; it's something we create by our own decisions.

This is our work in the world: to pull on rubber boots and stand in this lively, dangerous water, bracing against the slapping waves, one foot on stone, another on sand. When one foot slips and the other sinks, to hop awkwardly to keep from filling our boots. To laugh, to point, and sometimes to let this surging, light-flecked mystery wash into us and knock us to our knees, while we sing songs of celebration through our own three short nights, our voices thin in the darkness.

I don't know what despair is, if it's something or nothing, a kind of filling up or an emptying out. I don't know what sorrow does to the world, what it adds or takes away. What I think I do know now is that sorrow is part of the Earth's great cycles, flowing into the night like cool air sinking down a river course. To feel sorrow is to float on the pulse of the Earth, the surge from living to dying, from coming into being to ceasing to exist.

Maybe this is why the Earth has the power over time to wash sorrow into a deeper pool, cold and shadowed. And maybe this is why, even though sorrow never disappears, it can make a deeper connection to the currents of life and so connect, somehow, to sources of wonder and solace. I don't know. And I don't know what gladness is or where it comes from that feels like a splitting open of the self. It takes me by surprise.

I was happy then, standing in the surge with lines of moonlight catching on my rubber boots. This is something that needs explaining, how light emerges from darkness, how comfort wells up from sorrow. The Earth holds every possibility inside it, and the mystery of transformation, one thing into another. This is the wildest comfort.

When the time comes, I want to be the woman ...who was a regular old plaid-jacketed Alaskan until she began losing her capacities. She lost the ability to balance. She lost access to her memories. One by one, the capacities that we think are essential dropped away, until she was stripped of all conscious thought and intention, leaving only the transparency of her inner mind. But what she had stored there, through all a lifetime, was radiant. Hank says that when they sat together, watching rain roll down the window, what ballooned from her was glass-clear gladness. That's what she had left. That's what she had become.

I went with Frank to a program on Lou Gehrig's disease. Allen was there, in a wheelchair. The woman said that of all the things that Lou Gehrig's disease brings, the most striking is the outpouring of love. At that, Allen started to sob. The woman explained that too, telling us that people who lose control of their muscles will cry often, to think of all the muscle effort to keep your crying inside, every muscle tensed to hold in your sorrow. I had never thought of that. People pulled their chairs closer to Allen, and his friend stroked his back, and there wasn't anybody muscular enough to hold in their sadness, and that was important.

When the chorus kicked in at the last movement, the "Ode to Joy," and the trumpets started to sing, Marlan leaning in, and the music marching up and down again, and the sopranos impossibly high and clear and triumphant, all I could think was what a glory. If humans can do this, can do this TOGETHER, then they can do anything. You know that point in the "Ode to Joy" when you think there will be a rest and there ISN'T? It's about going on and not stopping. Thrilled by the music, thrilled by the hope, the conviction that if we can go on, can just hold on long enough to get past this point in his-tory, just keep singing joy, just hold things together through this time, then maybe there is hope for the human race. If we can't, then the world can go on without us, but that would be a shame, because it would have to go on without the "Ode to Joy.

But what if I could see the familiar world as if I had never seen it before, even if I see it every day--with that wonderment and surprise? Or see it as if I would never see it again? Then imagine the glory. I'm thinking it's a paltry sense of wonder that requires something new every day. I confess: Wonder is easy when you travel to desert islands in search of experiences you have never imagined, in search of something you have never seen before, in search of wonder, the shock of surprise. It's easy, and maybe it's cheap. It's not what the world asks of us. To be worthy of the astonishing world, a sense of wonder will be a way of life, in every place and time, no matter how familiar: to listen in the dark of every night, to praise the mystery of every returning day, to be astonished again and again, to be grateful with an intensity that cannot be distinguished from joy.

Maybe the forest is a prayer tonight, bent under the weight of all that winter, the whole world on its knees. Or maybe the prayer is the hush. Could I pray this way, letting the night settle onto my thoughts like snow on my shoulders, that gently? Hush. My snowshoes shuffle through the drifts. Hush: one snowshoe, then another. There is no other sound.

May the light that reflects on water be this wild prayer. May water lift us with its unexpected strength. May we find comfort in the "repeated refrains of nature," the softly sheeting snow, the changing seasons, the return of blackbirds to the marsh. May we find strength in light that pours in under snow and laughter that breaks through tears. May we go out into the light-filled snow, among meadows in bloom, with a gratitude for life that is deep and alive. May Earth's fire burn in our hearts, and may we know ourselves part of this flame, one thing, never alone, never weary of life.

To see to the depth of a river, wade into still water. In the silent space under the slick of the world, the river clears. If you stand still too, so as not to wrinkle the water, you will see the shadows of minnows. You will smell sage and melting snow and you will notice, incised into the topography of the silt, little river channels pointing to the sea. And isn't this what you had hoped to find? A quiet place where everything comes clear and the Earth itself shows the way to the one thing.

Here is what I believe: that the natural world- the stuff of our lives, the world we plod through, hardly hearing, the world we burn and poke and stuff and conquer and irradiate- that THIS WORLD (not another world on another plane) is irreplaceable, astonishing, contingent, eternal and changing, beautiful and fearsome, beyond human understanding, worthy of reverence and awe, worthy of celebration and protection. If the good English word for this combination of qualities is "sacred," then so be it. Even if we don't believe in God, we walk out the door on a sacred morning and lift our eyes to the sacred rain and are called to remember our sacred obligations of care and celebration. And what's more, if the natural world is sacred, and "sacred" describes the natural world; if there are not two worlds but one, and it is magnificent and mysterious enough to shake us to the core; if this is so, then we-you and I and the man on the beach- are called to live our lives gladly. We are called to live lives of gratitude, joy, and caring, profoundly moved by the bare fact that we live in the time of the singing of birds.

I think I will teach about mystery today, this bright ocean that surrounds the small island of our understanding, the rain that rises from that sea. I don't know why we live or die, whether that's necessary or contingent. But I will tell my students this: life and death are all nothing. When you die, it's done, the chance is gone. So when you live? When you live, make it all. Don't wait for the rain to stop. Climb out of your tent with your mind engaged and your senses ablaze and let rain pour into you. Remember: you are not who you think you are. You are what you do. Be the kindness of soft rain. Be the beauty of light behind a tall fir. Be gratitude. Be gladness.

You have to do something after a while, don’t you?

Try to go infinitely deep into any piece of the distance of time. If there is eternal life, a friend says, it will not be in the length of your life, but in its depth…I don’t think there is any limit to the depth of each moment, and I am going to try to live in a way that plumbs those depths, to live thickly, expanding the reach of my moment down into the mire of detail and up into the damp and cry-filled air.

We realized too late that we never taught our students what ducks know without knowing, that “we must love life before loving its meaning,” as Dostoyevsky told us. We must love life, and some meaning may grow from that love…What is it all for, this magnifying-glass-in-the-sun focus on being, this marshland, this wetness, this stewpot, this great splashing…the colors, the plumage, the effort, the noise, the complexity? Nothing, I think, except to continue. This is the testimony of the marsh: Life directs all its power to one end, and that is to continue to be. A marsh at nightfall is life loving itself. Nothing more. But nothing less, either, and we should not be fooled in to thinking this is a small thing.

You can’t take the planet for granted; it could all be otherwise. There must be worlds spinning on the far side of Jupiter where field guides are futile, where nothing is this or that, but rather nothing at all or everything at once. Imagine a simple world where everything is one kind of thing, evenly distributed, like red cinders blown out of a red cinder cone onto an even plain, so when the wind blows, it plays a single endless note. Imagine a planet where no two things are ever the same and there are infinitely many things…or imagine a world where chaos never yielded to creation, a world forever unsorted, spinning in that glare that is all light combined. These are worlds that rationality can’t conquer.

The thrill of the storm…doesn’t purr, it crackles. I asked Frank if the excitement could be physical. He studies chemicals in the brain, so he might know. Maybe it’s’ the sudden drop in air pressure, I suggested. Released from the weight of the atmosphere, all your cells expand and life and your spirits lighten. You have to breathe harder to get enough oxygen, and nothing seems quite fastened down… All the elements of beauty can be found in the way light strikes a wheat field under purple thunderheads; clarity and lucidity, a kind of shine and smoothness, unity and diversity… The opposite of beauty is not ugliness. The opposite of beauty is sublimity, the blow-to-the-gut awareness of chaotic forces unleashed and uncontrolled, the terror- and finally the awe. To experience the sublime is to understand, with an insight so fierce and sudden it makes you flinch, that there is power and possibility in the universe greater than anyone can imagine. The sublime blows out the boundaries of human experience.

Storms are our wilderness. A few generations ago, people looked to wild lands for the experience of the sublime…But now we tidy up the wild places and manage the mountains for science pleasure…the same landscape is merely beautiful now…if people are looking for wilderness now, all they need to do is turn their faces to the sky. Philosophers…use the phrase “that greater than which nothing can be conceived.” Our ancestors spoke to storms with magical words, prayed to them… dancing to the very edge of what is alien and powerful… we may have lost the dances, but we carry with us a need to approach the power of the universe…

In forests or huckleberry patches, I’ll be hiking along under the hemlocks and suddenly the light will stream in sideways and every leaf lights up and I’m stopped in midstride, overwhelmed with how beautiful the forest has become…sometimes the natural world gives you a gift so beautiful, so precious, that all you can do is stand there and cry. But I never actually though of this as religion. All the same, the thought is an interesting one, and now I’m trying to look around me a little differently, keep an open mind.

In the fifty years that I have been writing about nature, roughly 60 percent of all individual mammals have been erased from the face of the Earth. The total population of North American red-winged blackbirds and robins have been cut by a third. Half of grassland birds have been lost. As many as one of out five species of organisms may be on the verge of extinction now, and twice that number could be lost by the end of the century…Unless the world acts to stop extinctions, I will write my last nature essay on a planet that is less than half a song-graced and life-drenched as the one where I began to write.

You have to be able to make them silent; it’s the silence that allows you to hear that glorious moment when the middle C vibrates with the middle tone of all things, the center of time, the hum of tide through a sea urchin’s spines, the golden mean that is the exact middle between two extremes, the way courage exactly cuts the difference between recklessness and cowardice.

and deflects the love of the giver.

Lord knows, I'd like to see the world the way ecologists do. If all of us thought of death as change rather than catastrophe, we could blunt the edge of sorrow. And isn't this a source of hope, that the force of nature turn death into life again and again, unceasing?

Unfelt sadness is possible I think. We can build up calluses on our hearts, rough skin that blocks out our own sorrow and prevents us from feeling the suffering of others. Maybe unfelt sorrow is why many of us are so restless and tormented; sorrow swarms in the spine, and the bewildered mind casts about for a dismay it does not understand. But once we close our hearts to suffering, are they closed also to the perception of joy? Is emotion a door that, once closed, is closed to everything that would come in?

Is it a mistake to look to the world to tell us the meaning of our plummeting lives? Maybe we all have the power to shape our own structure, the structure of our metaphoric wings, what lifts us - our character maybe, or call it our spirit. We all in our own ways catch the light of the world and reflect it back, and this is what is bright and surprising about a person, this rainbow shimmer created from colorless structure. Maybe there is meaning in the world itself - no sorrow. In fact, no good or bad, beginning or end. Maybe what there is, is the individual way each of us has of transforming the world, ways to refract it, to create of it something that shimmers from our spread wings. This is our work, creating these wings and giving them color.

To love a person or place is to take responsibility for its well-being.

It is a heartache, honestly, to be so shunned. I have never understood why a creator god would go to so much trouble to separate one thing from another—the light from the darkness, waters that were under the firmament from waters that were above, the seas from the dry land, and worst of all, humankind from the fishes of the sea and the birds of the air and every creeping thing.

I should have felt a loneliness close to despair, there, in the night, in the rain, a thousand miles from home. What I felt instead was uncommon joy. What was there to long for, where all I wanted was what I suddenly had?—to be fully part of the night, joined by a song, by a simple shared song, to the loon, to the wolf, to the keening of all humankind, all of us together in this one infinite night, all of us floating in the same darkness, each of us, as we howl our loneliness, finding that we are not alone after all.