Lyanda Lynn Haupt Quotes

Our bodies, minds, and spirits stand in ancient communion with the soil.

Rooted ways embolden us to remember that with our complex minds we can feel—and live—more than one thing simultaneously. Anxiety, difficulty, fear, despair. Yes. Beauty, connectedness, possibility, love. Yes.

Our hands imbibe like roots, so I place them on what is beautiful in this world. —Francis of Assisi

In spite of the string of magazine covers announcing the contrary, we all know that ten simple things will not save the earth. There are, rather, three thousand impossible things that all of us must do, and changing our light bulbs, while necessary, is the barest beginning. We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want.

We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want.

....hope is 'that virtue by which we take responsibility for the future.' ...hope is our positive orientation toward the future, a future in which we simultaneously recognize difficulty, responsibility, and delight. Hope is not relative to the present situation, nor is it dependent upon a specific outcome... Hope is not an antidote to despair, or a sidestepping of difficulty, but a companion to all these things.

Wonder, as a quality of intellect, has fallen from favor.

Hope is 'that virtue by which we take responsibility for the future.' Not just responsibility for our individual futures but also for that of the world.

But I believed in the power of sacrament, in very much the way I do today—not as a Catholic but as a human open to the truth that something can be made sacred by the attention we grant it.

Birds will give you a window, if you allow them. They will show you secrets from another world– fresh vision that, though it is avian, can accompany you home and alter your life. They will do this for you even if you don't know their names– though such knowing is a thoughtful gesture. They will do this for you if you watch them.

While we have more scientific knowledge of the universe than any people ever had, it is not the type of knowledge that leads to an intimate presence within a meaningful universe.… The difficulty is that with the rise of the modern sciences we began to think of the universe as a collection of objects rather than as a communion of subjects.

Hope is not a remedy or even a substitute for the despair and anxiety we face in the modern world, but a companion to these things. Mature hope involves a willingness to allow that brokenness and beauty sometimes intertwine.

And what is this wild summons? What art is asked of us? The gift offered is different for each but all are equal in grandeur. To paint, draw, dance, compose. To write songs, poems, letters, diaries, prayers. To set a violet on the sill, stitch a quilt,; bake bread; plant marigolds, beans, apple trees. To follow the track of the forest elk, the neighborhood coyote, the cupboard mouse. To open the windows, air beds, sweep clean the corners. To hold the child’s hand, listen to the vagrant’s story, paint the elder friend's fingernails a delightful shade of pink while wrapped in a blanket she knit with deft young fingers of her past. To wander paths, nibble purslane, notice spiders. To be rained upon. To listen with changed ears and sing back what we hear.

This is one of the blessings of the urban nature project: without the overtly magnificent to stop us in our tracks, we must seek out the more subversively magnificent. Our sense of what constitutes wildness is expanded, and our sense of wonder along with it.

We practice wonder by resisting the temptation to hurry past things worth seeing, but it can take work to transcend our preconceived standards for what that worth might be.

Perhaps the corollary would be just as good an opening for a tale; not "long ago, when animals could speak," but "Long ago, when people could listen.

But the earth and its beings are extravagantly wild, full of unexpected wonders. It is time to turn from our textbooks and listen to the birds themselves.

Wonder feeds our best intelligence and is perhaps its source.

Who wants an everyday path—paved and void of danger—when we can have beasts and shadows and secret flowers and unexpected visits from the feral wolf of our imaginations?

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”)

We know, both from experience and now from published scientific studies, that being among trees, or simply viewing trees through a window, makes people calmer, and even happier.

Somehow, in our language and in our psyches, we have come to equate good with light and evil with darkness. The symbolism runs deep. We see it in our poetry, our religion, our songs, and our cultural mythology.

As we work to know the life that surrounds us, we stand in a lineage of naturalists — past, present, and even future. We join the "cloud of witnesses" who refuse to let the more-than-human world pass unnoticed.

Surely there is a continuum from a pure, undefiled wilderness to a trammeled concrete industrial area. But there is no place, we now know, as the relentlessly global impacts of climate change become increasingly understood, that humans have left untouched; and there is no place that the wild does not, in some small way, proclaim itself.

The modern science of nature is significant for many other reasons, beyond the obvious setting of conservation priorities and actions. Foremost in my mind being the fact that it is beautiful. Its wondrous mathematical synchronicities, the specifics of its chemical analyses, the complexity of its physics are beyond both the practical and intuitive knowledge of most lay naturalists (or mystics), no matter how seasoned. When mingled with the wildness of the natural world and the creativity of the human mind, good science reveals its center, its story, its deeper teaching. The science has its own poetic force.

Questions lead to further questions, and inquiry breeds insight. Gathering expertise brings both confidence and consolation. E. O. Wilson wrote: "You start by loving a subject. Birds, probability theory, stars, differential equations, storm fronts, sign language, swallowtail butterflies....The subject will be your lodestar and give sanctuary in the shifting mental universe.

With my new habit of carrying binoculars everywhere, I feel imbued with a readiness to see, an attitude that my life itself is a kind of field trip. The urban naturalist has the terrific luxury of stepping out her door and into "the field," without long rides or carpools, or putting money in for gas and Dairy Queen. When does the field trip being? Whenever we start paying attention.

Even time breaks down within this calculus of interbeing. We stand in a spiral—rather than a strictly linear—continuity with our ancestors and the ancient cosmos. We still see the light of the stars that died long ago and that now form our living bodies; so, too, do our actions reach into the future of all life and death. It matters what we bring forth with the matter of our bodies. We create, as cosmos-formed creatures, within creation.

I am no ecological Pollyana. I have borne, and will continue to bear, feelings of wholehearted melancholy over the ecological state of the earth. How could I not? How could anyone not? But I am unwilling to become a hand-wringing nihilist, as some environmental 'realists' seem to believe is the more mature posture. Instead, I choose to dwell, as Emily Dickinson famously suggested, in possibility, where we cannot predict what will happen but we make space for it, whatever it is, and realize that our participation has value. This is grown-up optimism, where our bondedness with the rest of creation, a sense of profound interaction, and a belief in our shared ingenuity give meaning to our lives and actions on behalf of the more-than-human world.

Thanks to a confluence of demographics and technology, we’ve pivoted further away from nature than any generation before us. At the same time, we’re increasingly burdened by chronic ailments made worse by time spent indoors, from myopia and vitamin D deficiency to obesity, depression, loneliness and anxiety.

When we allow ourselves greater freedom in space and place than has come to be the norm, we create our own pathways of meaning and knowledge upon the land where we dwell. Wandering freely, we garner landmarks, presences, ecological awareness, a sense of kithship. Our brains and our hearts alike gather this knowledge as we become intimate with the paths that speak to us most strongly. Our footsteps in the outer world create an inner, wilder cartography that whispers, This way, this way…

Darkness possesses its own essential grace. It is darkness that bears liminal imaginings more difficult to access in the scattered daylight. Darkness brings the restorative sleep and dreaming our bodies and psyches require. Darkness takes the harried busyness of the day and transforms it to stillness, to quiet. Darkness brings us starlight. Darkness erases our view of the horizon, forcing our reliance upon a spacious inner vision that daylight cannot provide. Darkness offers a complex refuge for all beings and all aspects of being.

But in the bare practical outlines, we are two writers, sitting at our desks, with starlings on our shoulders

When we allow ourselves greater freedom in space and place than has come to be the norm, we create our own pathways of meaning and knowledge upon the land where we dwell.

... be expectant, do not be dull, but bring the lost fullness of your intelligence to this endeavor as you come quietly into the presence of wild things. -- Haupt quoting Darwin

Here is the dream of the earth: continuance.

Wonder and enchantment require us to disengage from culturally constructed norms of rationality for adult humans and allow ourselves to be affected by the astonishing world that enfolds us always.

I care with the brightened curiosity of one who loves a subject for no rational reason, but who loves it nonetheless and prodigally. This is the ardor of the academic Austenologist who believes that if she looks beneath the floorboards of the right dusty attic, she will find the diary entry explaining why Jane Austen rejected her one marriage proposal the day after she'd accepted it; of the birder in Costa Rica tiptoeing through tails of biting ants and fer-de-lance serpents in hopes of glimpsing a rare hummingbird that no one has seen for fifteen years. I could list such loves forever, the sort that visit our imaginations on the cusp of the impossible but that we cannot erase from our minds. We follow the trail with whatever breadcrumbs we can gather, with hope, with love, with an almost magical combination of urgency and patience...

One evening I came home and there on the couch I found my husband, Tom, with a freshly fledged crow sitting calmly in his lap. They were busy watching Star Trek: The Next Generation; since Captain Jean-Luc Picard was in the middle of an absorbing monologue, they hardly registered my arrival, but finally they both glanced my way, Tom looking a bit sheepish, the crow nibbling bits from a can of gourmet cat food. I thought of something Bernd Heinrich wrote, inspired by his raven studies, "Living with another creature, you naturally feel closer to it the more activities that can be shared, especially important activities like watching TV.

My wish for all of us is forest baths guided by our inner knowing. Where we don’t have any idea what is behind each turn. Immersed, unsettled forest baths—ones where we emerge with ankles enlivened by the prick of nettles, lichens in our tresses, pebbles in our pockets, an uncertainty about whether the tendrilly growth on our arms is hair or fur. Our heart rate calm yet beautifully feral. Let us return so mingled with the stuff of the earth that the first person to stumble upon us after we are home from our wandering looks at us and says, with a mixture of admonition, admiration, worry, and an urge to suddenly run out the door themselves, “You need a bath.

Dr. Ashley King, planetary scientist and stardust expert (an enviable job description), states: “It is totally 100 percent true: nearly all the elements in the human body were made in a star and many have come through several supernovas.” Oxygen + carbon + hydrogen + nitrogen + calcium + phosphorous + potassium + sulfur + sodium + chlorine + magnesium = star-human. The stuff of the cosmos is woven into our bone branches and wanders in our blood rivers.

philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed, “The more ingenious and accurate our instruments, the more unsusceptible and inexpert become our organs: by assembling a heap of machinery about us, we find afterwards none in ourselves.

Directionlessness leads to clear vision and creative flourishing. Decoupled from overt value in the usual measures, wandering is an unorthodox act, removing us from the anthropic realm of striving, judgment, and economic utility.

It is from this beautiful, feral place that we are able to respond to the breath of inspiration that summons us to the fullness of our creativity. Full, because we are cognizant that we are not a lone pair of hands or a single voice, that we do not create in isolation but bring our gift, the art of our lives, to one another, to the earth. We each touch the seven starlings closest to us in our own mumuration, and the ripple spreads faster than we could have imagined. .

When the fraught name God comes up in conversation or reading, I always remind myself that whatever the source or language used, we are at root on common ground—invoking the graced, unnamable source of life, the sacredness that cradles and infuses all of creation, on earth and beyond.

In newer studies, Kabat-Zinn and other clinical psychologists are turning the question around: what if, instead of working to focus on the present moment, it is just as mindful to follow the mind where it wants to go, to let it wander? Kabat-Zinn adopted Krishnamurti’s phrase choiceless awareness to describe this more meandering meditation. The practitioner is encouraged to follow her distractions during meditation and so, ironically, not become distracted by them. Instead of intense focus, aimless wandering of both mind and body allow a renewed sense of calm responsiveness to our lives and world.

Where kin are relations of kind, kith is relationship based on knowledge of place—the close landscape, “one’s square mile,” as Griffiths writes, where each tree and neighbor and robin and fox and stone is known, not by map or guide but by heart. Kith is intimacy with a place, its landmarks, its fragrance, the habits of its wildlings.

Whenever I renew a commitment to studying raptors or gulls or crows or the birds in my backyard, more are given, more show themselves. Our efforts are rewarded, our studies are enhanced in experience. I cannot explain this, and I am reluctant to sound to woo-woo but we can take this as confidently as if it came from the Oracle at Delphi: the more we prepare, the more we are "allowed" somehow to see.

We have come to an earthen moment wherein we must make all the connections we are able with the whole of life, no matter how at-risk that puts our public-facing façade of normality. Look at the vapid homogeneity of the wealth-based, earth-denuding, dominant culture: is this the approval we seek? When we turn to the sweet, ragged edges of society, we see the people carrying violins, mandolins, pens, microscopes, walking sticks. The ones with ink on their hands, paint on their faces, mosses in their hair, shirts on sideways because they have been awake all night in the thrall of a new idea. This is where the art of earth-saving lies. We are creating a new story –one of vitality, conviviality, feralness (escape!), wildness, nonduality, interconnectedness, generosity, sensuality, creativity, knowledge of the earth and all that dwells therein.

The rooted pathways offered here are not meant as a definitive list but as waymarkers and fortification for all of us seeking our unique, bewildering, awkward way through the essential question of how to live on our broken, imperiled, beloved earth. It is the question Thoreau asked. The one that Mary Oliver, who passed just before I wrote these words, has perhaps framed most beautifully: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

What art is asked of us? The gift offered is different for each but all are equal in grandeur. To paint, draw, dance, compose. To write songs, poems, letters, diaries, prayers. To set a violet on the sill; stitch a quilt; bake bread; plant marigolds, beans, apple trees. To follow the track of the forest elk, the neighborhood coyote, the cupboard mouse. To open the windows, air the beds, sweep clean the corners. To hold the child’s hand, listen to the vagrant’s story, paint the

Who among us has not heard it? The wolf of this beloved, damaged earth, beckoning us by name just outside our safe living room, demanding our own response? The strange and persistent furry-pawed knocking? We peek tentatively through the door, just ajar, and see that there is no road, no sidewalk, barely a trail—and that obscured by stones, by leaves, by an intimation of the remains of those who have walked before us upon the unyielding circle of life. In spite of it all, we long to walk this path. For we know that there is more than what has been given and named by the overculture, more than what we have been told is true, more than green gardens and nature calendars, and recycling, and a summer hike in the mountains, and an occasional camping trip. More, even, than an hourlong “forest bath,” however lovely that sounds. We know there is a wilder earth, and upon it—within it—a wilder, more authentic human self. We know the need of each for the other is absolute.

Walker-thinkers have found various ways to accommodate the gifts that their walking brings. Caught paperless on his walks in the Czech enclaves of Iowa, maestro Dvořák scribbles the string quartets that visited his brain on his starched white shirt cuffs (so the legend goes). More proactively, Thomas Hobbes fashioned a walking stick for himself with an inkwell attached, and modern poet Mary Oliver leaves pencils in the trees along her usual pathways, in case a poem descends during her rambles.

There is a way to face the current ecological crisis with our eyes open, with stringent scientific knowledge, with honest sorrow over the state of life on earth, with spiritual insight, and with practical commitment. Finding such a way is more essential now than it has ever been in the history of the human species. But such work does not have to be dour (no matter how difficult) or accomplished only out of moral imperative (however real the obligation) or fear (though the reasons to fear are well founded). Our actions can rise instead from a sense of rootedness, connectedness, creativity, and delight.

Walt Whitman asked that which we all primally ask: The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life? We hold the ten thousand things of the troubled earth in mind and in spirit while offering the few beautiful things that we, and we alone, are able to offer with our ten little fingers. Whitman answered his own question: That you are here—that life exists and identity, / That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. This is all we have—our life and what we give. In our ragged wandering with padded feet and pricked ears and rewilded minds we find gifts from the wild earth, and we come to share our own gifts in return.

While I wandered the dreamy quiet of St. Marx Friedhof, it was the Requiem that swirled through my head. But when I set my chestnut on the gray concrete that had to stand in for Star's tiny, forgotten grave, it was the wild, swirling cadenzas from A Musical Joke that filled my mind and heart. Even more than his poem, this flight of musical fancy was Mozart's truest elegy for his small friend, the commonest of birds who could never have known that he was joining with a musical genius in the highest purpose of creative life: to disturb us out of complacency; to show us the wild, imperfect, murmuring harmony of the world we inhabit; to draw our own lives into the song.

There is another world,” Paul Éluard wrote, “but it is in this one.”* One world is marked by a bland forgetfulness, where we do not permit ourselves an openness to the simple, graced beauty that is always with us. The other is marked by attentiveness, aliveness, love. This is the state of wonder, which is commonly treated as a passive phenomenon—a kind of visitation or feeling that overcomes us in the face of something wondrous. But the ground of the word, the Old English wundrian, is very active, meaning “to be affected by one’s own astonishment.” We decide, moment to moment, if we will allow ourselves to be affected by the presence of this brighter world in our everyday lives. Certainly

Surely there is a continuum from a pure, undefiled wilderness to a trammeled concrete industrial area. But there is no place, we now know, as the relentlessly global impacts of climate change become increasingly understood, that humans have left untouched; and there is no place that the wild does not, in some small way, proclaim itself. Many human activities are wholly ugly, working against the nature upon which we forget we depend. Still, we do not flip-flop back and forth, now in nature, now in culture, now feeling quite animal-like, now wholly intellectual. We are, at all times, both at once. In this, humans may be unique, but we are no less natural. We are the human species, living in culture, bound by nature.

As long as we frame a worldview with language that refers to the wild as a commodity, it will be treated as one. It is likewise damaging to invoke technology-based metaphors to explain nature: the brain a computer, the earth a spaceship, the rooted and fungal soil beneath our feet a kind of internet. Such mechanistic phrasing unwittingly invites us to see the natural world as other-than-alive and reparable by human skill in ways that it simply is not. If we are seeking a relationship within the earthen community that is meaningful, genuine, and impactful, then the words we use to describe that relationship, and the beings in its purview, must be chosen with intention, with specificity, with intelligence, and with love.

And do most of us really need a scientific document to inform us that the animals we live with are conscious beings? I believe that the human sense of connection with the more-than-human world is innate and joyous. It is our truest way of being, of dwelling, of relating. It is not new; it is very old. It surfaces in the art and culture of every civilization across place and time - in stories of human-animal relationships that are based on respect, awareness, knowledge, and love. I have no desire to confer on any animal a capacity that it doesn't have. There is no need. Animals have capacities enough - those we do understand, those we do not yet know, those we can never know because they reside in the unique minds of other-than-human beings.

reading books over my shoulder and turning pages that I did not want turned, and having finished all of her e-mail correspondence, Carmen settles onto my shoulder, into the crook of my arm, or on my lap against my belly; she rounds her soft breast over her feet, fluffs and then unfluffs her feathers, and becomes perfectly still. Sometimes she will close her eyes; other times she will simply rest, entirely at peace. She might make a contented little sound, one I never hear from her aviary. It is a sigh-chirp, reserved for these moments of quiet snuggling. If I am still, I can feel her swift heartbeat. I will never tire of such moments. Comfort, rest, and unexpected consolation, shared so easily between two beings who grew from such seemingly different limbs of the taxonomic tree.

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; (This last is courtesy of Delilah, walking across my MacBook, and since this is a story that appreciates intraspecies offerings, I thought I’d let her make her presence known—semicolons are a suitably catlike, noncommittal form of punctuation.)

Kindness is both wild and wise.

Global avian populations are perilously declining because of human-wrought habitat degradation, and many individual avian injuries are at root human-caused.

Whenever I renew a commitment to studying raptors or gulls or crows or the birds in my backyard, more are given, more show themselves. Our efforts are rewarded, our studies are enhanced in experience.

But unlike most birds, crows also appear to fly for reasons that defy scientific explanation, though to us it seems obvious. They fly for fun. Any windy day will fling crows into the air like leaves, diving, wheeling, rising, tumbling. I see them, and think that if I were a bird, I would want to fly like a crow—with enough of a brain to love it. It might even make it worth it having to eat dead city rats if I could fly like that.

both confidence and consolation. E. O. Wilson wrote: “You start by loving a subject. Birds, probability theory, stars, differential equations, storm fronts, sign language, swallowtail butterflies.… The subject will be your lodestar and give sanctuary in the shifting mental universe.

Amphibious, we wander at the singular, radical intersection of science, nature, and spirit.

but there is no one way to participate in this re-storying. In her inspired and challenging memoir, Bless the Birds, nature writer Susan Tweit chronicled her husband Richard’s decline and death due to a brain tumor. Ever an educator in life, it was Richard’s wish that his body become a teaching cadaver for medical students. After his time teaching post-death, his ashes were returned to Susan. When I asked her about it, Susan said, “I’d always imagined our bodies ‘going to ground’ together and gently moldering back into earth, but if it gave Richard peace to donate his body, that was his decision.” As Rumi sang, “There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one important thing,” proclaims an ancient fragment attributed to the Greek poet Archilochus. It is implied that the hedgehog curls into the side of higher wisdom, and we are advised to sink into the still depths of this hedgehog way of knowing. Discerning people have told me that because no one can do everything needed to help the troubled world, it is most impactful (and least confounding) to focus our passion on one thing. Pick one cause, one creature, one ecosystem. Go deep. I think this is mostly true.

We each have our own calling, our own charism—the unique gift of our own life and creativity. It is useful to think of it this way: as the particular grace that is ours to give freely, with devotion, with service, with joy, though not without hardship. As Clarissa Pinkola Estés warns about the creative spirit of el duende, “If you think it costs nothing to have it, all your hair will be burned off.

the heart of it is something very complex, that has to do with destiny, and with an almost inexpressible feeling that I am merely the instrument through which something has happened—that I’ve had little to do with it myself.

For hundreds of years, Buddhist monks in Vietnam have meditated in open cemeteries, bodies of their brethren in different states of decay around them. There, they envision the same processes that will inevitably be at work upon their own bodies. Saint Benedict, a fifth-century Italian monk and scholar, authored a famous book-length Rule for living that is still followed by many monastic orders and their oblates (including Benedictines, the Trappist order that drew Thomas Merton to monastic life, and even some Buddhist monasteries). Sisters and brothers following the Rule are counseled to “keep death ever before you.” Such meditations call us to acknowledge more fully the insistent ephemerality of our existence and to live with more intention, generosity, humility, and love.

immediately but take hours, sometimes more than a day, to quiet and begin the transformation to this cadaveric ecosystem. Inexplicably, some genetic material contained within our cells does not even express itself until after what is medically termed to be bodily death. By the humanistic selfish-gene version of evolution, this doesn’t make sense, and scientists have come up with no reason that it would be so. I have read in scientific journals that such genetic expression has “no purpose,” though more likely it serves a purpose. It likely serves a purpose we do not yet understand. All of this is of value in tracing the tragic loss of loved ones, but it carries philosophical and spiritual meaning as well.

Hand-sewing is calming to me, and I chose to stitch my dress entirely machine-free. For whimsy and inspiration, I’ve selected some thread in a pretty shade of moss-green and continue to embroider quotes along the hems as fancy strikes. Joy Harjo: Remember the earth whose skin you are. Walt Whitman: I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love… Your very flesh shall be a great poem… Now and then I wear the dress on a forest walk, letting it become accustomed to roots and soil. If

Hand-sewing is calming to me, and I chose to stitch my dress entirely machine-free. For whimsy and inspiration, I’ve selected some thread in a pretty shade of moss-green and continue to embroider quotes along the hems as fancy strikes. Joy Harjo: Remember the earth whose skin you are. Walt Whitman: I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love… Your very flesh shall be a great poem… Now and then I wear the dress on a forest walk, letting it become accustomed to roots and soil. If any of these practices and ponderings sound glib or overly lighthearted, know that they are defense mechanisms. Naps upon decaying trees. Sewing of shrouds. Skulls of birds and coyotes enshrined as memento mori on the shelves of my study—I contemplate them daily in the palms of my hands, their intricate post-purpose: Remember. All of this is an attempt at a reckoning with the end of my own life, the constant presence of an inevitability I am as yet unable to fully brook. Some say peace with death descends upon us as we age, and perhaps this is so. For now, I struggle and I stitch.

Rachel’s response was gentle. As far as a continuation of consciousness beyond death, she was willing to dwell in mystery, and invoked the words of Swedish oceanographer Otto Pettersson, who, at the end of his long life, told his son that he would be sustained “by an infinite curiosity as to what was to follow.” But there was one thing about which Carson did have some certainty, and that was in her sense of what she called “material immortality,” where our bodies are first broken down by decay, then resurrected physically in new cellular arrangements. She summoned the words she had penned in an early piece, “Undersea,” published in 1937 by the Atlantic Monthly. Individual elements are lost to view, only to reappear again and again in different incarnations in a kind of material immortality.… Against this cosmic background the life span of a particular plant or animal appears not as a drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change. She

My grown-up vision of earthen grace remains influenced by a line from the creed I recited weekly as a child at Saint Anthony’s Catholic Church in the mercurial green Pacific Northwest even before I discovered Frog Church: I believe in the seen and the unseen. I remember standing there like a tree amidst the pews, not knowing the science yet, but knowing something true.

...I feel inexplicably overcome with discomfort; something is off- something I can't understand, explain, or ignore....in Japan I learned a word for this very thing- fun'iki, in ineffable feeling of goodness or badness or contentment or discomfort. Atmosphere may be the closest we can come [in English].

I wonder whether part of my work at this point in my life might be to simply witness...

While on faculty at a writer’s conference recently, I attended a talk by another teacher who claimed that the magical incantation abracadabra, made familiar by cartoons and magician parodies, means, at root, “what is spoken is what becomes.” While this is certainly a happy thought

for writers looking to justify the significance of our word-work, it seemed too good to be true. Yet when I dug into etymological sources and consulted classical language scholars, I found it to be credible. Abracadabra is from the Hebrew-Aramaic lineage, murky but traceable. What we say is what we bring into being. The way we speak shapes our perceptions, our actions, and ultimately the outcomes we seek.

high to the oak’s crown, she napped among the oak’s branches. Lynda wrote about the experience in her book Witness Tree, and told me she has no doubt that in time, the tree recognized her presence—that they belonged to each other. To return and return and return is to come into relatedness with a specific tree and the surrounding land. It is the great lesson.

Try these things: Keep field guides everywhere. And topographical maps. Read them like novels, like holy texts, like poems. Learn the names of new-to-you wild beings or landmarks in your home region, then create your own living names for these same things. Respect Indigenous names. Listen for the earth to whisper a new name for yourself, and tell it to everyone or to no one. When you are at a loss, put your ear to the forest floor, or the bark of a tree, or tilt it toward the clouds. See what wordless language points you along your path.

Hildegard of Bingen grounded both her ecospirituality and her herbal medicine in this knowing. Her central concept of viriditas, or divine “greenness,” sanctifies more than the literally green mosses and leaves; over and over Hildegard calls upon the interdependence of trees, seeds, spirit, and soil as sacred cocreators. She used various trees in her practical cures, but they were also stand-ins for the mythic tree of life in her writings and visions. In one of Hildegard’s greatest hymns, she sings to the trees on her lush Rhineland. “O happy roots, mediatrix, and branches…” The “happy” roots, ever underland, grow in the particular favor of the divine (and perhaps of Hildegard herself—there is speculation that some of her visions may have been enhanced by the hallucinogenic mandrake root, which she prescribed as a cure for depression). Green branching is only and always mirrored in rooted darkness—the place we, too, come from and return to. To be whole on earth is to embrace this exuberant darkness, the landscape we visit with every turn of day into night.

That you are here—that life exists and identity, / That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. This is all we have—our life and what we give. In our ragged wandering with padded feet and pricked ears and rewilded minds we find gifts from the wild earth, and we come to share our own gifts in return. CONTRIBUTE YOUR VERSE Footnotes 1 The thousand arms per statue proved too much for the confines of this temple, though it has been accomplished on single statues elsewhere.

New science supports a cellular intelligence and intricate ecology existing long after the seeming death of an organism. At the Southeast Texas Applied Forensic Science Facility, in Huntsville, researchers who study the decomposition of human bodies find that, far from being “dead,” our bodies, when they are allowed contact with the earth, lie at the center of a convivial “cadaveric ecosystem.

I sat cross-legged at the doe’s head and lifted it—heavy—onto my calf, stroked her cheek, long lashes rimming her wide, dark, open eyes. Soft ears, the softest. “You have done well, little one.” I heard the words from my lips, unawares. “Roam now in peace and beauty.

In his book Our Wild Calling, Richard Louv describes this modern human condition as “a desperate hunger for connection with other life.… All of us are meant to live in a larger community, an extended family of other species.” Without this, a number of pathologies grow within us and “the family of humans loses comfort, companionship, and perhaps even the sense of higher power, however one defines it.” Animals, too, have evolved with humans among them—and this distanced relationship in which we currently live may be an incalculable, unknowable loss to them as well. Being in

Carmen [pet starling] brings joy and depth and insight to our family. I believe she has a good life, and I am glad she did not die with her nest mates. But not one single day passes that I do not wish I could see her fly free.

I have always thought of all creatures-all organisms, really-as relations. Whether wandering alone in deep wilderness or just leaning against a tree growing beside an urban sidewalk, I have had no difficulty feeling, as if in dreamtime, the roots of our relatedness-ecologically, yes, but also with an overlay of the sacred, the holy.

I waited so eagerly for Carmen to mimic back the concerto's motif. Now I see that she has been calling out something much bigger, much more vital; she has been singing back the song of life, all of life, all the time.

It was the official policy of the [raptor] rehab facility to euthanize any starlings that came through the door rather than lavish scarce resources on them and then release them into the wild to wreak their ecological havoc. Most often the starlings that came to us were babies, orphaned or cat-caught; the people who brought them had no idea about the ecological conflict and usually didn't even know what kind of bird they had. They were just filled with compassion for another creature that needed care.

I am armed with a tenacious conviction that somehow the presence of the people who live in a home reside in the atmosphere of the walls forever.

My grail chalice has been filled with an elixir that is perhaps headier than the wine of fact-it is filled with swirling, essential uncertainty and the difficult, mature task of dwelling in such a state.

I am not suggesting that a bird, say, with her fleet heart, experiences more in a short life of three years than we do in that same period but that her actual perceived life may be longer than three years. The measure is mysterious; the time of the bird's life expands beyond our typical calculation in ways that we cannot understand, at least not yet. is it possible that some people, too, experience this time/space portal, allowing more experience to billow within and around them?

While “virtue” might sound a bit prim and moralistic, I looked it up in the same old monastic lexicon and found virtue described as the power to realize good, to do so “joyfully and with perseverance in spite of obstacles.” Hope asks something of us. The singular virtue of acting in hope has nothing to do with the likelihood of a specific outcome; it has simply to do, in this moment, with participation in the renewal of the earth, however that will manifest.

Rebecca Solnit writes in Hope in the Dark, “It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine.” Hope is not a remedy or even a substitute for the despair and anxiety we face in the modern world, but a companion to these things. Mature hope involves a willingness to allow

caught up with a culture that keeps the earthen vessels of our human forms away from the clay in which we are rooted. This makes so much sense. It is no wonder we are such a mess.

Miyazaki notes that “humans have evolved into what they are today after the passage of 6 to 7 million years… less than 0.01% of our species’ history has been spent in modern surroundings. Humans have spent over 99.99% of their time living in the natural environment.” All of our psychophysiological functions are adapted to natural outdoor settings—ones that are not free of stress or danger, but with which our bodies are entangled in a symbiotic history; modern humans are responding to the evolutionarily sudden immersion in artificial and urbanized environments by operating in a constant “stress state,” says Miyazaki. The biological functioning of our bodies and minds has not