84 Quotes by Gretel Ehrlich

Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild is an exquisite, far-sighted articulation of what freedom, wildness, goodness, and grace mean, using the lessons of the planet to teach us how to live.

Am I like the optimist who, while falling ten stories from a building, says at each story, I’m all right so far?

Everything is moving, but there’s so much we can’t see: how thought comes into being; how grasses and trees connect; how animals know weather, experience pleasure and love; how what’s under the soil, the deep microbial empire, can hold twenty billion tons of carbon in its hands.

Now what looks like smoke is only mare’s tails – clouds streaming – and as the season changes, my young dog and I wonder if raindrops might not be shattered lightning.

The mind swims laps, memory is cantilevered over genetic turmoil, and the writing goes on as if from unseen instruction, silencing, cleaving, and destabilizing words and thoughts, while the “hum” in me, the human, pushes fragments into the semblance of story.

So much has broken away already, there is nothing to drink but air, nothing left to walk on but water, yet the fasting heart grows full.

My parents, who are older, think they don’t have to be careful, so they eat the most contaminated fish in hopes that the less contaminated fish will be there for younger people.

All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call “aware” – an almost untranslatable word meaning something like “beauty tinged with sadness.

Everything in your world has vanished. You have no money, no job, and no hope of finding one. That’s how it is for thousands of people here. Please don’t forget that feeling.