Marc Hamer > Quotes

“A feeling of belonging brings with it a desire to build something to mark one's connection, and then, having built - a garden, a house, a career, a tunnel system - one has to protect those things from intruders, violently if necessary. We try to create an illusion of permanence, but there is none.”
― Marc Hamer, How To Catch A Mole

“Once you experience this feeling of simply existing you lose the need to ask why you exist.”
― Marc Hamer, How to Catch a Mole: Wisdom from a Life Lived in Nature

“This life is beautiful, but there is no such beauty in eternity; its glory is only because it ends.”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: Life, Nature, and a Country Garden

“In my imagination, this life has been a path with many, many forks, each one a choice to be made. Each unchosen route fading from view as it became the past, its destination unknowable. No destination is really known until you arrive, and then it becomes merely a point along the way - a vague place rarely planned for, simply the start of another adventure. The only thing to do is be happy with the outcome, whatever it is. The path leads to the end, as all paths do. I've had some rocky paths and dead ends, and decisions that led to disaster, and others that led to love and passion and poetry, to excitement and adventure. All I can do is embrace them all and move on. People sometimes get frozen and unable to decide which path to take; others instantly regret their choices, because their dreamlike fantasies about the unchosen path were far brighter in their minds than the reality and effort of their chosen one. What could have been has never been, and never will be. This is the Tree of Life where each branch grows and bears fruit and, ultimately, ends in a bud. There are no rules, and nothing planned by humans is ever planned that way again. The way is vague and unknowable.”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: A Gardener's Story

“Moles are tiny, they are cute, and like the rest of nature they do not care what we feel. They are devastating, and they always win.”
― Marc Hamer, How to Catch a Mole: Wisdom from a Life Lived in Nature

“When a song is ended, it leaves nothing but a feeling in those who heard it until that feeling, slowly moving backwards in time, collapses under pressure from more recent feelings and is replaced. Events become memories, unreliable stories, fade away at the ends. Unconnected and distinct from the day's experience, they become one of the millions of strata that make us who we are. We are the sum of all our experiences. We are waves on the ocean, interacting with and affected by all the other waves that move and die and are washed up on the shore. We are each a breath, a song, a flower. We are time itself, and mine has been long and I've collected many disconnected layers.”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: A Gardener's Story

“We each have a space that fits us, all our darks and lights; and when we leave, the space lasts for a while, then slowly closes up, changing shape as it does, and we are mostly forgotten. I have forgotten most of my own life - why should somebody else remember it? I have found a purpose in life, and it is to bloom, wander around, have a bite to eat. Nothing of any value lasts for ever.”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: A Gardener's Story

“Love is simple: just pay attention, put the effort in, kill your ego.”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: Life, Nature, and a Country Garden

“Life is so full of mystery, answers are so few, I do not trust them. I prefer unanswered questions. At the end of the answers there is usually a person who enjoys the power of appearing to know.”
― Marc Hamer, How to Catch a Mole: Wisdom from a Life Lived in Nature

“A Sikh told me once that everyone was a flower in the Lord God's garden - all the individuals, the colours and races, tribes and religions; it was an idea that I fell in love with, and kept coming back to over the years, and eventually I chose to be a flower. I don't believe in any kind of God; if there is such a beast, he has horns and hooves and plays the pipes and doesn't live in the sky, for us to look up to and worship, but underground, and pushes all the wonderful things out of the soil for us to admire, pushes us out into the world, then takes us back again to join the earth. A creator that gives us passion and music and lust: that's my kind of deity, should I ever need one.”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: A Gardener's Story

“I bought a narrow blue one with white spots and square ends, took off my long-striped tie and rolled it up in my top jacket pocket, leaving a bit sticking out. After a few attempts at the speckled mirror, I manage to get the bow tie almost right, if a little lopsided. In the world of bow ties, it is important that it should be ever so slightly imperfect; this is to show that: a) you tied it yourself; and b) that you are slightly 'devil may care' and not at all prissy. Perfection is the sign of an amateur, perhaps someone who works with great skill but without connection to his animal nature, to passion and lust. Perfection is not for living things, certainly not for human beings; if you are not capable of loving flaws and faults, then you are not capable of love. I have lived most of my life in poverty, but I can tie a bow tie and to some this will be a mystery, but somebody who knows me would say, 'Of course he can tie a bow tie.' Such imperfections - wrinkles in the world - are where all of life's best stories are.”
― Marc Hamer, Spring Rain

“A feeling of belonging brings with it a desire to build something to mark one’s connection, and then, having built – a garden, a house, a career, a tunnel system – one has to protect those things from intruders, violently if necessary.”
― Marc Hamer, How to Catch a Mole: Wisdom from a Life Lived in Nature

“Compassion is born at the interaction between joy and sadness. Compassion for your own life, forgiveness for your own mistakes, is the foundation.”
― Marc Hamer, How to Catch a Mole: Wisdom from a Life Lived in Nature

“Not knowing is for me the best of all possible worlds; it contains a sweetness and a playful willingness to accept change and to enjoy the mutli-layered, million-petalled flower of life without having the compulsion to know what everything is.”
― Marc Hamer, How To Catch A Mole

“I cannot choose to stay the same; change is all there is - it just happens.”
― Marc Hamer, How To Catch A Mole

“Nature doesn't care about a single individual; it is easy to just make more, billions more. Each human, mole, and dragonfly, each dandelion and blade of grass, wears out and is replaced. If a population outstrips its food supply because of a high birth rate or a drought, for instance, many die until some kind of balance is achieved.”
― Marc Hamer, How To Catch A Mole

“here in the present
distracted by the future
when I plant spring bulbs.”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: A Gardener's Story

“There is something deeply magnificent in being just ordinary”
― Marc Hamer, How To Catch A Mole

“Every small step we take on this earth has consequences”
― Marc Hamer, How To Catch A Mole

“Ownership of things that appear permanent gives us a sense of permanence. We feel ourselves immortal because of our possessions and the mole coming in and damaging them, taking them away, challenges something buried deep within us.”
― Marc Hamer, How To Catch A Mole

“Words have a different existence to the things they name: they live in different places, have different lives.”
― Marc Hamer, How To Catch A Mole

“I USE A whetstone to hone the blades and knives I use in my work. It was engineered to be hard and perfectly flat when I bought it years ago, but now has a smooth complex curve that tells the story of how I use it. A tool responds to the way it is used. Slowly over time it just naturally changes its shape to fit in with the way I do things. I just like to look at it sometimes. To hold it in my hand. While the knife wears away the stone, the stone also wears away the knife and over time their curves become matched. People do that too: when Peggy and I met we were scratchy and brittle and fought a lot, but over the years we have worn off each other’s spines, smoothed out the roughness, and our curves now match.”
― Marc Hamer, How to Catch a Mole: Wisdom from a Life Lived in Nature

“For a few days, uncertain about what I should do next, I go for walks and watch television. The walking is good, but the television leaves me feeling hopeless and worthless. The vile psychopaths it wants me to enjoy cannot hold me in their spell. I can't bear to absorb those indelible images and pollute myself with hatred and violence. What doesn't depress me makes me feel like the cornered victim of a wealthy bore with their holiday movies, who sucks the vitality out of me. I pull the plug and take to my bed to read, cocooned again in poetry and wondering about a rebirth.”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: A Gardener's Story

“Healing is just adapting to change, acceptance.”
― Marc Hamer, How To Catch A Mole

“A broken cloud of small birds can't make up its mind which tree to land in. First they fly to one, then the other, then back again. Like me, they are vagrant, having no focus. And the world is new again, and I feel clean and happy that nearly every morning for the last sixty-odd years I have popped into the world for a while and at the end of the day popped out again, and eventually the day will come when my song will end and that is all fine. I don't need to do anything, I don't need to be Sisyphus rolling his stone. I can be happy, just watching and listening and tasting the air without thinking, without doing. My beard is white, through sun or years; my head as smooth as a river stone. My autumn has come and I'm ripening - how sweet that is! How sweet a flower I'll try to be.”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: A Gardener's Story

“I have come to like things that are left unfinished. It’s the question that shines the light, that seeks. The answer’s often just a dim reflection of the vastness of the question. There are no answers that satisfy.”
― Marc Hamer, How to Catch a Mole: Wisdom from a Life Lived in Nature

“Forgetting is freedom and forgiveness but more than anything it is a process of immersing myself in what is happening now.”
― Marc Hamer, How To Catch A Mole

“Swann’s Way Proust says, ‘Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
― Marc Hamer, Seed to Dust: Life, Nature, and a Country Garden

“When I look at the past I do it in the present, it becomes the present and I don't have any desire to cling to it. I make the three piles of stuff that we have all made at some time: a pile to keep, a pile to go, and a pile that I don't know what to do with.”
― Marc Hamer, Spring Rain

“The European mole is a protected species in Germany and Austria: gardeners there put up with them.”
― Marc Hamer, How to Catch a Mole: Wisdom from a Life Lived in Nature