Lyanda Lynn Haupt > Quotes

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“Our bodies, minds, and spirits stand in ancient communion with the soil.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“....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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds: A Bird Book for Adults

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness

“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...”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“Our hands imbibe like roots, so I place them on what is beautiful in this world. —Francis of Assisi”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“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?”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness

“Wonder, as a quality of intellect, has fallen from favor.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“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…”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness

“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.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit