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?”
― Kathleen Dean Moore

“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.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“We must live according to the principle of a land ethic. The alternative is that we shall not live at all.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril

“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.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril

“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.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

“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.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Great Tide Rising: Towards Clarity and Moral Courage in a time of Planetary Change

“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.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“To love a person or a place is to take responsibility for its well-being.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore

“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.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

“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.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

“If we are not afraid, if we keep our balance, if we let our anxious selves dissolve into the beauties and mysteries of the night, we will find a way to peace and assurance. Signal fires burn all over the land.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“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”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“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.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Piano Tide

“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.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

“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”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

“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?”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

“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.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

“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.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“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.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, The Pine Island Paradox: Making Connections in a Disconnected World

“How can we live as if we were in the wilderness, with that same respect and care for what is beautiful and beyond us?”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, The Pine Island Paradox: Making Connections in a Disconnected World

“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.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

“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?”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

“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?”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

“Grief is healing, so grieve. But regret is poison. No looking back.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Piano Tide

“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.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

“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.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“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.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“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.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, The Pine Island Paradox: Making Connections in a Disconnected World

“To love a person or place is to take responsibility for its well-being.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore

“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.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature