Deborah Bird Rose > Quotes

“I learned about bir’yun through dancing all night. In contrast to Morphy, I did not work with people who were visual artists; rather, I encountered people who focused on performance, who connected bodies and earth through dance and song. In music, there are multiple different temporal patterns, and it is through those temporal patterns that one starts to experience shimmer. Ethnomusicologists describe these experiences as iridescence. The temporal patterns are a kind of foregrounding and backgrounding, flipping back and forth to the point where the music and the dance become iridescent (or shimmer) with ancestral power.”
― Deborah Bird Rose, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene

“You watch, listen, talk, sniff and wonder. You are there as a thinking, experiencing creature, and so you take notice. At the same time, you are in the presence of other thinking, experiencing creatures. You are noticed.”
“..and there are all the ordinary living things—the trees, birds, insects, marsupials and
mammals, fish, amphibians, reptiles, trees, shrubs, grasses. To some of these
you are related. So, you are in the presence of your relations, and thus you are enmeshed in reciprocities, obligations, benefits and shared objectives. You are not alone.”
― Deborah Bird Rose, Dreaming Ecology: Nomadics and Indigenous Ecological Knowledge, Victoria River, Northern Australia

“We are called to live within faith that there are patterns beyond our known patterns and that, in the midst of all that we do not know, we also gain knowledge. We are called to acknowledge that in the midst of all we cannot choose, we also make choices. And we are called into recognition: of the shimmer of life’s pulses and the great patterns within which the power of life expresses itself. We are therefore called into gratitude for the fact that in the midst of terrible destruction, life finds ways to flourish, and that the shimmer of life does indeed include us.”
― Deborah Bird Rose, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene