MARY CALVO > MARY's Quotes

“In the first movement, our infancy as a species, we felt no separation from the natural world around us. Trees, rocks, and plants surrounded us with a living presence as intimate and pulsing as our own bodies. In that primal intimacy, which anthropologists call "participation mystique," we were as one with our world as a child in the mother's womb.

Then self-consciousness arose and gave us distance on our world. We needed that distance in order to make decisions and strategies, in order to measure, judge and to monitor our judgments. With the emergence of free-will, the fall out of the Garden of Eden, the second movement began -- the lonely and heroic journey of the ego. Nowadays, yearning to reclaim a sense of wholeness, some of us tend to disparage that movement of separation from nature, but it brought us great gains for which we can be grateful. The distanced and observing eye brought us tools of science, and a priceless view of the vast, orderly intricacy of our world. The recognition of our individuality brought us trial by jury and the Bill of Rights.

Now, harvesting these gains, we are ready to return. The third movement begins. Having gained distance and sophistication of perception, we can turn and recognize who we have been all along. Now it can dawn on us: we are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again -- and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way than before, in our infancy.”
― Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self

“If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear.”
― Joanna R. Macy

“The heart that
breaks open can
contain the
whole universe.”
― Joanna Macy

“To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe -- to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it -- is a wonder beyond words.”
― Joanna Macy

“What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“We found that trees could communicate, over the air and through their roots. Common sense hooted us down. We found that trees take care of each other. Collective science dismissed the idea. Outsiders discovered how seeds remember the seasons of their childhood and set buds accordingly. Outsiders discovered that trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. That trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warn kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks. “Here’s a little outsider information, and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“if the medicine we need is relationship, what if we surrendered to relationship with our trauma, with our inheritances, with our ancestors, with our bullshit, with our fears so that we could begin to make possible relationship with one another? what happens when we be with our inheritances, when we bow to them, when we thank them, when we bear witness to them, when we eulogize them, and then when we send them on their way?”
― Stephanie Kaza, A Wild Love for the World: Joanna Macy and the Work of Our Time

“Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

“When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That's the message he is sending.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“Waking up this morning, I smile. Twenty-four brand new hours are before me. I vow to live fully in each moment and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“Some of my students believe that if you spend more time outdoors receiving the energy of the natural world, you will have less need for the industrial energy grid. What do you think?”
― Stephanie Kaza, Mindfully Green: A Personal and Spiritual Guide to Whole Earth Thinking

“It seems like an indulgence to take the time to cultivate mindfulness when so much is being lost. But this is the tension - to find a considered way of acting not based on reaction. Building a different kind of sanity requires a stable base for careful action. It means being willing to know all the dimensions of the reality of destruction, being willing to breathe with the tension of emotional response, being willing to cultivate tolerance for unresolved conflict. This nonverbal form of ethical deliberation depends on the careful work of paying attention to the whole thing. Meditating, walking slowly, calming the mind by centering on the breath - these painstaking, deliberate practices increase the odds for acting intelligently in the midst of crisis.”
― Stephanie Kaza, Conversations with Trees: An Intimate Ecology

“May all of us have the courage to open ourselves to the time that we live in, to let it shape us as we, in turn, shape it. May we perceive what is being asked of us. May we awaken here, on this sharp edge of uncertainty.”
― Stephanie Kaza, A Wild Love for the World: Joanna Macy and the Work of Our Time

“The miracle is to walk on Earth.”
― Thích Nhất Hạnh, Thich Nhat Hanh: Essential Writings

“We are what we feel and perceive. If we are angry, we are the anger.”
― Thích Nhất Hạnh, Thich Nhat Hanh: Essential Writings

“Compassion is not an idea or something we can imagine. It is a mental formation that has an immediate result in action of body, speech, or mind. It is rooted in understanding. When we understand why we suffer we can be compassionate to ourselves. When we understand how others suffer then we can be compassionate to them.”
― Thích Nhất Hạnh, Thich Nhat Hanh: Essential Writings

“Perfect love casts out fear. Where there is love there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency. I do not demand that you make me happy; my happiness does not lie in you. If you were to leave me, I will not feel sorry for myself; I enjoy your company immensely, but I do not cling.”
― Anthony de Mello, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality

“As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. … That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life… Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.”
― Anthony de Mello

“These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness, and worship without awareness.”
― Anthony de Mello

“I say to myself, go on seeking, be glad for being sensitive, be glad you're able to go beyond the resistance inside you. It is our resistance to what we experience that makes creativity possible. So don't get rid of resistance like that by going around it or trying to eliminate it. Our own limitations put up strong resistance, but it's because of that that we are creators”
― Brother Roger of Taize

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
― Dom Helder Camara, Dom Helder Camara: Essential Writings

“Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world.”
― Helder Camara, Spiral of Violence

“When we are dreaming alone it is only a dream. When we are dreaming with others, it is the beginning of reality.”
― Dom Helder Camara

“If there is some corner of the world which has remained peaceful, but with a peace based on injustices the peace of a swamp with rotten matter fermenting in its depths - we may be sure that that peace is false. Violence attracts violence. Let us repeat fearlessly and ceaselessly: injustices bring revolt, either from the oppressed or from the young, determined to fight for a more just and more human world.”
― Helder Camara

“Without justice and love, peace will always be a great illusion.”
― Dom Helder Camara

“The capitalist empires, with their affirmations of sacrifice for the free world, of defence of private enterprise, of safeguarding order from subversion and chaos, are in fact defending their political prestige and the economic interests arising from it; they are indeed at the service of economic power and the international trusts. The socialist empires for their part are hard and intransigent, they do not allow pluralism, they impose dialectical materialism, demand blind obedience to the party, set up a regime of total and permanent insecurity and fear, just like the fascist dictatorships of the extreme right.”
― Helder Camara