Earth Care Quotes

“Earth care, as it turns out, is really about self-care and other-care. What we design today impacts how we live tomorrow. For better or for worse, it impacts far into upcoming generations.”
― L.L. Barkat, Earth to Poetry: A 30-Days, 30-Poems Earth, Self, and Other Care Challenge

“I don’t want to talk to us about what we can’t do. I want to talk to us about what we can do. And what we can do, if we are going to do it with some level of aplomb and commitment, needs to stem from love...”
― L.L. Barkat, Earth to Poetry: A 30-Days, 30-Poems Earth, Self, and Other Care Challenge

“To say that people weren’t aware, from the first, of the effect the Industrial Revolution was having on nature—and on themselves—is to commit a falsehood.”
― Sara Barkat, Earth Song: A Nature Poems Experience

“Writer Lorraine Hansberry has said, 'There is always some- thing left to love.'

Similarly, there is always something left for which we can feel gratitude—something to love about our days, despite our occasional brushes with doubt or despair.”
― L.L. Barkat, Earth to Poetry: A 30-Days, 30-Poems Earth, Self, and Other Care Challenge

“Images of both distance and closeness, smallness and vastness, exist in 'North on the Illahee Ferry.' Every life is sustained by both.”
― L.L. Barkat, Earth to Poetry: A 30-Days, 30-Poems Earth, Self, and Other Care Challenge

“Why don’t people 'look up'? In other words, why do they almost blindly do things that are counter to their well-being or survival?”
― L.L. Barkat, Earth to Poetry: A 30-Days, 30-Poems Earth, Self, and Other Care Challenge

“What is retained within something, even when it is removed from its ordinary setting or becomes broken?”
― L.L. Barkat, Earth to Poetry: A 30-Days, 30-Poems Earth, Self, and Other Care Challenge

“When we begin a deeper journey into earth care, sometimes we are struck by the breadth of ruin, even ugliness, that it is our challenge to recover and redeem.

While it is very necessary to acknowledge the true problems that call on our creative solutions, a continual focus on the difficulties can damage our own souls over time. Putting into place a daily or weekly practice of 'looking for the lovely thing,' can help sustain us and keep us creative—for, it is in a spirit of gratitude, hope and creativity that we can maintain our energy and continue to craft better and better solutions together.”
― L.L. Barkat, Earth to Poetry: A 30-Days, 30-Poems Earth, Self, and Other Care Challenge

“Love certainly draws us on, making learning feel more like discovery and making work feel worth it, even when that work doesn’t exactly feel like play.”
― L.L. Barkat, Earth to Poetry: A 30-Days, 30-Poems Earth, Self, and Other Care Challenge

“But that’s not the whole story. The news is not and never has been, because it doesn’t talk about the small moments. Moments that matter to individuals, whatever they do or do not do in the grand scheme of things. And it is those individual moments that belong to people, that deserve to be faced and remembered as much as every big, world-changing disaster. And nature, because it exists in the details, is so easy to elide, even when trying to talk about it.”
― Sara Barkat, Earth Song: A Nature Poems Experience

“The only emotion I purposefully stayed away from is anger. Not because that isn’t also an important moment in human experience, because it is. But on this topic, that of the environment, there has been so much already dealt with on anger, on bitterness. Sometimes, in fact, that seems all it’s possible to find—both outside and in. But simple longing is so easily subsumed under more powerfully expressed emotions, and other things just as important as anger become overshadowed.”
― Sara Barkat, Earth Song: A Nature Poems Experience