Julie Wright

“But the black sheep are the artists, visionaries and healers of our culture, because they are the ones willing to call into question those places which feel stale, obsolete, or without integrity.”
― Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves home

“Every hunt and every harvest, every death and every birth is distinguished by beauty-making and ceremony for that which we cannot see, feeding back that which feeds us. I believe our alienation is the felt negligence of that reciprocity.”
― Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves home

“One of the big reasons that so many of us cling to false belonging is that braving into a more genuine life requires a terrifying initial descent.”
― Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves home

“The layers of crises and cruelty we face will not be solved with technological, political, or economic strategies alone. A deeper transformation of heart is necessary to welcome in a new story. Moving away from a worldview and a way of life that treats others as a “collection of objects” toward a new way of being human that participates honorably in a vast “communion of subjects” is what Thomas Berry calls “the Great Work.”4 The Great Work is spiritual at the core. Gus Speth, an environmental attorney, ecologist, and climate advocate, has summarized the problem brilliantly: “I used to think that top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. . . . But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”5”
― Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred