Trebbe Johnson > Quotes

“When you spend any time at all paying attention to the proclivities of the natural world, you realize that nature has no problem including in its sorority the dead, dying, and ailing as fully as the lovely, healthy, and whole.”
― Trebbe Johnson, Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth's Broken Places

“Learning to live with wounded places is a mission threaded with find¬ing and making beauty. If I’m open to the likelihood of it, I can always find beauty under any circumstances, whether it’s in a kindly gesture from a stranger or the first shoot of greenery shoving up through the waste of a calamitous event. Beauty is the antidote to grief and despair, and it is the one sure thing I can bring to bear when I confront a place that has fallen on hard times.”
― Trebbe Johnson, Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth's Broken Places

“Acceptance does not mean surrender. It does not mean resignation. Acceptance means I am finally available to the entire spectrum of creative responses.”
― Trebbe Johnson, Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth's Broken Places

“You Cannot Escape Beauty And You Cannot Stop Being Attracted To It, Because Beauty Allures. Beauty Seduces. Beauty Wants You To Come Closer.”
― Trebbe Johnson, Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth's Broken Places

“To see a place as orphaned or wounded is also to reexamine the meaning of living and dying and to allow some curiosity and even a sense of marvel to emerge about the tactics things employ to persevere.”
― Trebbe Johnson, Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth's Broken Places

“Why do they do what they do with such regularity, such mindfulness, such devotion? They do it because it is their sacred work. They do it because not to do it would be to deny what they know is theirs to manage and care about. The right action does not depend upon having a right outcome. It depends on taking the action because that is the action that rises before you in the moment with all its grace and power and majesty -- and because it demands to be done. The action is all.”
― Trebbe Johnson, Fierce Consciousness: Surviving the Sorrows of Earth and Self