“The trees act not as individuals but somehow as a collective. But what we see is the power of unity. All flourishing is mutual.”

“Ceremony is a vehicle for belonging - to a family, to a people, and to the land.”

“He told me that science was not about beauty, not about the embrace between plants and humans.”

“My natural inclination was to see relationships, to seek the threads that connect the world to join instead of divide.”

"But science is rigorous in separating the observer from the observed, and the observed from the observer. Why two flowers are beautiful together would violate the division necessary for objectivity.”

“Yes, I have learned the names of all the bushes, but I have yet to learn their songs. I was teaching the names and ignoring the songs.”

“When I stare too long at the world with science eyes, I see an afterimage of traditional knowledge. Might science and traditional knowledge be purple and yellow to one another? We see the world more fully when we use both.”

"The questions of goldenrod and asters was of course just emblematic of what I really wanted to know. it was an architecture of relationships, of connections that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together. And I wanted to know why we love the world, why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.”

“It’s not just the words that will be lost. The language is the heart of our culture, it holds our thoughts, our way of seeing the world.”