Daniel Griffith > Daniel's Quotes

“We live in what we perceive to be a broken land—fires ravage our western boundaries, acid rains water our failing crops, and our climate is trying to kick us out—but it is our relationship that is broken and relationships are easy to fix. They require humility, acknowledgement, openness, and shared language. Really, if they require anything of us at all, they require us to stop talking and to start listening—listening for the hope that they have stored deep within their ageless marrow, deep below the punishing reach of the plow and the spade, deep below the place where technology’s roots can reach, but shallow enough for photosynthetic processes to penetrate. Yes, grass can do that.”
― Daniel Firth Griffith, Wild Like Flowers

“Community...is the unseen energy that animates, propels, and connects; it is a story that grows; and it is our story.”
― Daniel Firth Griffith, Boone: An Unfinished Portrait

“To be means to be useful; to have means to profit at the expense of use. Profit and use, control and relationship.”
― Daniel Firth Griffith, Wild Like Flowers

“To uncultivate means to be both the clay and the pot, an element with promise and a tool entirely empty, without context—without water, without the potter, without life itself.”
― Daniel Firth Griffith, Wild Like Flowers

“To pay attention is to see the remarkable. In many ways far too real, it is to see ourselves in the ordinary, the daily, the mundane miracles of Creation.”
― Daniel Firth Griffith, Wild Like Flowers

“Wildness is a medium for mindfulness, a consciousness in which cultivation transforms into community and harvest into communion through the shared language of being—of life itself.”
― Daniel Firth Griffith, Wild Like Flowers

“To move conservation forward—to move toward ethics and regeneration and holism—we must first learn to see so that we can learn how to speak so that we can learn how to know better.”
― Daniel Firth Griffith, Wild Like Flowers

“Conservation is in a bad way because it has failed to see the whole of communities and the many concentric circles of wholes they contain; it has failed to see that management is a partnership based in community and not a dictatorship based in control; and, if I can go this far, it has failed because it never learned how to stop, to see, and to speak the language of the wind—it has never learned to be wild like flowers.”
― Daniel Firth Griffith, Wild Like Flowers

“Without the herbivore, grass is without value. Without the valuable cover of grass, the soil is without life. Without life, the terrestrial world becomes valueless and simply unhappy. The uniform diversity of the meadowland demonstrates that value co-creates the valuable via the tool of time. Time and value. Seeing and being. Grass is nothing at all. The community of grass is all.”
― Daniel Firth Griffith, Dark Cloud Country: The 4 Relationships of Regeneration