Rhea Cone

“Western science and technology, while appropriate to the present scale of degradation, is a limited conceptual and methodological tool—it is the “head and hands” of restoration implementation. Native spirituality is the ‘heart’ that guides the head and hands . . . Cultural survival depends on healthy land and a healthy, responsible relationship between humans and the land. The traditional care-giving responsibilities which maintained healthy land need to be expanded to include restoration. Ecological restoration is inseparable from cultural and spiritual restoration, and is inseparable from the spiritual responsibilities of care-giving and world-renewal.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“That September pairing of purple and gold is lived reciprocity; its wisdom is that the beauty of one is illuminated by the radiance of the other. Science and art, matter and spirit, indigenous knowledge and Western science—can they be goldenrod and asters for each other? When I am in their presence, their beauty asks me for reciprocity, to be the complementary color, to make something beautiful in response.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“When you place your hand in moving water, you will feel the curves of power looping your bones, addressing your skin with logarithmic sways. Magnify that ten or twenty thousand times and you will be killed by the force. Then your body will know.... But pay attention in that moment and you will feel the intelligence of water upon you. It will tell stories of itself against your body in boils and surges and vacancies.”
― Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water

“Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice