The Understory Quotes

“I am temporal, and I am eternal, and neither makes complete sense, but I believe it nonetheless. Adsum. I am here.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“I wonder why we find it so uncomfortable to maintain relationships with those who have sauntered to goodness elsewhere and found it.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“I want to make the loss of relationships and the crumbling of institutions all their fault and not mine. Their isolationism, their idolatry, their idealism about what constitutes faithfulness. But the truth is it takes two to drift apart through time or willfulness. One leaves or the other lets them or both leave. It's never all down to one of us.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“I have known real grief from real deaths, but the grief surrounding the death of friendships or relationships or institutions is another kind of grief. It's a grief with no home.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“Help me hold what is beautiful in the world, and even though it contains unexpected ashes and terrible tears, remind me it also holds the source of life.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“This is sometimes how I think of pain in our lives. Even if our bodies and lives are a landscape of hurt and healed wounds, because we are humans and we live in a story as unique to us as our fingerprints or DNA, every cut is new and foreign, never before seen or experienced.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“To belong to God means to stand where we are and say, "This is who I am and all of who I am." But to belong to God also means to say, "This is who I am not and who I relinquish the need to be.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“Even now I'm trying to attempt an honest assessment of these broken relationships, and it feels nearly impossible to hold all that hurt in a hand and now that, in some ways, they are holding their own handful of hurt from me and that we're prevented from seeing one another wholly.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“I want to write good words- truthful and slant words- and sometimes they will hurt people I love. And I hate that.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“Despite all our hope in a world to come and belief in a new earth, the earth we live within now is foreshadowing the way we will all go.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“It takes a lot of work to believe that th beliefs and convictions of someone else are just as viable as our own. And not just viable but valuable.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“It is not always, as we might suspect, the hardwoods that necessarily live longer but sometimes the softer woods.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“I am here and I am loved by I Am.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor