The Great Conversation Quotes

“We’re surrounded by a world that talks, but we don’t listen. We’re part of a community engaged in a vast conversation, but we deny our role in it. We haven’t the courage to acknowledge our deep need for what we can’t explain. The soul feeds on what takes us to the edge, but we don’t go there willingly. Our longing is an echo of the Earth’s.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“Underneath all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles, these watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me.” Hildegard of Bingen”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“The splendor of light was a central metaphor (in the mystic) Hildegard of Bingen’s thought, a divine luminescence filling the earth…She heard God say, “I, the highest and fiery power, have kindled every spark of light…I flame above the beauty of the meadows, I gleam in the waters, and I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars… for all life lights up out of me.” The same idea was also emerging in Jewish mystical thought (Kabbalistic)…the vessels containing God’s Shekinah glory were said to have shattered at creation, dispersing divine sparks that lie hidden within all things. The healing of the world (tikkun olam) requires the recovery of these shards of light.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“Wind varies in its emotional effect on humans depending on ions in the atmosphere. A hot, dry, dusty wind-generates positive ions that cause increased tension and irritability…on the other hand, waterfalls, pounding surf, and the aftermath of a thunderstorm release negative ions that clear airborne particles, relieve stress, and boost energy.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“Something similar (to bird migrations) draws human beings on pilgrimages as well… Pilgrimage is a spiritual as well as biological impulse, cutting across species. It’s even a cosmic mystery. The Earth itself follows a 584-million-mile path around the sun each year. We’re all defined by movement.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“The threat to natural wilderness forces us into the inner wilderness of the human psyche where wonder, grief, and longing are storming within us as well. Every experience in the natural world invites us to a corresponding work of the soul.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that human perception is deeply invested in a full-bodied exchange with the rest of the world. Sitting near his home on the seacoast near Bordeaux, he writes: “As I contemplate the blue of the sky…I abandon myself to it, and plunge into this mystery, it “thinks itself within me.” I am the sky itself as it is drawn together and unified…my consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue.” The lines blur between his act of perceiving and the stunning character of what he perceives. The sky “thinks itself” within him.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“A huge shift in consciousness is underway in our time. A sea change from the “I and it” marketplace conception of the world to an “I and thou” sense of communal identity. Joanna Macy describes it as a “Great Turning” an ecological revolution widening our awareness of the intricate web that connects us. Teilhard de Chardin called it an evolution of consciousness, an emergence of the “planetization” of humankind. We have to think now like a planet, not like separate individuals. We need a “psyche the size of the earth,” James Hillman says, “the greater part of the souls lies outside the body.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“I shoulder my pack and hit the trail, realizing I’m being called to a memory deeper than my own, to a language my body has known all along. The desert speaks- out of lifetimes of patience and pain-with a subtle but insistent voice. My role in the Great Conversation isn’t finally to understand, only to listen and love.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“The high desert landscape of New Mexico is a sparse terrain, bearing the trace of stories long forgotten. It’s a good place to study the parlance of wind and flowing water, to ponder ravens on the wing and the play of shadows among the rocks. The land here cuts through you like a knife, enticing you to relinquish one trusted language for another- or for none at all.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“Questioner: How are we to treat the others? Ramana Maharshi: There are no others.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“Poet W.S. Merwin once mused that in order to adequately describe the forests of eastern Pennsylvania where he grew up, he’d “have to speak in a forgotten language.” He was aware that a shift in consciousness is necessary for certain forms of communication and that it’s easy to lose ancient languages we’ve long ceased to practice. How, then, do we speak of the languages that we may need in renewing the Great Conversation?”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“The tallest mountains generally get the most attention. Fourteen of the world’s peaks are more than 26,247 feet high. The region about 25,000 feet is known as a mountain’s “death zone,” an altitude the human body can only endure for a few days…when Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest in 1953, he reverenced the mountain as Chomolungma, the “Mother Goddess of the World.” By contrast, after finished the ascent, Edmund Hillary wisecracked to a member of the team, “well, we’ve knocked the bastard off.” Some folks seem tone-deaf to mystery.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“Mountains cover 24 percent of the Earth’s surface, accommodating 12 percent of the world’s population in 120 different countries. They tend to be hotspots of cultural diversity. In the Hindu Kush of the Himalayas alone people speak more than a thousand different languages and dialects.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“Canyons carry the soul into unfinished grief-into the pain we’ve stifled, the secrets we’ve hid, the depression we’ve feared. Deep chasms know the grinding action of stone scraped away, grain by grain, over millions of years, they’re conversant with dark shadows. Their deep recesses receive direct sunlight only a few minutes each day, if ever. You don’t see their beauty, in fact, without the shadows. Canyons are the grand opera of the desert landscape- lavish productions bringing to the surface emotions you didn’t know you had.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is- it must be something you cannot possibly do.” Henry Moore”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“We have always sought a way to feel at home in a universe of far-flung stars. The immensity of the cosmos is overwhelming. Our planet glides through space on one of a dozen rotating arms revolving around the nucleus of the Milky Way Galaxy. Our sun takes 220 million years to make a complete revolution around the massive black hole at the galaxy’s core. It’s made only twenty-five such trips since the sun and the Earth were born. Multiply this by the two hundred billion other galaxies in the universe… and you have a truly inconceivable immensity. The light reaching us from the most distant stars (up to ten billion light years away) began its journey before the Earth even existed”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“Over the years, I’ve attached myself to teachers in my own commitment to wilderness backpacking as a spiritual practice. Submitting to these spiritual guides in a penetratingly physical way is a life-changing experience. In wilderness (wherever you find it), there’s always a risk, but the physical challenge is the least part of it. Out on the trail, I find myself longing for an unsettling beauty, for a power I cannot control, for a wonder beyond my grasp. I can’t begin to name the mystery that sings in the corners of an Ozark night. But I can be crazy in love with it, scribbling, in turn, whatever I’m able to mumble about the experience.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“The connecting web is a mystery embedded in the ordinary. My falling in love with a tree has been a profound experience of the sacred…I increasingly encounter God’s presence in the rough touch of bark and the sound of rustling leaves. In the ordinary.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul