Unsolaced Quotes

“In Greenland there is no ownership of land. What you own is your house, your dogs, your sleds and kayaks. Everyone is fed. It is a food-sharing society in which the whole population is kept in mind--the widows, elderly, infirm, and ill are always taken care of. Jens said, "We weren't born to buy and sell, but to be out on the ice with our families.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“The mind swims laps, memory is cantilevered over genetic turmoil, and the writing goes on as if from unseen instruction, silencing, cleaving, and destabilizing words and thoughts, while the “hum” in me, the human, pushes fragments into the semblance of story.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“Every blade of grass counts if we are to survive.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“He knew that sick land meant a sick society, that the loss of biodiversity meant the end of life”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“Since Solace was published thirty-six years ago, everything and nothing has changed. Ecosystems are crashing. Terrorism sprouts and vanishes with devastating effect. Coronavirus is on a rampage, reminding us that the roulette wheel still spins. As the pandemic spreads, animals wander through empty cities as if to say that we humans have been in the way all this time. Finally, the sharp lessons of impermanence I learned while writing Solace still hold true: that loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness, and despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“Everything is moving, but there’s so much we can’t see: how thought comes into being; how grasses and trees connect; how animals know weather, experience pleasure and love; how what’s under the soil, the deep microbial empire, can hold twenty billion tons of carbon in its hands.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“During a chance meeting, the naturalist E.O. Wilson advised me to give up thinking we are doomed. "It's our chance to practice altruism," he said. I looked doubtful, but he continued. "We have to wear suits of armor like World War II soldiers and just keep going. We have to get used to the changes in the landscape and step over the dead bodies. We have to discipline our behavior and not get stuck in tribal and religious restrictions. We have to work altruistically and cooperatively and make a new world.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“Our “always in a hurry” ways of living seemed doubly insignificant. Intimacy with weather, terrain, and pronghorn taught me to hold each foot-worn trail in my mind as it deepened. I liked to think that a “green light” glowed inside those animals, instructing them how to survive and eat well. We humans might do the same and, in the process, vernalize our minds.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“So often we miss the whole-fabric aspect of where we live, and our own consciousness embedded within it. We are not interrelated but “intrabranched”: one branch wound around another and fused into a single embrace. Our lacelike nervations have overlapping frequencies. It’s what the Greenlanders simply call sila: consciousness, weather, and the power of nature as one. If nothing else, we are what the physicist Richard Feynman called “scattering amplitudes,” wholes within unbounded totalities.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“It was all of a piece, all a form of aggression. Pimping the land and animals. Profit at the expense of all else. Exclusion and exclusivity. Willful ignorance and denial. As I drove, I tried to register how it felt “not to be.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“Water is how time plays its notes, announcing mortal wounds, unvoiced regrets, unexpected spurts of joy. It is time’s unbroken medium; it carries us. Water is alive; it remembers how it has been treated.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“Crush the rich, take food from the poor, keep them barefoot, hungry, uninformed, uneducated, and moneyless. That’s how a dictator rises to power.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“You see, poor land leads to poor people, conflict, disease. To heal the planet, you have to heal the whole.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“Cabin and cosmos, sun and home, and a garden full of radishes and Swiss chard. So much I hadn’t had for a long time, yet I missed Jens and the dogs and the feel of sea ice under me; I missed lions roaring and picking thorns from my feet in Africa. In both Africa and Greenland, I’d seen the two root causes of climate change: degraded and desertified earth caused by ineffectual rainfall, and the loss of albedo because of the disappearance of snow and ice.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“Where we are right now has nothing to do with human time. The word now is meaningless. What we call a year is a tiny framework in a huge sea of time. We are engulfed.” I lifted my arms. No words came, only images of the Japanese gardens I had once visited: Saihō-ji, Kinkaku-ji, Ryōan-ji. But this place was the font. The whole world was this, embedded in this, had issued from this. It was a place where, as Dōgen said, being and nonbeing are rolled together”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“Hunger became an ally. My metabolism changed and my understanding of this land changed with it. On the night the wind howled, our tents rattled like bones. We were camped by a string lake. Pans of ice made of bunched crystals floated by. Pale green on top, the clear sides looked like see-through rows of teeth. When the sun came, the bunched stalks disintegrated: deconstructed chandeliers. I heard music—not Dennis’s but candle-ice tinkling. The whole lake chimed. Lying on top of my sleeping bag by the water, I lost track of my body. I wasn’t floating—there was nothing mysterious going on—but something had let go inside me. The weight of my boots, my abraded heels, ankles, and toes ceased to hurt and no longer impeded my journey. I had entered a trance state. The equation was this: hunger + beauty = movement. I wanted only to keep going.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“Almost daily I return to the high country. Mountain is shoulder: I rub against it and step forward. The hinge squeals, an arm lifts, a rock wall slides, and for a moment the mountain’s inner sanctum is revealed.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“The mind splices fragments of sensation and language into story after story. The blood in my veins and every blade of grass is oxygen, sugar, photosynthesis, genetic expression, electrochemistry, and time. I watch clouds crush the last bit of pink sky. Breath slips even as I inhale, even as snow falls out of season and mud thaws, even as lightning ignites a late spring.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“Early on I saw how conventional society wanted me to be one thing only, reduced to a splinter in a reductive world, but I went the other way and kept unpeeling my mind. Sagebrush and string quartets, Buddhist practice and cowboying were all of a piece. Quantum decoherence interested me more than mapping out a firm life plan. The ground would always be spacious landscapes and animals. The sky would hold the soul-songs of Brahms and birds; the blue shawl of imagination would enfold everything else.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“Plowing turns the world upside down. Overgrazing and undergrazing create deserts. Chemical fertilizers make the farm field an addict.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“Solace doesn’t arrive on a silver platter,”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“In his journal, Emerson wrote: “Everything teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis….We dive & reappear in new places.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

“One hectare of land burned equals the emissions from more than six thousand cars, but they continue to burn more than a billion hectares in Africa per year.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is