Wild Comfort Quotes

“The earth offers gift after gift—life and the living of it, light and the return of it, the growing things, the roaring things, fire and nightmares, falling water and the wisdom of friends, forgiveness. My god, the forgiveness, time, and the scouring tides. How does one accept gifts as great as these and hold them in the mind?

Failing to notice a gift dishonors it, and deflects the love of the giver. That's what's wrong with living a careless life, storing up sorrow, waking up regretful, walking unaware. But to turn the gift in your hand, to say, this is wonderful and beautiful, this is a great gift—this honors the gift and the giver of it. Maybe this is what [my friend] Hank has been trying to make me understand: Notice the gift. Be astonished at it. Be glad for it, care about it. Keep it in mind. This is the greatest gift a person can give in return.

'This is your work,' my friend told me, 'which is a work of substance and prayer and mad attentiveness, which is the real deal, which is why we are here.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“I don’t know any other way to move through darkness, but to put one foot ahead of the other and listen for the exact sound of our footsteps. If we have to drop to our knees sometimes and press the palms of our hands against the duff and damp of the earth, then that is what we will do.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“If we are not afraid, if we keep our balance, if we let our anxious selves dissolve into the beauties and mysteries of the night, we will find a way to peace and assurance. Signal fires burn all over the land.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“May the light that reflects on water be this wild prayer. May water lift us with its unexpected strength. May we find comfort in the "repeated refrains of nature," the softly sheltering snow, the changing seasons, the return of blackbirds to the marsh. May we find strength in light that pours in under snow and laughter that breaks through tears. May we go out into the light-filled snow, among meadows in bloom, with gratitude for life that is deep and alive. May Earth's fire burn in our hearts, and may we know ourselves part of this flame--one thing, never alone, never weary of life.

So may it be.
"Never Alone or Weary”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“May the light that reflects on water be this wild prayer. May water lift us with its unexpected strength. May we find comfort in the "repeated refrains of nature," the softly sheeting snow, the changing seasons, the return of blackbirds to the marsh. May we find strength in light that pours in under snow and laughter that breaks through tears. May we go out into the light-filled snow, among meadows in bloom, with a gratitude for life that is deep and alive. May Earth's fire burn in our hearts, and may we know ourselves part of this flame, one thing, never alone, never weary of life.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“Lord knows, I'd like to see the world the way ecologists do. If all of us thought of death as change rather than catastrophe, we could blunt the edge of sorrow. And isn't this a source of hope, that the force of nature turn death into life again and again, unceasing?”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“Is it a mistake to look to the world to tell us the meaning of our plummeting lives? Maybe we all have the power to shape our own structure, the structure of our metaphoric wings, what lifts us - our character maybe, or call it our spirit. We all in our own ways catch the light of the world and reflect it back, and this is what is bright and surprising about a person, this rainbow shimmer created from colorless structure. Maybe there is meaning in the world itself - no sorrow. In fact, no good or bad, beginning or end. Maybe what there is, is the individual way each of us has of transforming the world, ways to refract it, to create of it something that shimmers from our spread wings. This is our work, creating these wings and giving them color.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“Unfelt sadness is possible I think. We can build up calluses on our hearts, rough skin that blocks out our own sorrow and prevents us from feeling the suffering of others. Maybe unfelt sorrow is why many of us are so restless and tormented; sorrow swarms in the spine, and the bewildered mind casts about for a dismay it does not understand. But once we close our hearts to suffering, are they closed also to the perception of joy? Is emotion a door that, once closed, is closed to everything that would come in?”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“and deflects the love of the giver.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“I think I will teach about mystery today, this bright ocean that surrounds the small island of our understanding, the rain that rises from that sea. I don't know why we live or die, whether that's necessary or contingent. But I will tell my students this: life and death are all nothing. When you die, it's done, the chance is gone. So when you live? When you live, make it all. Don't wait for the rain to stop. Climb out of your tent with your mind engaged and your senses ablaze and let rain pour into you. Remember: you are not who you think you are. You are what you do. Be the kindness of soft rain. Be the beauty of light behind a tall fir. Be gratitude. Be gladness.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“Here is what I believe: that the natural world- the stuff of our lives, the world we plod through, hardly hearing, the world we burn and poke and stuff and conquer and irradiate- that THIS WORLD (not another world on another plane) is irreplaceable, astonishing, contingent, eternal and changing, beautiful and fearsome, beyond human understanding, worthy of reverence and awe, worthy of celebration and protection.

If the good English word for this combination of qualities is "sacred," then so be it. Even if we don't believe in God, we walk out the door on a sacred morning and lift our eyes to the sacred rain and are called to remember our sacred obligations of care and celebration.

And what's more, if the natural world is sacred, and "sacred" describes the natural world; if there are not two worlds but one, and it is magnificent and mysterious enough to shake us to the core; if this is so, then we-you and I and the man on the beach- are called to live our lives gladly. We are called to live lives of gratitude, joy, and caring, profoundly moved by the bare fact that we live in the time of the singing of birds.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“To see to the depth of a river, wade into still water. In the silent space under the slick of the world, the river clears. If you stand still too, so as not to wrinkle the water, you will see the shadows of minnows. You will smell sage and melting snow and you will notice, incised into the topography of the silt, little river channels pointing to the sea. And isn't this what you had hoped to find? A quiet place where everything comes clear and the Earth itself shows the way to the one thing.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“Maybe the forest is a prayer tonight, bent under the weight of all that winter, the whole world on its knees. Or maybe the prayer is the hush. Could I pray this way, letting the night settle onto my thoughts like snow on my shoulders, that gently? Hush. My snowshoes shuffle through the drifts. Hush: one snowshoe, then another. There is no other sound.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“But what if I could see the familiar world as if I had never seen it before, even if I see it every day--with that wonderment and surprise? Or see it as if I would never see it again? Then imagine the glory. I'm thinking it's a paltry sense of wonder that requires something new every day. I confess: Wonder is easy when you travel to desert islands in search of experiences you have never imagined, in search of something you have never seen before, in search of wonder, the shock of surprise. It's easy, and maybe it's cheap. It's not what the world asks of us.

To be worthy of the astonishing world, a sense of wonder will be a way of life, in every place and time, no matter how familiar: to listen in the dark of every night, to praise the mystery of every returning day, to be astonished again and again, to be grateful with an intensity that cannot be distinguished from joy.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“When the chorus kicked in at the last movement, the "Ode to Joy," and the trumpets started to sing, Marlan leaning in, and the music marching up and down again, and the sopranos impossibly high and clear and triumphant, all I could think was what a glory. If humans can do this, can do this TOGETHER, then they can do anything. You know that point in the "Ode to Joy" when you think there will be a rest and there ISN'T? It's about going on and not stopping. Thrilled by the music, thrilled by the hope, the conviction that if we can go on, can just hold on long enough to get past this point in his-tory, just keep singing joy, just hold things together through this time, then maybe there is hope for the human race. If we can't, then the world can go on without us, but that would be a shame, because it would have to go on without the "Ode to Joy.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“I went with Frank to a program on Lou Gehrig's disease. Allen was there, in a wheelchair. The woman said that of all the things that Lou Gehrig's disease brings, the most striking is the outpouring of love. At that, Allen started to sob. The woman explained that too, telling us that people who lose control of their muscles will cry often, to think of all the muscle effort to keep your crying inside, every muscle tensed to hold in your sorrow. I had never thought of that. People pulled their chairs closer to Allen, and his friend stroked his back, and there wasn't anybody muscular enough to hold in their sadness, and that was important.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“When the time comes, I want to be the woman ...who was a regular old plaid-jacketed Alaskan until she began losing her capacities. She lost the ability to balance. She lost access to her memories. One by one, the capacities that we think are essential dropped away, until she was stripped of all conscious thought and intention, leaving only the transparency of her inner mind. But what she had stored there, through all a lifetime, was radiant. Hank says that when they sat together, watching rain roll down the window, what ballooned from her was glass-clear gladness.

That's what she had left. That's what she had become.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“I was happy then, standing in the surge with lines of moonlight catching on my rubber boots. This is something that needs explaining, how light emerges from darkness, how comfort wells up from sorrow. The Earth holds every possibility inside it, and the mystery of transformation, one thing into another. This is the wildest comfort.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“Maybe this is why the Earth has the power over time to wash sorrow into a deeper pool, cold and shadowed. And maybe this is why, even though sorrow never disappears, it can make a deeper connection to the currents of life and so connect, somehow, to sources of wonder and solace. I don't know.
And I don't know what gladness is or where it comes from that feels like a splitting open of the self. It takes me by surprise.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“I don't know what despair is, if it's something or nothing, a kind of filling up or an emptying out. I don't know what sorrow does to the world, what it adds or takes away. What I think I do know now is that sorrow is part of the Earth's great cycles, flowing into the night like cool air sinking down a river course. To feel sorrow is to float on the pulse of the Earth, the surge from living to dying, from coming into being to ceasing to exist.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

“This is our work in the world: to pull on rubber boots and stand in this lively, dangerous water, bracing against the slapping waves, one foot on stone, another on sand. When one foot slips and the other sinks, to hop awkwardly to keep from filling our boots. To laugh, to point, and sometimes to let this surging, light-flecked mystery wash into us and knock us to our knees, while we sing songs of celebration through our own three short nights, our voices thin in the darkness.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature