Rooted Quotes

“Rooted ways embolden us to remember that with our complex minds we can feel—and live—more than one thing simultaneously. Anxiety, difficulty, fear, despair. Yes. Beauty, connectedness, possibility, love. Yes.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“Our bodies, minds, and spirits stand in ancient communion with the soil.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“The modern science of nature is significant for many other reasons, beyond the obvious setting of conservation priorities and actions. Foremost in my mind being the fact that it is beautiful. Its wondrous mathematical synchronicities, the specifics of its chemical analyses, the complexity of its physics are beyond both the practical and intuitive knowledge of most lay naturalists (or mystics), no matter how seasoned. When mingled with the wildness of the natural world and the creativity of the human mind, good science reveals its center, its story, its deeper teaching. The science has its own poetic force.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“While we have more scientific knowledge of the universe than any people ever had, it is not the type of knowledge that leads to an intimate presence within a meaningful universe.… The difficulty is that with the rise of the modern sciences we began to think of the universe as a collection of objects rather than as a communion of subjects.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“Our hands imbibe like roots, so I place them on what is beautiful in this world. —Francis of Assisi”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“My wish for all of us is forest baths guided by our inner knowing. Where we don’t have any idea what is behind each turn. Immersed, unsettled forest baths—ones where we emerge with ankles enlivened by the prick of nettles, lichens in our tresses, pebbles in our pockets, an uncertainty about whether the tendrilly growth on our arms is hair or fur. Our heart rate calm yet beautifully feral. Let us return so mingled with the stuff of the earth that the first person to stumble upon us after we are home from our wandering looks at us and says, with a mixture of admonition, admiration, worry, and an urge to suddenly run out the door themselves, “You need a bath.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“Hope is not a remedy or even a substitute for the despair and anxiety we face in the modern world, but a companion to these things. Mature hope involves a willingness to allow that brokenness and beauty sometimes intertwine.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“Darkness possesses its own essential grace. It is darkness that bears liminal imaginings more difficult to access in the scattered daylight. Darkness brings the restorative sleep and dreaming our bodies and psyches require. Darkness takes the harried busyness of the day and transforms it to stillness, to quiet. Darkness brings us starlight. Darkness erases our view of the horizon, forcing our reliance upon a spacious inner vision that daylight cannot provide. Darkness offers a complex refuge for all beings and all aspects of being.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“Even time breaks down within this calculus of interbeing. We stand in a spiral—rather than a strictly linear—continuity with our ancestors and the ancient cosmos. We still see the light of the stars that died long ago and that now form our living bodies; so, too, do our actions reach into the future of all life and death. It matters what we bring forth with the matter of our bodies. We create, as cosmos-formed creatures, within creation.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“When we allow ourselves greater freedom in space and place than has come to be the norm, we create our own pathways of meaning and knowledge upon the land where we dwell. Wandering freely, we garner landmarks, presences, ecological awareness, a sense of kithship. Our brains and our hearts alike gather this knowledge as we become intimate with the paths that speak to us most strongly. Our footsteps in the outer world create an inner, wilder cartography that whispers, This way, this way…”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“But I believed in the power of sacrament, in very much the way I do today—not as a Catholic but as a human open to the truth that something can be made sacred by the attention we grant it.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“Who wants an everyday path—paved and void of danger—when we can have beasts and shadows and secret flowers and unexpected visits from the feral wolf of our imaginations?”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“Somehow, in our language and in our psyches, we have come to equate good with light and evil with darkness. The symbolism runs deep. We see it in our poetry, our religion, our songs, and our cultural mythology.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“Dr. Ashley King, planetary scientist and stardust expert (an enviable job description), states: “It is totally 100 percent true: nearly all the elements in the human body were made in a star and many have come through several supernovas.” Oxygen + carbon + hydrogen + nitrogen + calcium + phosphorous + potassium + sulfur + sodium + chlorine + magnesium = star-human. The stuff of the cosmos is woven into our bone branches and wanders in our blood rivers.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“In newer studies, Kabat-Zinn and other clinical psychologists are turning the question around: what if, instead of working to focus on the present moment, it is just as mindful to follow the mind where it wants to go, to let it wander? Kabat-Zinn adopted Krishnamurti’s phrase choiceless awareness to describe this more meandering meditation. The practitioner is encouraged to follow her distractions during meditation and so, ironically, not become distracted by them. Instead of intense focus, aimless wandering of both mind and body allow a renewed sense of calm responsiveness to our lives and world.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“Who among us has not heard it? The wolf of this beloved, damaged earth, beckoning us by name just outside our safe living room, demanding our own response? The strange and persistent furry-pawed knocking? We peek tentatively through the door, just ajar, and see that there is no road, no sidewalk, barely a trail—and that obscured by stones, by leaves, by an intimation of the remains of those who have walked before us upon the unyielding circle of life. In spite of it all, we long to walk this path. For we know that there is more than what has been given and named by the overculture, more than what we have been told is true, more than green gardens and nature calendars, and recycling, and a summer hike in the mountains, and an occasional camping trip. More, even, than an hourlong “forest bath,” however lovely that sounds. We know there is a wilder earth, and upon it—within it—a wilder, more authentic human self. We know the need of each for the other is absolute.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”)”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“Thanks to a confluence of demographics and technology, we’ve pivoted further away from nature than any generation before us. At the same time, we’re increasingly burdened by chronic ailments made worse by time spent indoors, from myopia and vitamin D deficiency to obesity, depression, loneliness and anxiety.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“We have come to an earthen moment wherein we must make all the connections we are able with the whole of life, no matter how at-risk that puts our public-facing façade of normality. Look at the vapid homogeneity of the wealth-based, earth-denuding, dominant culture: is this the approval we seek? When we turn to the sweet, ragged edges of society, we see the people carrying violins, mandolins, pens, microscopes, walking sticks. The ones with ink on their hands, paint on their faces, mosses in their hair, shirts on sideways because they have been awake all night in the thrall of a new idea. This is where the art of earth-saving lies. We are creating a new story –one of vitality, conviviality, feralness (escape!), wildness, nonduality, interconnectedness, generosity, sensuality, creativity, knowledge of the earth and all that dwells therein.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“Directionlessness leads to clear vision and creative flourishing. Decoupled from overt value in the usual measures, wandering is an unorthodox act, removing us from the anthropic realm of striving, judgment, and economic utility.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“When we allow ourselves greater freedom in space and place than has come to be the norm, we create our own pathways of meaning and knowledge upon the land where we dwell.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“Wonder and enchantment require us to disengage from culturally constructed norms of rationality for adult humans and allow ourselves to be affected by the astonishing world that enfolds us always.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“Where kin are relations of kind, kith is relationship based on knowledge of place—the close landscape, “one’s square mile,” as Griffiths writes, where each tree and neighbor and robin and fox and stone is known, not by map or guide but by heart. Kith is intimacy with a place, its landmarks, its fragrance, the habits of its wildlings.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“Walt Whitman asked that which we all primally ask: The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life? We hold the ten thousand things of the troubled earth in mind and in spirit while offering the few beautiful things that we, and we alone, are able to offer with our ten little fingers. Whitman answered his own question: That you are here—that life exists and identity, / That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. This is all we have—our life and what we give. In our ragged wandering with padded feet and pricked ears and rewilded minds we find gifts from the wild earth, and we come to share our own gifts in return.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“As long as we frame a worldview with language that refers to the wild as a commodity, it will be treated as one. It is likewise damaging to invoke technology-based metaphors to explain nature: the brain a computer, the earth a spaceship, the rooted and fungal soil beneath our feet a kind of internet. Such mechanistic phrasing unwittingly invites us to see the natural world as other-than-alive and reparable by human skill in ways that it simply is not. If we are seeking a relationship within the earthen community that is meaningful, genuine, and impactful, then the words we use to describe that relationship, and the beings in its purview, must be chosen with intention, with specificity, with intelligence, and with love.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“The rooted pathways offered here are not meant as a definitive list but as waymarkers and fortification for all of us seeking our unique, bewildering, awkward way through the essential question of how to live on our broken, imperiled, beloved earth. It is the question Thoreau asked. The one that Mary Oliver, who passed just before I wrote these words, has perhaps framed most beautifully: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“When the fraught name God comes up in conversation or reading, I always remind myself that whatever the source or language used, we are at root on common ground—invoking the graced, unnamable source of life, the sacredness that cradles and infuses all of creation, on earth and beyond.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“My soul rested in a state of such delightful security and powerful bliss that there was no fear, no sorrow, or physical pain that could be suffered that would have bothered me. And then again I was suffering. And then I was in bliss. Back and forth—first one, then the other. She concludes that in the sacred whole we are equally supported “in well and woe… both are one love.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“Moments of enchantment and wonder are typically portrayed as experiences that fall upon us, when in truth they most often require a cultivation of openness to their visitations.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit

“To be alive is to give praise.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit