Quotes about Connection

What I am has been to a considerable extent determined by what my forebears were, by how they chose to treat this place while they lived in it;

Be still and listen to the voices that belong to the stream banks and the trees and the open fields. Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.

Grandpa had owned his land and worked on it and taken his pride from it for so long that we knew him, and he knew himself, in the same way that we knew the spring. His life couldn't be divided from the days he'd spent at work in his fields. Daddy had told us we didn't know what the country would look like without him at work in the middle of it; and that was as true of Grandpa as it was of Daddy. We wouldn't recognize the country when he was dead.

He turned to his own place then . . . and began to ask what might be the best use of it. How might a family live there without reducing it?

There is no government so worthy as your son who fishes with you in silence beside the forest pool. There is no national glory so comely as your daughter whose hands have learned a music and go their own way on the keys.

And in the fields and the town, walking, standing, or sitting under the trees, resting and talking together in the peace of a sabbath profound and bright, are people of such beauty that he weeps to see them. He sees that these are the membership of one another and of the place and of the song or light in which they live and move.

To have the two of them there, at opposite corners of the table, with their long endurance in their faces, and their present affection and pleasure, was a blessing of another kind.

When we convene again to understand the world, the first speaker will again point silently out the window at the hillside in its season… and we will nod silently, and silently stand and go. Sabbaths 2000 II

My mother is a fish.

It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.

Surely heaven must have something of the color and shape of whatever village or hill or cottage of which the believer says, This is my own.

All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born.