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In some Native languages the term for plants translates to "those who take care of us."

If there is meaning in the past and in the imagined future, it is captured in the moment. When you have all the time in the world, you can spend it, not on going somewhere, but on being where you are.

When times are easy and there’s plenty to go around, individual species can go it alone. But when conditions are harsh and life is tenuous, it takes a team sworn to reciprocity to keep life going forward. In a world of scarcity, interconnection and mutual aid become critical for survival.

Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop.

Our indigenous herbalists say to pay attention when plants come to you; they’re bringing you something you need to learn.

Doing science with awe and humility is a powerful act of reciprocity with the more-than-human world.

It is a terrible punishment to be banished from the web of reciprocity, with no one to share with you and no one for you to care for. I remember walking a street in Manhattan, where the warm light of a lavish home spilled out over the sidewalk on a man picking through the garbage for his dinner. Maybe we've all been banished to lonely corners by our obsession with private property. We've accepted banishment even from ourselves when we spend our beautiful, utterly singular lives on making more money, to buy more things that feed but never satisfy.

To plant trees is an act of faith.

Ignorance makes it too easy to jump to conclusions about what we don't understand.

For grief can also be comforted by creation, by rebuilding the homeland that was taken. The fragments, like ash splints, can be rewoven into a new whole.

All powers have two sides, the power to create and the power to destroy. We must recognize them both, but invest our gifts on the side of creation.

Plants are the first restoration ecologists. They are using their gifts for healing the land, showing us the way.