Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Omnia vivunt, omnia
inter se conexa
Everything is alive; everything is interconnected.
- Cicero
One could not pluck a flower without
troubling a star.
- Francis Thompson
When I reflect that one man, armed only with his own physical and moral
resources, was able to cause
this land of Canaan to spring from the wasteland, I am convinced that in spite of
everything, humanity is
admirable. But when I compute the unfailing greatness of spirit and the tenacity of
benevolence that it
must have taken to achieve this result, I am taken with an immense respect for that old
and unlearned
peasant who was able to complete a work worthy of God.
- Jean Goon, The Man Who
Planted Trees
A heartwarming story about the impact of one man, Elzeard Bonfire, who planted trees from
1900-1946,
in the area where the Alps thrust down into Province, France.
We are seeking another basic outlook: the world as an organization. This
would profoundly
change the categories of our thinking and influence our practical attitudes. We must
envision
the biosphere as a whole with mutually reinforcing or mutually destructive
interdependencies.
- Ludwig Von Bertalanffy
Where there is form, there is nature.
Where nature and
humans interact, there is a garden. Where there is a garden,
there is an implied co-creative partnership.
- Perelandra
Lack of awareness of the basic unity
of organism and
environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.
- Alan Watts
... there is nevertheless a certain
respect, a general duty to humanity,
not only to beasts that have life and sense, but even to trees and plants.
We owe justice to men, and graciousness and benignity to other
creatures ... there is a certain commerce and mutual obligation
betwixt them and us.
- Michel de Montaigne
I continue to handpick the beetles,
mosquitoes feast on me,
birds eat the mosquitoes, something else eats the birds,
and so on up and down the biotic pyramid.
- William Longgood
Life just seems so full of
connections. Most of the time
we don't even pay attention to the depth of life. We only
see flat surfaces.
- Colin Neenan
By means of microscopic observation
and astronomical projection the
lotus flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the
universe and an agent whereby we may perceive Truth.
- Yuko Mishima
Working in my garden or walking in
the countryside, I have never
come across anything in nature that is superfluous and does not
fulfill a function. There seems to be no redundancy or unemployment
in these natural worlds. Be it rock or plant, bird or tree, or even the
bacteria within the soil, everything occupies a vital place
in the dance of life.
- Michael Lindfield, The Dance of Change
At the deepest level of
ecological awareness you are talking about
spiritual awareness. Spiritual awareness is an understanding
of being imbedded in a larger whole, a cosmic whole,
of belonging to the universe.
- Fritjof Capra
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting, after the long season of tending and growth,
the harvest comes.
Marge Piercy, Seven of Pentacles
Who loves a garden
Finds within his soul
Life's whole;
He hears the anthem of the soil
While ingrates toil;
And sees beyond his little sphere
The waving fronds of heaven, clear.
- Lousie Seymour Jones, Who Loves a Garden
Ecology - Quotes for Gardeners
It is especially important in this discussion to recognize the unity of the total
process, from
that first unimaginable moment of cosmic emergence through all its subsequent forms of
expression until the present. This unbreakable bond of relatedness that makes of the
whole
a universe becomes increasingly apparent to scientific observation, although this bond
ultimately escapes scientific formulation or understanding. In virtue of this
relatedness,
everything is intimately present to everything else in the universe. Nothing is
completely
itself without everything else. This relatedness is both spatial and temporal.
However
distant in space or time, the bond of unity is functionally there. The universe is a
communion and a community. We ourselves are that communion
become conscious of itself.
- Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth,
1988, p. 91.
Every explicit duality is an implicit
unity.
- Alan Watts
My life is not my own business.
- Anthony Hopkins
A human being is a part of the whole,
called by us Universe, a part limited in time
and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something
separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This
delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection
for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free from this prison by
widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole
nature in its beauty.
- Albert Einstein
A mystic sees beyond the illusion of
separateness into the intricate
web of life in which all things are expressions of a single Whole.
You can call this web God, the Tao, the Great Spirit,
the Infinite Mystery, Mother or Father,
but it can be known only as love.
- Joan Borysenko
I am a part of all that I have met.
Yet, experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravl'd world whose
Margin fades forever and forever
When I move.
- Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
There are sacred moments in life when we
experience in rational and
very direct ways that separation, the boundary between ourselves
and other people and between ourselves and Nature, is illusion.
Oneness is reality. We can experience that stasis is illusory and
that reality is continual flux and change on very subtle and also
on gross levels of perception.
- Charlene Spretnak
You are only made of non-you
elements. That is, your body is composed
entirely of non-body elements - dirt, plants, decomposed bodies, stardust,
etc.. Thinking about the human body in this way one may come to
understand that independent existence is a mental construction,
unverified by physical interrogation.
- Source Unknown
The interconnectedness of all life
does not have to be an abstract concept. We can live it.
It doesn't matter whether we garden indoors or outdoors; we can honor our world.
It is all a prayer.
- Judith Handelsman Growing Myself, 1997
See deeply the beauty and
interconnectedness of all life;
then think, speak and act from what you see.
- Maggie Streincrohn Davis, Caring in Remembered Ways
Whatever affects one directly,
affects all indirectly. I can never
be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is
the interrelated structure of reality.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
We are members of a vast cosmic
orchestra, in which
each living instrument is essential to the complimentary
and harmonious playing of the whole.
- J. Allen Boone
Quotes for Gardeners
A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes Arranged by 130 Topics
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips, Cliches, Adages, Wisdom
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
All things are connected,
like the blood which unites one family.
All things are connected.
Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth.
Man did not weave the web of life,
he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web,
he does to himself.
- Chief Seattle, 1854
Chief Seattle's Letter to
All
I believe that the universe is one being, all its
parts are different expressions of the same energy,
and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic
whole. (This is
physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people
and races and
rocks and stars; none of them seems to me important it itself, but only the whole.
The whole is in
all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am
compelled to love
it, and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of
the deeper sort of
love; and that there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one's
affections
outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one's self, or on humanity, or on
human
imaginations and abstractions - the world of the spirits.
- Robinson Jeffers, 1934
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a
single premise: that the individual
is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts
prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics
prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a
place to compete for). ... The land ethic simply enlarges the
boundaries
of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals...
- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
The deeper we look into
nature, the more we recognize that it is
full of life, and the more profoundly we know that all life is a secret
and that we are united with all life that is in nature. Man can no
longer live his life for himself alone. We realize that all life is
valuable and that we are united to all this life. From this
knowledge comes our spiritual relationship with the universe.
- Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)
Each portion of matter may be
conceived of as a garden
full of plants, and as a pond full of fishes. But each branch
of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its
humors, is also such a garden or such a pond.
- Leibniz
From the first dawn of life, all
organic beings are found to resemble each other in
descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups. This
classification is evidently not arbitrary like the grouping of stars in
constellations."
- Charles Darwin
Spirituality - Quotes for Gardeners
Bamboo shadows sweep the stairs
but no dust is stirred;
moonlight reaches to the bottom of the pond
but no trace is left in the water.
- Zenrinkushu
Soil . . . scoop up a handful of the
magic stuff. Look at it closely.
What wonders it holds as it lies there in your palm. Tiny sharp
grains of sand, little faggots of wood and leaf fibre, infinitely small
round pieces of marble, fragments of shell, specks of black carbon,
a section of vertebrae from some minute creature. And mingling
with it all the dust of countless generations of plants and flowers,
trees, animals and – yes – our own, age-long forgotten forebears,
gardeners of long ago. Can this incredible composition be
the common soil?
- Stuart Maddox Masters, The Seasons Through
No man is an Island, entire of
itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of
the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a
promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any
man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore
never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
- John Donne, Meditation XVII
We modern folk are not so different
from this. We speak of being
in tune, of needing harmony and rhythm to feel complete and alive.
We create our own realities with our words and our songs, our
eyes and our hands. Each world is defined by our own outline,
the envelope of skin and nerves and light and air we inhabit.
Every time we push against something, we feel ourselves.
- Rosalind Fordham
Pets: perhaps they were my first
clumsy attempts to grope through the
enfolding veils of acculturation in order to know those other worlds, in
order to break down the barrier, but without the intelligence yet to
comprehend that I was doomed to destroy what I would possess. What
the child does not see is that no creature lives without context. And that
is what it finally dies for the lack of. Its nest, its air, its earth, its
river,
its sea. Which growing garlic or farming or any activity with a border
open to - I suppose - the universe, or whatever engages you in the
contemplation of an ever-expanding sense of context, can finally, if you
let it, begin to reveal the boundless extent of.
- Stanley Crawford, A Garlic Testament, p. 80
Only by restoring the broken
connections can we be healed.
Connection is health.
- Wendell Berry
I am the dust in the sunlight, I am the ball of the sun . . .
I am the mist of morning, the breath
of evening . . . .
I am the spark in the stone, the gleam of gold in the metal . . . .
The rose and the nightingale drunk with its fragrance.
I am the chain of being, the circle of the spheres,
The scale of creation, the rise and the fall.
I am what is and is not . . .
I am the soul in all.
- Rumi
If you are a poet, you will see
clearly that there is a cloud floating
in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without
rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper.
The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here,
the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the
cloud and the paper inter-are.
- Thich Nhat Hanh, Interbeing
"If both of us were the same, one of us would be unnecessary."
Things derive their being and nature
by mutual dependence
and are nothing in themselves.
- Nagarjuna
We are all connected to everyone and
everything in the universe.
Therefore, everything one does as an individual affects the whole.
All thoughts, words, images, prayers, blessings, and deeds
are listened to by all that is.
- Serge Kahili King
For me, a landscape does not exist in
its own right, since its
appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding
atmosphere brings it to life -- the light and the air which vary
continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere
which gives subjects their true value.
- Claude Monet
At the edges of one mind are other minds.
Everything gives birth to something;
One thing is indebted to everything.
I water the peach, peaches feed me in time.
- Mike Garofalo, Cuttings
An elementary particle is not an
independently existing,
unanalyzable entity. It is, in essence, a set of relationships
that reach outward to the other things.
- H.P Stapp
Some say that Buddha-nature is similar to the seed of a plant; when
it receives
the nourishing rain of the Dharma, it naturally sprouts - leaves, flowers and fruit
appear, and the fruit contains its own seeds. This is the view of ordinary,
unenlightened people. Those holding such a view should learn that the seed,
flowers, and fruit each and at the same time have the pure mind. Within the
fruit
there are seeds. Although the seeds are not visible, still the root, stem, and
the rest grow. Without outside assistance the branches multiply and a large tree
appears. This procedure is not inside or outside; it is true for any time of
the
past or present. Therefore, even though we have an unenlightened view, the
root,
stem , branches, and leaves all live, die, "totally possess," and become
and
are Buddha-nature simultaneously.
- Dogen, Nature
and Buddha Nature
Spirituality and Concerns of the Soul
Simplicity and the Simple Life
Pulling
Onions
Quips, Maxims and Observations by Michael P. Garofalo
Haiku Poetry - Links and References
Cliches for Gardeners and Farmers
The
History of Gardening Timeline
From
Ancient Times to the 20th Century
Short Poems and Haiku by Michael P. Garofalo
Quotes for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Cliches, Adages, Wisdom
A
Collection Growing to Over 2,000 Quotes, Arranged by 105 Topics
Many
of the Documents Include Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled
by Michael P. Garofalo
Distributed on the Internet by Michael P. Garofalo
I Welcome Your Comments, Ideas,
Contributions, and Suggestions
E-mail Mike Garofalo in Red Bluff, California
A Short Biography of Mike Garofalo
Interdependence - Quotes for Gardeners. Version 3.3.12.
The History of Gardening Timeline