## Metadata - Author: [[Lyanda Lynn Haupt]] - Full Title: Rooted - Category: #books ## Highlights - humans can be conversant with the earth and the sacred in strange, imaginative, wild ways. In any way we want. ([Location 106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=106)) - something can be made sacred by the attention we grant it. ([Location 122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=122)) - 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. ([Location 191](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=191)) - Journalist Florence Williams reports in her book The Nature Fix that North Americans spend over 93 percent of their waking hours indoors or in cars (and the other 7 percent is spent walking between buildings and cars). And while there is an extraordinary exuberance and diversity of wild plant and animal life dwelling in our midst, still the urban environment is inhospitable to the majority of species on our shared planet. Regular—or any—experience of deep wilderness is missing from most of our modern lives. Without such contact, our radiant mental and physical intelligences are being diminished. Williams writes: 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. ([Location 200](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=200)) - So many people have felt somewhere in their core a spiritual connection to nature but have not had the language to ponder it deeply in our evidence-heavy overculture; the new science gives them this language, and the essential courage, to trust the intuition they have always possessed. And for those who would deny that the earth is alive, life-sustaining, and at a perilous anthropogenic tipping point? Well, science is giving them no place to hide. ([Location 213](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=213)) - 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. ([Location 217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=217)) - Yet no matter how significant the research, I believe that spirit—the response of our hearts and imaginations to the whole of life, so often beyond traditional rationality—is required to fully animate the new science. The quantified results of scientific work, and the stringent lexiconic language in which they are reported, awaken and sing through the brightness of our ensouled stories, unfolding in concert with nature. The poetry of earthen life cannot reach its fullness on a computer screen, or even in the synapses of our magnificent intellect. Our hearts are formed of a wilder clay. ([Location 221](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=221)) - 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. I know that prayer is the lifting of our hearts, our thoughts, and even our bodies in conversation, or contemplation, or remembrance, or supplication, or gratitude within this whole, requiring no dogma, only openness. Hildegard counseled, “To be alive is to give praise.” ([Location 260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=260)) - In this time of planetary crisis, overwhelm is common. What to do? There is so much. Too much. No single human can work to save the orcas and protect the Amazon and organize anti-fracking protests and write poetry that inspires others to act and pray in a hermit’s dwelling for transformation and get dinner on the table. How easy it is to feel paralyzed by obligations. How easy it is to feel lost and insignificant and unable to know what is best, to feel adrift while yearning for purpose. ([Location 267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=267)) - We all come to know our own lessons as they spring from the study of our households, our woodlands, our watching, our footprints, the trails of kindred wild ones that cross our paths. Our intelligent feet, our making hands, our listening ears. ([Location 275](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=275)) - The word rooted’s own root is the Latin radix, the center from which all things germinate and arise. The radix is the radical—the intrinsic, organic, fervent heart of being and action. Rooted lives are radically intertwined with the vitality of the planet. In a time that evokes fear and paralysis, rooted ways of being-within-nature assure us that we are grounded in the natural world. Our bodies, our thoughts, our minds, our spirits are affected by the whole of the earthen community, and affect this whole in return. This is both a mystical sensibility and a scientific fact. It is an awareness that makes us tingle with its responsibility, its beauty, its poetry. It makes our lives our most foundational form of activism. It means everything we do matters, and matters wondrously. ([Location 277](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=277)) - Amphibious, we wander at the singular, radical intersection of science, nature, and spirit. ([Location 282](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=282)) - Here are the interwoven pathways of inward, wild stillness and outward, feral action. ([Location 284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=284)) - At this crossroads there is intelligence, and sacredness, and wildness, and grace. There is clear-sighted hope in a time of despair. 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. ([Location 285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=285)) - As Wade Davis wrote in The Wayfinders, “Science is only one way of knowing and its purpose is not to generate absolute truths but rather to inspire better and better ways of thinking about phenomena. ([Location 311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=311)) - Yet as we partake, so we are called to nourish in return. It is said that “if we walk in the woods, we must feed the mosquitoes.” A rooted life is one of reciprocity—the tending of a mutually enhancing presence within the natural world. ([Location 332](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=332)) - 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. ([Location 343](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=343)) - The joining of our own unique arts to those of the collective whole is the deepest—perhaps the only—hope for the continuation of a wild earth. ([Location 350](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=350)) - To live rooted on a changing earth is to create a new story. There are very few voices left that speak for wild nature first. It’s time to clasp hands (paws, fins, feathers, branches) and know where we stand. The ways of this story will not appear conventional within outworn cultural norms. Our new ways are disruptive. They will look weird. This is good. Let us not care, but enjoy that glimpse in another’s eyes that we will find sometimes—the one that says, “You’re not crazy. I feel it, too.” ([Location 352](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=352)) - (For as Ursula Le Guin wrote, “People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”) ([Location 375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=375)) - Adsum abandons hopelessness and blind hope and even rational hope—which, of course, are not the only kinds. I discovered this visionary definition in a Benedictine monastery library some years ago: Hope is “that virtue by which we take responsibility for the future,” and a quality that gives our actions “special urgency.” ([Location 411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=411)) - Hope is “that virtue by which we take responsibility for the future,” ([Location 417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=417)) - While “virtue” might sound a bit prim and moralistic, I looked it up in the same old monastic lexicon and found virtue described as the power to realize good, to do so “joyfully and with perseverance in spite of obstacles.” Hope asks something of us. The singular virtue of acting in hope has nothing to do with the likelihood of a specific outcome; it has simply to do, in this moment, with participation in the renewal of the earth, however that will manifest. ([Location 418](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=418)) - We enter as pilgrims, as wayfarers—knowing there is something we are seeking, something nameless, beautiful, waiting, wanting. Something that will change us so thoroughly that our cozy slippers will no longer fit, that our cat will, at first, hiss upon our return, our hair tinted green with lichen, sweet root tendrils among our toes. ([Location 450](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=450)) - The thirteenth-century Italian saint Francis of Assisi is the patron of ecology, beloved far beyond the Christian faith. Francis sings praise to the divine, in his words, “through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us.” Note that Francis does not speak of an earth that is a gift to humans from a creator-God, nor a garden of resources over which we have dominion, nor even a landscape that we are called to steward benevolently. It is the earth, a mother, our sister, who governs us. We find the sacred not simply upon the earth, but through the earth. Francis was known for calling all things sister and brother—not just the monks and sisters of the monasteries he cofounded with Clare of Assisi, but everything. The sun, the moon, famously. But also crickets, grasses, mice, trout, ravens. Wolves. ([Location 462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=462)) - New work in psychology reveals that simply the knowledge of a flourishing wild—beyond the reach of most human visitors—positively affects our psychology and creativity. Wilderness that we will never even see roots us in a sense of individual purpose, no matter where we live. It is this knowledge that we are called to cultivate daily. We live in a continuum. From the micro-ecosystems of our households we make the choices that will allow the endurance of deepest wilderness. ([Location 500](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=500)) - Shoes put little blindfolds on our soles. Shoes shed, I feel the earth change underneath my feet—the places where the soil turns suddenly extra cold, say, and I look up to find a closed cedar canopy; I realize I am standing on soil that is never touched by the sun, and looking down again I see what happens here—the hefty growth of sword ferns, the lack of nearly every other plant. ([Location 577](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=577)) - And if I am very quiet and still, and let my feet stand solid upon the earth, I can feel what I have come to call beneathness. For the soil is alive and writhing beyond my sight with roots, mycelia, decomposers, bacteria, protozoa, worms, grubs, beetles—beyond counting, beyond knowing. The living and the dead brushing together to create the quietest symphony of sound and activity. Holy ground. ([Location 580](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=580)) - Barefoot walking is a wonder and a homecoming. “For the same reasons folks seek to protect heritage seeds or their culture’s art forms,” Bowman told me, “walking barefoot is how we preserve the footsteps of our ancestors at the same time we preserve our own.” ([Location 672](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=672)) - Wandering can be a disquieting activity, given the cultural expectation to at least appear productive. But in her 1938 classic, If You Want to Write, Brenda Ueland declares aimless attention essential to good work and deep thought: So you see the imagination needs moodling—long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling, and puttering. These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas… but they have no big ideas. ([Location 807](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=807)) - Emily Dickinson was a spiritual seeker and a religious rebel (a “pagan” and an “infidel,” self-proclaimed); of her many names for God, my favorite is Vagabond. ([Location 814](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=814)) - The science behind forest bathing is beautiful, completely beautiful, affirming an elemental connection between our bodies and the body of the planet. Guided forest baths can inspire wonder and love. Yet we must remain alert to the ways we engage this science. The line between commodity and reciprocity may seem thin, but it is profoundly meaningful. ([Location 929](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=929)) - Darkness twins with light as the primordial ground of existence. So many myths (Gilgamesh, Orpheus, Persephone, Aeneas, Dante) deploy the Greek journey of katabasis—descent into a dark underworld that will edify a heroic seeker’s eventual life after they return to the aboveground world. ([Location 1273](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=1273)) - Ninety percent of life unfolds in complete and eternal darkness—beneath the soil that cradles every footstep, and beneath the sea, where whole worlds exist absent the penetration of any light at all. Without absolute darkness, the seed will not germinate, the decomposers and fungi that live underearth will not toil, the transformation of death into new life will cease its spinning. ([Location 1276](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=1276)) - Tags: [[pink]] - While light travels, there is no “speed of dark.” Darkness becalms us in a constant, receptive awareness. Darkness offers an intelligent stillness that fills and tills our psyche in a manner both difficult and beautiful ([Location 1345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=1345)) - Let us dwell in this darkness as we can. Instead of the luminous as a measure, we can turn with more nuance to the numinous. Seek the dark. Be awake in its ancient cradle. Cozy (or uneasy) in bed with windows wide open to the night sounds. Step into the night, the backyard, the urban sidewalk beneath the same moon that shines upon moose, bears, sleeping falcons, waking owls. Turn off lights, outdoors and indoors, during avian migration times—tell everyone. Walk beyond sunset, camp in darkness, sleep outside. We can bring respect to the dark each night, interrupting it as little as possible with light-sound-words-screen. We can listen to the artful messages of our dreams, allow them to affect our day-life. We can protect the night dwellers with knowledge and presence and wonder and love and conservation. Fine soil, clean water, all the way down. ([Location 1349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=1349)) - We are experiencing now an isolation named species loneliness by Michael Vincent McGinnis in a 1993 paper for Environmental Ethics. ([Location 1487](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=1487)) - Recovery from species loneliness will mean walking with a courageous new tolerance for complexity and discomfort, an allowing of difference, a delight in sameness, an openness to wonder, being alert instead of being afraid. This is a tangled empathy. Ecopsychologist Patricia H. Hasbach created an unusual list of engagement patterns shared by humans and many other animals, not just those with eyes and fur; Louv collected and added to these in Our Wild Calling. Alongside many animals, we: recognize others and know that we are being recognized in return; have a natural and mutual curiosity; play with our own species and often with others; share empathy; and use “intonement,” a humming or chanting of notes for a variety of purposes. In addition to all of this, we are able to “cross the threshold,” as Hasbach says, to enter the “psychological or spiritual space” that hangs between two animals. This grounds another path to empathy on Dr. Hasbach’s list, perhaps the most inscrutable to modern culture: “Becoming the animal.” ([Location 1497](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=1497)) - Much of the animal behavior we regularly observe is the stilted, watchful behavior that occurs in the presence of us large bipedal mammalian predators. Animals stop feeding when we turn up; they stop moving; the winged ones fly to a comfortable height or distance. Yet when we are still for a long time, the interruption caused by our human presence ebbs, and the animals among us return to their natural ways of being in the world. We are privileged to stand witness. The still spot is an enchanted parenthesis between worlds—the everyday world of distraction and the ground of an empathic, wilder life. ([Location 1516](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=1516)) - To witness can simply mean to be present—no testifying involved. Why not just witness—see a thing because we are there to see it, knowing that our presence is a privilege for ourselves and a quiet offering to that being witnessed. Why not allow astonishment to visit as it will, then walk into the world changed but perhaps silent—without thinking up words and ways to “tell about it,” or imposing a narrative upon our encounter at all? This is beholding. For spiritual traditions all over the world, such a stance—that of contemplative witness—is in itself prayer, art, and activism. Sometimes, letting go of the urge to name and tell—to embroider our own story upon a being or experience, however unwittingly—allows us to see deeper into the beheld while cultivating a unique and poetic wholeness within ourselves, like that possessed by an owl or a stone. ([Location 1731](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=1731)) - we must make all the connections we are able with the whole of life, no matter how at-risk that puts our public-facing facade 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. ([Location 1903](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=1903)) - Lynda Mapes studied a single oak over the course of a year in Harvard Forest, the university’s 3,000-acre research area. She watched, sketched, researched alongside scientists. She climbed high to the oak’s crown, she napped among the oak’s branches. Lynda wrote about the experience in her book Witness Tree, and told me she has no doubt that in time, the tree recognized her presence—that they belonged to each other. To return and return and return is to come into relatedness with a specific tree and the surrounding land. It is the great lesson. ([Location 1916](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=1916)) - Sane people still do hear trees speak; it is a matter of making ourselves available to listen and, when we are ready, to respond. These essential conversations invite respect, openheartedness, open-mindedness, a decrease in our tendency—even our ability—to commodify another’s existence. They broaden our sense of living within an inspirited, sacred world. This is the rooted foundation of all bold, outer activism on behalf of wild lands and life. ([Location 1943](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=1943)) - The ways and tenets of rootedness prepare us to share our unique passions—whatever they are—on behalf of a beloved, suffering world. Our work is to allow this passion to affect our existence, to let the inner ecology of our lives come to touch the outer ecology of the earth. This is the creative art of earth activism. The human task now is to bring it. ([Location 2026](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=2026)) - Progressive as popes go, Francis wrote in his encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home that our “green rhetoric” is framed by professionals, thought leaders, organizations, and media who reason from a place of comfort within “a high level of development and a quality of life well beyond the reach of the majority of the world’s population,” which can lead to “a numbing of conscience and to tendentious analyses which neglect parts of reality.” ([Location 2068](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=2068)) - Rebecca Solnit writes in her essay “Our Storied Future” that “as citizens engaged in the daily task of remaking the world, we get to choose our stories—the stories that divide and conquer or those that tie things together with possibility.” ([Location 2084](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=2084)) - of everyday mysticism; to bring generosity and simplicity to every encounter thwarts an economic-political paradigm based on rampant consumption. The heart and life of individual agency has everything to do with broader systemic and ecological change. ([Location 2107](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=2107)) - Nothing has prepared us for this planetary moment. There is no prewalked path to offer direction. Our individual charism cannot be prescribed, proscribed, or even thought up in our head. It can, however, be listened for—a rooted, ongoing, reciprocal conversation with the wild earth—a spiral of inward, receptive stillness, and outward, creative action. ([Location 2123](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=2123)) - It is most likely a combination of such things. It is certain to be countercultural and counterproductive according to all usual measures—those we have been taught, those that can be labeled with a sum or a number. ([Location 2129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=2129)) - Inexplicably, some genetic material contained within our cells does not even express itself until after what is medically termed to be bodily death. By the humanistic selfish-gene version of evolution, this doesn’t make sense, and scientists have come up with no reason that it would be so. I have read in scientific journals that such genetic expression has “no purpose,” though more likely it serves a purpose. It likely serves a purpose we do not yet understand. ([Location 2191](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=2191)) - “They say it takes a hundred years for an oak to grow,” Kate pondered aloud, “and a hundred years for an oak to die.” We walked in thoughtful silence, contemplating what this means for oaks, for us, for life. ([Location 2198](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=2198)) - Julian of Norwich, who, in the fourteenth century, was the first woman known to publish a book in the English language ([Location 2274](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=2274)) - All shall be well, in whatever tangled, unknowable, difficult, beautiful way that wellness unfolds. Our lives are irrevocably entwined with this unfurling. Though we can’t know exactly where we are going, or what will happen, still we journey together by choice and in grace, foot by foot, upon our troubled and beloved earth. ([Location 2290](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08KQ4CMNV&location=2290))