Quotes About Healing

Here on the waste beds there are expanses without a living thing, but there are also teachers of healing and their names are Birch and Alder, Aster and Plantain, Cattail, Moss, and Switchgrass ... Nitrogen-fixing legumes in abundance, and clovers of all kinds, have also come to do their work ... Plants are the first restoration ecologists. They are using their gifts for healing the land, showing us the way.

There ain't hardly no hurt the woods don't have medicine for.

Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land. Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as reestablishing proper hydrology or cleaning up contaminants. It is medicine for the earth.

how their friendship was medicine for each other.

But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.

This braid is woven from three strands: indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most. It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story—old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.

it is not the land that is broken, but our relationship to it. Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecological systems that sustain them. We restore the land, the land restores us.

I wonder how the fabric is changed when the release of daughters tears a hole. Does it heal over quickly, or does the empty space remain? And how do the daughter cells make new connections? How is the fabric rewoven?

my heart grieves for the one who could have told me stories of sweetgrass. All my life I have felt that loss. What was stolen at Carlisle has been a knot of sorrow I've carried like a stone buried in my heart.

a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship.

It is not the land that has been broken, but our relationship to it.

We'll make out for a while and you'll feel better.

Crying will release the sorrowful thoughts on the mind.

People tend to treat a miscarriage like a heavy period but it's a death. You lost your baby. You have to take time to grieve.

Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies—Nelson Mandela. "Enough,

but I'm still the child of an abusive alcoholic and we don't make great parent material.

found this man. I fell in love with his kindness, his patience. He saw me, all of me, and he didn't turn away. He let me in. He held back my hair while I puked my way through detox. He spoonfed me broth while I slowly fought my way back to living.

MY PAIN IS NAMED

We can walk his last steps. We can retrieve his bones to be laid to rest next to his mother's. But we'll still never know everything that happened to Tim. Sooner or later, his father and his friends will have to come to terms with that. That the quality of their future sleep won't be determined by a visit to his grave, but by their ability to let go.

If you hoard other people's tragedies, does that make your own easier to bear?

Hospital. "I

It serves no purpose to relive the worst moments of your life.

I've always known we were two puzzle pieces that fit together in a hollow that is our pain. There was a time when I was certain we were too damaged not to destroy each other. Now I think we are saving each other.

Great griefs are mute.