“Viewed as a resource that sustains our humanity, the earth is a collection of places.”

A place is a piece of the whole environment that has been claimed by feelings.

It is the sounds and smells and sights of places which haunt us and against which we often measure our present.

The catalyst that converts any physical location – any environment if you will – into a place, is the process of experiencing deeply.

Viewed simply as a life-support system, the earth is an environment.

We are homesick for places, we are reminded of places.

How we navigate between false agreement and polarization is the kind of mastery that collective wisdom represents.

Collective wisdom is about our capacity to recognize interdependence and to make decisions demonstrating that we have a stake in each other, that we can indeed care for each other and the physical planet we share.

In my own life, I think legends of supernatural, mythic things are really just a manifestation of the collective unconscious. So I don’t really get freaked out.

We don’t work like the best basketball player and the best musician and so on. Science is a collective effort.

I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say ‘I’; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.

I define “politics” as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create – not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.

In a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women’s movement, for instance, becoming “support-groups” or therapy groups.