“Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.”

I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever.

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.

We’re all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I’m complicit in the things that I’m trying to oppose.

For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.

If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.

An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.

To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.

Whether we or our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

The only time I’ve been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.

If we can’t afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we’re in an insurmountable mess.

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The atmosphere, the earth, the water and the water cycle – those things are good gifts.

It means that your will and God’s will may not be the same. It means there’s a good possibility that you won’t get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.

We have to regard them as gifts because we couldn’t make them. We have to regard them as good gifts because we couldn’t live without them.

Industrial agriculture characteristically proceeds by single solutions to single problems: If you want the most money from your land this year, grow the crops for which the market price is highest.

There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.

Our heart often times wakes when we sleep, and God can speak to that, either by words, by proverbs, by signs and similitudes, as well as if one was awake.

That’s when the magic happens- when everyone else is asleep and you’re awake thinking about the world as it is, and the world as it could be. Make the most of those moments.

Dancing of the autumn leaves on the surface of a lake is a dream we see when we are awake!

Wise man is the rooster of the universe: He awakens the unawake!

The mystics, knowing that man is involved in a hidden history of the cosmos, endeavor to awake from the drowsiness and apathy and to regain the state of wakefulness for their enchanted souls.

Awake, awake, my Lyre!And tell thy silent master’s humble taleIn sounds that may prevail;Sounds that gentle thoughts inspire

To awaken spiritual unity, and to spread to others the love that is our inherent nature, is the true goal of human life.

When winter withers – my bones begin to thaw, my lungs crackle as they expand, and the blood in my veins start to flow and I awaken from hibernation – hungry for happiness and eager to let go.