Approaches to growing food that align with nature changed human relationships.

My children threw me a life line: "Return to your roots - food - and rewrite your first book, Diet for a Small Planet." I learned that if I could just show up, in this case, if I could just get myself out of bed, get to the computer in my tiny office at MIT, and start writing, help would start arriving.

The good life is not about avoiding fear. Just the opposite.

Freedom is not the capacity to do whatever we please; freedom is the capacity to make intelligent choices.

I read a book in the late 1990s called The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, by Erich Fromm, and it had a profound impact on me. Fromm takes Descartes' statement, "I think, therefore I am" and changes it to "I effect, therefore I am."

Beauty is created by fellow human beings, and enhanced because they are in relationship with each other.

That's what happened when my own life crumbled. The people who came into my life bolstered me to take more risks, to be even more true to myself.