Whatever life we have experienced, if we can tell our story to someone who listens, we find it easier to deal with our circumstances.

There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.

We've taken disturbances and fluctuations and averaged them together to give us comfortable statistics. Our training has been to look for big numbers, important trends, major variances. Yet it is the slight variations - soft-spoken, even whispered at first - that we need to encourage.

we can't be creative if we refuse to be confused. Change always starts with confusion; cherished interpretations must dissolve to make way for what's new. Great ideas and inventions miraculously appear in the space of not knowing.

Probably the most visible example of unintended consequences, is what happens every time humans try to change the natural ecology of a place.

Nothing has given me more hope recently than to observe how simple conversations give birth to actions that can change lives and restore our faith in the future. There is no more powerful way to initiate significant social change than to start a conversation. When a group of people discover that they share a common concern, that's when the process of change begins.

Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone