We have become blind to the alternatives to violence.

The only sustainable city - and this, to me, is the indispensable ideal and goal - is a city in balance with its countryside.

Annual plants are nature's emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.

You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours.

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

It's mighty hard right now to think of anything that's precious that isn't endangered. There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places. My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.

Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.