I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a "hypaethral book," such as Thoreau talked about - a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has ...
Community, then, is an indispensable term in any discussion of the connection between people and land. A healthy community is a form that includes all the local things that are connected by the larger, ultimately mysterious form of the Creation. In s...
In the loss of skill, we lose stewardship; in losing stewardship we lose fellowship; we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of Creation. It is possible - as our experience in this good land shows - to exile ourselves from Creation, and to all...
If we are to have a culture as resilient and competent in the face of necessity as it needs to be, then it must somehow involve within itself a ceremonious generosity toward the wilderness of natural force and instinct. The farm must yield a place to...
[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escap...
We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another. From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly or we may refuse to collabor...
As the connections have been broken by the fragmentation and isolation of work, they can be restored by restoring the wholeness of work. There is work that is isolating, harsh, destructive, specialized or trivialized into meaninglessness. And there i...
If the arts are held up solely as a means of social insight, fantasy is denied the chance to be commonplace and reality the chance to be exotic.
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.
Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.
I think that the way of bringing realism into fantasy is to treat it as the commonplace.
Let us dig our furrow in the fields of the commonplace.
If we are looking for insurance against want and oppression, we will find it only in our neighbors' prosperity and goodwill and, beyond that, in the good health of our worldly places, our homelands. If we were sincerely looking for a place of safety,...
At a certain age, death becomes familiar to you-or a loss becomes familiar-the tragedies that are more commonplace in life.
I glory in the emotionally commonplace
Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.
It is a commonplace that the League of Nations is not yet-what its most enthusiastic protagonists intended it to be.
To the average mind popular music would mean compositions vulgarly conceived and commonplace in their treatment. That is absolutely false.
One rare and exceptional deed is worth far more than a thousand commonplace ones.
We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.
I want to look at life - at the commonplaces of existence - as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time.
