Quote of the Day from Calvin Luther Martin

“The messenger led the brother and sister by lantern along a woodland path till they came upon a huge, ancient oak in whose trunk was cut a cunningly wrought door. Through the door and up a long, spiraling staircase to the chamber excavated out of the core of this immense living creature. Here, haloed by firelight, stood a sage, a keeper of long-forgotten earthly knowledge. The old man spoke of a world bristling and crackling with power, the power of origination and deepest formation, which cared for everything –took care of everything- even human beings. The earth, he said, was not a place to fear. The problem was that adults had lost their nerve, lost their faith in the marrow of it all. Children, he believed, still hold the mighty secret of trust. It was the lesson of the child to the adult: absolute trust. Once trust began percolating back into the soul again, humans would behold the liberating of those colossal earthly powers that now lie silent under the spell of our bad faith. The earth would be alive again and human beings would stop living lives of waiting, stop living under the curse of time and history, to live instead in the still point of beauty….Children, and whatever bits of childhood survived the battering of growing up, might help us finding a lost trust in this planet. Human beings could unshackle the awesome powers of place if we could only find our body and spirit in the otherness of this planet, as our ice-age ancestors and their hunter-gatherer heirs did for tens of thousands of years.”

- Calvin Luther Martin, “The Way of the Human Being”

Quote of the Day

One of our three Learning Domains at Manzanita is Aesthetic/Numinous (together with Biological/Evolutionary and Historical/Cultural). The word ‘numinous’ refers to that which evokes wonder and mystery in us, that awakens deep curiosity and sense of awe. According to one of the great minds of our times:

“The most beautiful thing that we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.“

- Albert Einstein

Quote of the Day from Aldo Leopold

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949

Quote of the Day from Walt Whitman

“When I heard the learned astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; Till rising and gliding out, I wandered off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Looked up in perfect silence at the stars.”

- Walt Whitman, Poet

Quote of the Day from Jeremy Narby

"The Asháninka people speak of plants and animals as intelligent beings with personalities and intentions, and who have kinship with humans…Biology has confirmed human kinship with other species, and has shown that all living beings are genetically related. The more that science looks at the natural world, the more intelligence it finds there… There is strong evidence that numerous species think, feel, remember, and plan, and have language-like abilities and systems of communication. This has led some western thinkers to move away from constantly affirming the centrality of human beings.”

- Jeremy Narby, Anthropologist

Quote of the Day from Ralph Metzner

“The idea that the spiritual and the natural are opposed or that spirituality must always transcend nature is a culturally relative concept not shared by non-monotheistic religions or traditional societies. In indigenous cultures around the world the natural world is regarded as the realm of spirit and the sacred; the natural is the spiritual. From this follows an attitude of respect, a desire to maintain a balanced relationship…-in short, sustainability.”

- Ralph Metzner, “The Psychopathology of the Human-Nature Relationship,” 1995 

Quote of the Day from Alfred North Whitehead

“There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil…Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.”

- Alfred North Whitehead, Mathematician, 1929

Quote of the Day from Dr. Lisa Lattuca

“Disciplines, it now seems clear, are powerful but constraining ways of knowing. As conceptual frames, they delimit the range of research questions that are asked, the kinds of methods that are used to investigate phenomena, and the types of answers that are considered legitimate.”

- Dr. Lisa Lattuca, Creating Interdisciplinarity: Research and Teaching among College and University Faculty