Between Stimulus & Response

 Bare Tree, Sky, Clouds, Blue Patch

 

“Between stimulus and response, there is space.  In that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

-Viktor Frankl

Aspen Trees, Stevensville

“And the wiser you get, the more you slow down your thinking, and the more conscious you become of your emotional triggers, the more you can expand that tiny little pause – that precious little space – in which to CHOOSE how to be.  That’s where it’s at.  Choosing instead of reacting.”

-Elizabeth Gilbert

They Are Other Nations

Scooter for Canvas

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals… We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of haven taken form so far below ourselves.  And therein we err and greatly err.  For the animal shall not be measured by man.  In a world older and more complete than ours…gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.  They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.

-Henry Beston

Moose, Cameron Lake2

A Strange Idea

View from Big Mountain

 

“How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us.
If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?
Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.
The white man’s dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man — all belong to the same family.”

-Chief Seattle