SILENCE: an energy which extends beyond the furthest reaches of the universe — and never vanishes, a quiet which pervades every particle of this world, and glides through the blackness of the great harbor by night, and speaks differently by day. Speech is the body of silence: the word floats up from silence; it flows back into silence. The word of relationship and the quiet of the heart are inseparable — like love and the silence from which it is born, and the rest to which it returns, unceasingly.
It is my hope that all the children, the children of the deer and the wolf, the whale and other marine forms of life; the children of the osprey and the bluebird and the butterfly; the children of the oak and the pine and the dogwood; the children all together with the human children will go into the future in oneness "as a single sacred community." ... The human is less a being on the earth or in the universe than a dimension of the earth and indeed of the universe itself. We cannot discover ourselves without first discovering the universe, the earth, and the imperatives of our own being. Each of these has a creative power and a vision far beyond any rational thought or cultural creation of which we are capable. Nor do we think of these as isolated from our own individual being or from the human community. We have no existence except within the earth and within the universe.