“But I now think about how wonderful it is that some of these radio stories that meant a lot to me that might have otherwise just disappeared, now do have a longer life. And you mentioned the fear of vampirism as a journalist. And the flip side of that is something that Audie Cornish, who was my co-host for many years on All Things Considered, said to me that I've really taken to heart, which is that in a crisis when people are on the worst day of their lives, whether it's a war or a natural disaster, or a mass shooting, of course there are people who don't want to talk and I respect that, but there are also people for whom being able to tell their story and being able to have somebody truly listen to them can be healing and can be a gift, and can be an act of love. And so when I go into those situations, I'm not going in as an emergency relief worker. I'm not going in as an aid worker. I'm going in as a listener. I'm going in to give people an opportunity to tell their stories and to be there to listen to them, and I've realized that that also has value and that that can be important.”

“Women spent so much time in the ancient world spinning, like they spent all their time, any spare moment. And spinsters were not bad, it wasn't bad to be a spinster the way we think of it, spinsters were, you know, respected members of households, single women who didn't have the responsibilities of husbands or children, who could spin more, and make money. And, you know, you think about things like marauding around when they sailed across the Atlantic and their little hats and everything, but you don't think about the sails. You don't think like, who made those sails? Who made the thread that made all those sails? Who do you think did that? How many years did it take those women to make one lousy sail, you know, I mean, it took two years of women's labor to make a sail. So it’s the invisible labor of women in all of that”

“So one of the things I explored in life in Life in Five Senses was the value of boredom. Because when you're bored and when your mind is just kind of running free and trying to amuse itself, you'll often have insight. And that's why people have ideas in the shower, when they're walking the dog or something. When there's nothing occupying them, that's when our brain can come up with these new insights. So I was walking through the Met, I was in a very familiar place, so I was a little bored. And that's when I realized, the way I thought of it was that the beautiful often requires a little bit of ugly. And being systematic, I’m like, you say that, but how do you back that up? And I could think of one for each sense because it does turn out that often the beautiful does require a little bit of what might be considered ugly. And that is part of, as you say, the complete picture. When I took a perfume class as part of my sense of smell study, our professor had said that often a beautiful perfume will have some bad, you'll smell it and you would be like, Ooh, that smells bad. And yet it makes the perfume more beautiful.”

“For people who have been in a long relationship and then it goes off the rails and ends, it’s a different kind of grief from say widower grief, right? Where maybe the relationship gets to stay intact and time capsuled. And you get to maintain the quality and texture of those memories even as you're grieving the loss of the person in your present life and in your future. And I think something that happens in divorce that we maybe don't talk enough about is the kind of like, I think they call it ambiguous grief, right? It's like losing someone who's still around, but not really, and not still around and available to you in the capacity that they once were. And so if you've been with someone for a really long time, you have all this institutional knowledge, right? Like all these private jokes and little songs, and it's like, who did I see? Oh, I remember seeing that movie. Who did I see that with? Oh, right. And it's like walking in a minefield.”

“Ideas don't arrive with a bang. There is no parade. The big thing never screams that it's a big thing. The big thing actually, at first, looks quite small, but if your life is filled with constant noise, constant chatter, and you're not making room to listen to yourself, you won't be able to hear that subtle whisper when it arrives. Most people say, my best ideas come to me in the shower, it's surprising. If you think about it though, it's not surprising at all because it's like one of the few moments of your day when you're by yourself and you're not getting bombarded by these high decibel sirens for attention in the form of notifications and emails and text messages and phone calls and this and that. You're in this solitary environment where you're letting your mind wander and it's just you and your thoughts and all of these built up whispers then begin to emerge to the surface, but we just don't stay with that long enough to really lean into those ideas, but imagine the types of ideas you might be able to generate if you can replicate those shower like conditions throughout the day so that you do hear those subtle whispers when they come up.”

“I guess for me, the real tragedy is this idea of a life where you're getting further and further away from something meaningful or what you want and then just watching the time, like having to sell your time in which you do something meaningless. That's deeply horrifying to me. I mean, I know that is describing a lot of jobs and work, but I think a lot of this book is me kind of poking someone and being like, hey, don't you hate that? Like we shouldn't be okay with this. You know, because I think to some degree if you're in a situation like that, there are coping strategies, or you know, you're just kind of like, well, I can't really think about that because I just need to get through another day.”

“We are in a time where everything that we think we have taken for granted in terms of human achievement, human conscience, human goodness are being turned upside down. To reclaim them, you know, to reclaim them is an act of courage, personally, but also depends to an extent on having a roadmap broad enough and receptive enough to receive the help that's coming to us from a wider world that we're not even aware of anymore. That for which this planet is, in its own funky way, the eye of the needle. There's something really precious and really painful, really difficult about our walk here, and everybody knows it, but we can reach for hope.”

“People have always fought against anyone trying to impose power on them or trying to assert their status on them. That is true right throughout history, from written records onwards, certainly, you know, we have evidence of it, even in some of the most misogynistic societies on the planet, like ancient Greece, for instance. You can still see in legal records, for instance, or in written records, this tension, male anxiety, and women pushing back, you know, that is a kind of constant all the way through. And, not least, we have societies in which women do have more power and that is not seen as remarkable or weird in anyway by those so…”

“When I'd gone off and got lost in the woods and I walked for hours and I just couldn't find my way back out of the woods, there was this moment when I stopped and just had this sense of the forest as this complete system of life. Like I could suddenly hear this crackle that felt to me like I could hear the water being drawn up from the soil and I could hear the leaves dropping down, and I could just feel like I was part of this body and it was a remarkable moment, and I've never let go of that. And I think once you've heard it once, like you can hear it again, this sense of like the being part of this huge system that's way bigger and way more ancient than you are and the humility of that, the lovely, humbling that entails, because, you know, humility, it means literally to be part of the soil, to be of the soil. And that is a grand feeling to chase, I think to integrate with that.”

“And we are made of stars, you know. It's not some fun little thing I'm trying to make everyone feel happy with. It's the carbon in your muscles, the calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood, born in stars. And so I just sat there on the road and the question was, okay, if I've got that in me, if those stars can shine despite everything they've been through, can I have some glow? Can I have something that lights the way even when things are really grim? Because at that moment I felt so lost. I felt like, how is it possible that I wrote this whole book about self-care? I had this whole career. I've done all this work. How is it possible that I'm still reeling from things that happened to me when I was a kid? Sort of the journey you go on with me on this book is, you know, kind of recognizing we all suffer. I mean, you know, I feel like trauma is almost like a taboo word. People think that it's being used too much. It's like, no, it's suffering. Right? Like every major religion refers to this as suffering. There's pain and rather than ignore it, what I have found is my life is much easier when I deal with it. It's just a better way to live.”

“I think the biggest challenge with codependency is when a family member is catered to when their unhealthy or toxic behavior is catered to, it makes the other people in the situation neglected. You know, if you have a sibling who's getting more care than you, or you know, more financial support, that feels a certain way to you. And often we take that out on not just the person doing it, but the other person involved, too. So the codependency just, it doesn't impact one relationship, it impacts many, and it really doesn't set anyone up for success. The best way to help a person is sometimes not helping. You know, I think about all of the help I didn't receive, but figured it out. Those were the biggest lessons versus someone rescuing me or doing the work for me, or me never having to figure out this thing because there is someone I can call.”

“A conversation that I hope this book sparks, because it's such a fun conversation, is the conversation about gay men being friends with straight men, but also straight women being friends with straight men. You know, writings on friendship talk about women and their best friends or straight men and their bro friends, or even gay men and their gay friends. But I would love to see more writing about friendships across these artificial gender lines.”

“And the moment when she admitted that she had been wrong, that was the greatest healing moment for me of all. And that would never have happened had I not written the memoir, had I not been sort seeking her out asking her lots of questions, details of fights that they had why they fell in love, how they fell in love, what her doubts were. And then there was that moment where she sent me that brief email where she affirmed his essential goodness, his essential integrity and his worth as a father, which was so important to me. And essentially saying she married him in large part because she so desperately wanted to have children. And at that, in that era, she was 27, I think, or 28 when she married him, which for a girl who came from the Midwest was very late especially. And she had gone through and then went through all this trauma. She had three miscarriages. She had something wrong with her uterus, she had to have surgery. So I was the fourth pregnancy that my parents had, and that's why they went ahead and had another baby so quickly with my sister 14 months later. And I think she just saw immediately that not only would my father be an incredible parent, but also he would be the kind of parent that a working woman, the dream parent for a working woman, because he wanted to do all that stuff that not only did she not have time to do, but she really didn't have any inclination to do playing with us, the imaginative play, taking us out on the weekends. I mean, my father, I don't think I ever, in my entire life, had a moment where I looked at my father and thought He's tired of us, or he's exhausted, he's bored with us. He wants to get back to his adult things every instant that he was with us, I felt him completely engaged. And to use your word from earlier, completely enthusiastic.”

“This is the time where it's kind of like the things that we didn't get right, we need to start fixing. Not fixing, I would say, but opening up to new paths of exploration because we’ve clearly learned at this point that we can't keep doing things the way that we have in the past for our environment, for social rights, workers rights, children's rights, reproductive rights, the whole thing. We need to make some shifts in order to sustain our evolution with the progress that we want to make. So we kind of all need to take a bit of a reset and a pause. I have said for some time, and this is why I'm excited about 2023 and these next couple of years, I have said that there is absolutely nothing that would get resolved while Pluto is still in Capricorn.”

“I mean, look at how we've convoluted and complicated the most simple things. Look at nutrition now, how many supplements are we supposed to take? How many grams of fat am I supposed to eat? And then grams of carbs, and then how many grams of sugar is tolerable? It's insane that we've managed because I think a lot of people don't believe stuff unless it sounds scientific or it's extremely complicated. But nature isn't that complicated. Like why do all of these cultures, the few that are around now, indigenous cultures, they don't have high blood pressure, they don't have heart disease, they don't have diabetes, they don't have anxiety, they don't have panic, they have all have straight teeth. They don't also have any big pharma, they don't have dentists, they don't need any of this stuff because they are living in an environment in which humans naturally evolved. You and I are not, we're living in an environment that is so different and it's no coincidence that the more we integrate back into nature, the better we get.”

“There are many places I'd love to see and I know I would learn from. But if I never see them, I won't be sorry. I mean I feel I'm so happy just being here in my little rented two room apartment in the middle of nowhere, Japan where we've been for 29 years. And I would be so grateful if I could spend almost every day here. And again another thing that the pandemic reminded us, I couldn't travel as much as usual. I don't think I really missed it. What I did find was I'd take a walk along the road behind my mother's house and it's in the hills of Santa Barbara and my parents had lived there more than 50 years. I'd never walked to the end of the road just 20 minutes away before. And I did. And I'd look around and there was a golden light of early morning and there's a Pacific ocean in the distance with the sun sentient above it. And I said, this is as beautiful as anywhere. Somebody would go to Capri or Rio de Janeiro to see us right in my backyard. And I'd never thought to look at it before. And so too, with this little apartment, my wife and I just start taking walks in every direction. And we came upon bamboo forests and cherry blossoms, all kinds of wonders. And we'd never in 29 years in this apartment looked around us. And so a reminder that all the beauty of the wonder of the world is right here. If only I have the eyes and motivation to see.”

“We're aware that we're in an ecological crisis. We are destroying our own ecosystem. We're aware there's loss of biodiversity, these beautiful species going extinct and who is the prime partner for us is the earth. But you go to an ecological conference like they are having now in Egypt and who listens to the earth whereas the voice of the earth herself, she's not heard, she's not asked, nobody asks the earth. And she is this ancient being. And so wise, she has been through mass extinctions before. Indigenous people knew how to ask and how to listen and how to talk to the earth. And that's why a lot of my writings recently are about trying to find a way to reconnect, to regain this way of being present with the earth, of listening to the earth of just being with her. And so her voice can be heard. Because if we don't make that connection, I don't see how we can go forward into a living future.”

“How do we actually, with due speed, because this is a timely issue, start to live in modern culture which has taken over the planet?Basically live in a way that is really about the truth of who we are; That ‘we’ are a ‘me’ and ‘me’ are a ‘we,’ and that if we live that way, we wouldn't treat each other as enemies, we would treat each other as relatives. You know, you don't get along with every relative the same way, but if they're in your family, they're your family. And if we then saw all of nature as the family of nature, you know, we would treat earth not like a trash can, but a sanctuary. And we would do this together. And we are incredibly collaborative, we're incredibly creative and yes, we can use competition, but what we can do in our competition is make it so we're competing to really deal with diseases and famine and all the problems we face. So when you win the competition, everybody benefits.”

I mean, nourishing is truly, honestly, activism. It is the minute you are nourished that the decisions you make versus when you weren't nourished, they're going to be really different the way you react to your kids, how we parent, how we are in our partnerships, or our work. When we're nourished, another part of us is being our truest part, who we truly are. And so if we can all be a little closer to that, that's the activism I'm tending. You know, that's an advocacy for a culture that's really hungry. A world that really needs us to care for ourselves. It's not just an ‘I’ it's a ‘we’ movement.