My grandmother lived in a universe filled with life. It was impossible for her to conceive of any creature — even the smallest insect, let alone a human being — as insignificant. In every leaf, flower, animal, and star she saw the expression of a compassionate universe, whose laws were not competition and survival of the fittest but cooperation, artistry, and thrift. . . .
The earth was our home, she would have said, but no less was it home to the oxen that pulled our plows or the elephants that roamed in the forest and worked for us. They lived with us as partners whose well-being was inseparable from our own.
— Eknath Easwaran, The Compassionate Universe