More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 27 - September 27, 2023
Gratitude to nature. Magic hiding in plain sight. The beauty of impermanence and our close kinship with the world we inhabit.
Naming the River The water in your body is just visiting. It was a thunderstorm a week ago. It will be an ocean soon enough. Most of your cells come and go like morning dew. We are more weather pattern than stone monument. Sunlight on mist. Summer lightning. Your choices outweigh your substance.
What do they name the wilderness of you?
Gather the fuel. Double it.
True for preventative mental health care
Our blood is red because of the iron we inherited from the Earth. Iron to bind the oxygen from trees and phytoplankton. Our blood and breath are hand-me-downs.
Iron to bind oxygen, built using the energy of sunlight. Water. Earth. Air. Fire. You may feel separated from the natural world, but just look at what you are. Look at how you live.
Our bodies speak of contradiction. Bones and soft tissue. Teeth and lips. Sensitive resilience.
We can’t wait for our climax. We don’t have character arcs. We live and then we don’t. There is no culmination in success or failure.
Today is the story of you and me.
I can’t say spending time in nature heals depression. For me, the outdoors changes sadness from a pain to be endured to a state to be experience. It’s still sadness. But in the context of green growing things under a limitless sky, sadness is simplified. Not a wound. A tile in the mosaic.
The perfect description
You can’t think your way out of depression any more than you can think your way out of drowning.
Asking for a life-jacket is more important than knowing the physics of buoyancy.
You are a unique sentence built from the alphabet of our universe. The letters were here before you and the story will march on long after you’ve been read, but you will forever be a part of the definitive text of existence. It’s too late for you not to matter.
Vision is a kind of divination shaped and fueled by a cosmic inferno. This can’t be true. It very much is.
Kindness. Gentleness. Empathy. These things are fires shining in the forest night. They must be tended, but in tending them we are illuminated. We become a target for things that thrive in darkness. So, as ever, love is risk. And, as ever, worth the danger.
If you whisper a secret to a candle flame, then all fire everywhere will know that secret.
Together in Absurdity
The universe is an ongoing explosion. That’s where you live. In an explosion.
When an explosion explodes hard enough, dust wakes up and thinks about itself.
Don’t burden your worth with global outcomes.
You are that continuity of matter and motion.
You can be still while the world is whirling. You can be silent while your heart is thundering. You can be alone while your memory is teeming.
You are not safe. Your birth was reckless. Lightning strikes without reason. Countless simple mishaps may be fatal. To live is to collect risk like a bee collects nectar. Yet there is hope in fragility. Our goal was never safety. Our success is not measured in forever. Our years are seasoning, but the meal is meaning. Our task is to become our truest selves and to smile at the knowledge that we will not succeed.
Can you feel the joy behind this limitation?
These sounds belong to the same unfinished poem as you
Bats can hear shapes. Plants can eat light. Bees can dance maps.
If you write out the basic facts of trees, but framed as technology, it sounds like impossible sci-fi nonsense.
Yessss this is what I’ve always said
The fossil is the stone’s memory of the bones of the animal. And that’s a poetry older than words.
Birds are dinosaurs who shrugged off a couple apocalypses. Some eat bone marrow. Some drink nectar. They outswim fish in the sea. They smile politely at gravity’s demands. I am grateful to see them. I am grateful to feed them. I am grateful to know them.
I’m not sure I’m at peace with this. A wary acceptance and determined avoidance
I’m in my little gray house in Ohio surrounded by the stale air of winter indoors, but somewhere there are orcas. It’s an easy fact to forget. It’s easy to shrink your world to what you can see. But thankfully, somewhere, there are orcas.
A dream with teeth.
you tasted oblivion before you learned your own name.
Truth and fact are sisters, not twins.
Autumn is a kind of nightfall.
We who stay awake are witnesses to the dormant, secret times. Seasonally nocturnal.
Every memory is a ghost and the house they haunt is you. 27-year-old me is gone from the world, but echoes of him remain. The same is true for 17-year-old me and 7-year-old me. Those people no longer exist. But I hear their footsteps in the attic, walking where I can’t where I will join them in the memory of a future me.
blooming chrome and circuitry.
People make meaning like bees make honey. Gathering experiences and images, synthesizing them into something new, rich, uniquely ours.
