Leah

“Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn’t feel that way. To us, it feels all-encompassing. It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“People can feel freed by these stories, but they can also get stuck in them.”
― Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

“Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.”
― Mary Oliver, West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems

“What may be featureless to us, a waste of undifferentiated ocean, is for them rich with distinction and variety, a fissured and wrinkled landscape, dense in patches, thin in others, a rolling olfactory prairie of the desired and the desirable, mottled and unreliable, speckled with life, streaky with pleasures and dangers, marbled and flecked, its riches often hidden and always mobile, but filled with places that are pregnant with life and possibility.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us