Ben

“Could you refuse me if I asked you to point again at the horizon, to tell me something was worth waiting for?”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“Years later, back from Mexico or South America, he’d admit he was tired of history, of always discovering the ruin by ruining it, wrecking a forest for a temple, a temple that should be simply left a temple. He wanted it all to stay as it was, even if it went undiscovered. I want to honor a man who wants to hold a wild thing, only for a second, long enough to admire it fully, and then wants to watch it safely return to its life, bends to be sure the grass closes up behind it.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“stories are able to create a third level of reality: intersubjective reality. Whereas subjective things like pain exist in a single mind, intersubjective things like laws, gods, nations, corporations, and currencies exist in the nexus between large numbers of minds. More specifically, they exist in the stories people tell one another. The information humans exchange about intersubjective things doesn’t represent anything that had already existed prior to the exchange of information; rather, the exchange of information creates these things.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“To think there was a time I thought birds were kind of boring. Brown bird. Gray bird. Black bird. Blah blah blah bird. Then, I started to learn their names by the ocean, and the person I was dating said, That’s the problem with you, Limón, you’re all fauna and no flora. And I began to learn the names of trees. I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems