Something in the Woods Loves You Quotes

“I couldn’t deny that the world that made the heron made me too, that we were of the same time and context, and somehow, in that moment, it didn’t feel possible that I was made to be miserable and afraid, to be measured by bank statements or resumes, not when there were living poems, descended from dinosaurs, walking beneath the silent trees just as they had long before the first written language.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“In the end, you were a part of the sky on loan to a body. A part of the sea that awoke to thought. A part of the Earth who carried a name.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“Technically speaking, you can look at any human life as the sum of a complex collection of chemical reactions, in much the same way as you can look at any beautiful painting as a simple collection of pigments, which is to say, you can miss the point of anything.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“Fifty thousand years ago, an elk was struck by lightning and lived. The ache of it stayed in her bones the rest of her life. There was no human there to see it or record it in words, yet it’s just as much a part of earth’s essential history as any song lingering in a billion human minds. So why should we think of language as the lifeblood of knowledge or the currency of legitimate existence?”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“There are two paths to magic: Imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water’s surface. Paying attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world. An acorn. The geometry of a beehive. The complexity of whale song. The perfect slowness of a heron.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“One of the most vital things for you to build and nurture is your own inner landscape. It is hard to bring peace to others when you do not grant it to yourself.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“Somewhere, there are orcas. Somewhere, there is a living bristlecone pine that stood when the pyramids were built at Giza. Somewhere, an unnamed creature swims in dark waters and has never witnessed an electric light. This is where we live. This is our world.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“Bats can hear shapes. Plants can eat light. Bees can dance maps. We can hold all these ideas at once and feel both heavy and weightless with the absurd beauty of it all. These are some facts that are easy to overlook.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“We are worthy parts of an amazing world. We have meaningful choices to make. Our limitations do not negate our worth or right to happiness. Your job isn’t to move the boulder, just to push when you are able. Cultivate love for what is and hope for what could be, all while sparing a bit of awe and gratitude for the massive, unknowable, unlikely forces that culminated with your own singular presence on this planet.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“Now, however, on hard days, I can look at death kindly and not feel it as a beckoning force, but a gentle, distant rain sweeping toward me from the west, a rain I will find soaking the parched earth at my feet one day. One day. And I can think of that inevitable day without frantically trampling through the fields of flowers ahead of me while rushing to meet those curtains of falling water.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“We all consume so many purposefully crafted stories that it's easy to forget life doesn't follow conventional narrative structure. We can't wait for our climax. We don't have character arcs. We live and then we don't. There is no final culmination in success or failure. We are not curated collections of achievements or mishaps.

It is not inherently wrong that we understand the world through stories. It's who we are. It is wrong not to treat our stories as living documents, as ongoing conversations. We know that our stories tend toward dichotomous patterns of black and white, so it's those structures that we need to scrutinize most actively.

This isn't easy advice to take I still struggle with it. Stories are like gravity. It's hard to examine something you've felt your entire life.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“These practical and cultural challenges are further complicated if the illness is too invisible or too conspicuous. Further still if it makes others uncomfortable or if it requires specialized equipment or rare expertise. The complications increase exponentially for those who do not have the emotional and financial support systems that I enjoy, those, for example, who navigate the labyrinthian regulations of federal disability programs, where funding can be stripped away for such missteps as finding someone you wish to marry or saving too much money. Our legal policies surrounding disability funding carry a clear message. If you need your civilization’s help to stay afloat while disabled, you must be careful to live in the abject poverty society feels you deserve or the help you need will be withheld. Such is our cultural love of billable productivity and our general disdain for everything else. It’s a concept that many of us internalize without a second thought. Our worth is our productivity.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“Please, enrich your life and our shared world by seeing nature for what it is. Wonder. Kindness. Family. Not perfect, something better and realer than that. Worthy of your care and attention. Nature and our connection to it contains all the elements to construct the meaning you need, that humanity needs, but the decision to build is yours.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“I don’t feel compelled to abolish wealth or make everyone’s values mirror my own. I do not need everyone’s meaning to be my meaning. That’s not my business. But it becomes my business when such folks build their games of excess contingent upon the suffering of huge swaths of humanity and sweeping ecological degradation. It becomes everyone’s business.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“To feel deeply is dangerous. To do anything else is a tragedy.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“If we can look at the living Earth and feel joy and love in the sight, can the essential truth of who we are really be beyond redemption? That feeling, that draw to the wild, it arises from two like things calling to one another. Reciprocal. A conversation. A moment of harmony. The pull of a family resemblance.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“We don’t need to measure our notions of happiness or progress against imagined universal constants for those concepts. They don’t exist. Even the typical notions of success change with time, context, and fashion. We do not need to prove that our ideas of identity or purpose are watertight in some objective, evidence-based sense.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“We are the culture that took the phrase “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” and twisted it to mean the opposite of its original intent. Originally, that saying was meant as a joke, as an example of something as ludicrously impossible as pulling yourself over a fence by your own bootstraps. Now, we forget the origin of the old saying and use it to suggest that we can succeed all on our own, an impossibility that we have decided to enshrine as a cultural value, ignoring the implicit absurdity of both the metaphorical act and the idea that we do anything alone as members of a society or an ecosystem.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“Kindness won’t make you rich, but it will make you whole. Kindness for each other, for ourselves, for our world.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“I’m not the only way the universe knows itself, I am a way and one day that way will be lost.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“We’re not just things, we are happenings. Things may be lost. Happenings are complete in and of themselves without needing to be possessed, unchanging, forever.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“For some of us, it’s easier to accept blame for things beyond our control than to acknowledge the stark limits of our agency.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“Our culture defends the takers and the blowhards while it mocks, devalues, and marginalizes the thinkers and the feelers, the caregivers and the teachers.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“Toxic masculinity diminishes through its insistence on conformity and its rejection of the richness of other perspectives. It’s a shackle disguised as armor. It shuns depth of feeling and complexity in personhood in exchange for the paltry prize of silencing tough questions from within and without.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“Be careful. Be thoughtful. Answer kindly. What you decide matters.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“Too many people look at a maple tree and see only the hard wood, not the soft, fluttering leaves that built all that strength and rigidity.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“How can anything as new as barely regulated capitalism be considered fundamental for humanity?”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“Humanity gets so endlessly lost in thinking that our perception and interpretation of things is the heart of existence, as if an eel or a cloud or the Catskill mountains weren’t wholly here and in possession of themselves before we named and categorized them.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“Shame often arises from a judgement of our life’s project as a whole, unified work.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You

“Step one: No issue. Rise one: Pre-contemplation/Denial. Step two: Acknowledging the problem. Rise two: Contemplation/Getting ready. Step three: Ready to change. Rise three: Preparation/Planning/Research. Step four: Action. Step five: Maintenance. “Sometimes this is drawn as stairs, sometimes as a circle or spiral, but these are most of the main ideas.” “Most?”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You