Order and stability are the most transient of states
(This was written two years after the Labor Day 2020 wildfire in my part of Oregon. Doubtless it was written and rewritten countless times, as one rewrites all one's own stories.) Every breath of air seemed to hold a fullness. Wandering the forest paths, damp each morning... ferns nestled happily, some clinging to the sides of trees, others tucked into the forest floor. Thick beds of moss clambering over long-fallen...
Read moreI saw that the momentum of the human machine - all its cogs and wheels, its production and consumption, the way it turned nature into money and called the process growth - was not going to be turned around now. Most people didn't want it to be; they were enjoying it. —Paul Kingsnorth
I have always wanted to be part of a culture which walks through the wild world as if it were of it, which doesn't talk of carbon or biodiversity or profit or growth but talks and lives as if this way of speaking were the poisonous bullshit that it so obviously is. —Paul Kingsnorth
I used to think it anthropomorphizing... the way I had come to feel about plants. Now I think more likely the opposite, we far too often anthropocentrize. To say that higher competences such as intelligence, learning, and memory mean nothing in the absence of brains is (in Daniel Dennett’s words) cerebrocentric.
The story – there are many variants – is that Haldane was asked by a theologian what he could deduce about the nature of the Creator from a lifelong study of His Creation. Haldane’s response: 'An inordinate fondness for beetles.' —quoted by Simon Barnes in Ten Million Aliens
I’ve gone off the idea of progress. It’s overrated! —Arthur Dent, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The tragedy of your times, my young friends, is that you may get exactly what you want. —quoted in Digital Angel (song by Awol One & Factor)
Step up one and all, this is what it means to be anything in the end of man, a fucking brand. —Sole (Tim Holland)
In these days of illusion nothing is honest. —Sole (Tim Holland)
A picture held us captive. —Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth. —Marcus Aurelius
What I'm listening to lately...
Order and stability are the most transient of states. —attributed to Paiute people of Owens Valley, California