Caitlin

“Whenever we take the focus off ourselves and move it outward, we benefit. Life's most fortunate ironies are that what's best for the long run is best now, and selflessness serves our interests far better than selfishness. The wider our circle of considerations, the more stable we make the world—and the better the prospects for human experience and for all we might wish. The core message of each successive widening: we are one. The geometry of the human voyage is not linear; it's those ripples whose circles expand to encompass self, other, community, Life, and time.”
― Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

“All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives.”
― Annie Dillard

“The world is changing because we're changing it. And that makes me understand, at least, what kind of person I'd like to be. A person can seek ways, whether big or small, to heal the world. That, to me, is spirituality and one's 'soul.' Not some disembodied eternal wishfulness but a way of being that, most days, I can work on. Life is like walking with a flashlight on a dark night. You can't see your destination, but each step illuminates the next few steps, and, taking one after another, you can get where you need to go. Only now, we'll need to quicken our pace if we are to avoid major upheaval in this century. It's up to us not just as individuals but as citizens of nations and of the world.”
― Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

“One can fully own a manufactured thing—a toaster, say, or a pair of shoes. But in what reasonable sense can one fully "own" and have "rights" to do whatever we want to land, water, air, and forests, which are among the most valuable assets in humanity's basic endowments? To say, in the march of eons, that we own these things into which we suddenly, fleetingly appear and from which we will soon vanish is like a newborn laying claim to the maternity ward, or a candle asserting ownership of the cake; we might as well declare that, having been handed a ticket to ride, we've bought the train. Let's be serious.”
― Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World