Sharon

“You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“I find the intellectual compulsion to break apart the pieces of nature and examine them one by one both interesting and troubling. I understand it's the way science typically works: to understand a system, you have to understand the parts, find the mechanism, put your flag on a piece of new ground. The poets would find this is nonsense. It's not just the smell of a cypress, or the sound of the birds, or the color green that unlocks the pathway to health in our brains. We're full sensory beings, or at least we were once built to be. Isn't it possible that it's only when you open all the doors - literally and figuratively - that the real magic happens? (p. 127)”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“Bolton is part naturalist, part social worker, part mythmaker. It's a job description that didn't used to exist because it didn't need to. We once had a familiar relationship with nature; we knew it on a first-name basis. But now we need professionals to help us reacquaint ourselves with the woods. (p.159)”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I—we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built