Mia

“It’s about growth versus decay, activity versus inactivity. The body was designed to be pushed, and in pushing our bodies we push our brains too. Learning and memory evolved in concert with the motor functions that allowed our ancestors to track down food, so as far as our brains are concerned, if we’re not moving, there’s no real need to learn anything.”
― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

“As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.”
― N. Scott Momaday

“Extending the Airport Runway
The good citizens of the commission
cast their votes
for more of everything.
Very early in the morning

I go out
to the pale dunes, to look over
the empty spaces
of the wilderness.

For something is there,
something is there when nothing is there but itself,
that is not there when anything else is.

Alas,
the good citizens of the commission
have never seen it,

whatever it is,
formless, yet palpable.
Very shining, very delicate.

Very rare.”
― Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings: Poems

“He had never experienced anything like this before outside the Zone. And it had happened in the
Zone only two or three times. It was as though he were in a different world. A million odors cascaded in
on him at once—sharp, sweet, metallic, gentle, dangerous ones, as crude as cobblestones, as delicate
and complex as watch mechanisms, as huge as a house and as tiny as a dust particle. The air became
hard, it developed edges, surfaces, and corners, like space was filled with huge, stiff balloons, slippery
pyramids, gigantic prickly crystals, and he had to push his way through it all, making his way in a dream
through a junk store stuffed with ancient ugly furniture … It lasted a second. He opened his eyes, and
everything was gone. It hadn't been a different world—it was this world turning a new, unknown side to
him. This side was revealed to him for a second and then disappeared, before he had time to figure it out.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic