Lara

“The trees act not as individuals but somehow as a collective. But what we see is the power of unity. All flourishing is mutual.”

“Ceremony is a vehicle for belonging - to a family, to a people, and to the land.”

“He told me that science was not about beauty, not about the embrace between plants and humans.”

“My natural inclination was to see relationships, to seek the threads that connect the world to join instead of divide.”

"But science is rigorous in separating the observer from the observed, and the observed from the observer. Why two flowers are beautiful together would violate the division necessary for objectivity.”

“Yes, I have learned the names of all the bushes, but I have yet to learn their songs. I was teaching the names and ignoring the songs.”

“When I stare too long at the world with science eyes, I see an afterimage of traditional knowledge. Might science and traditional knowledge be purple and yellow to one another? We see the world more fully when we use both.”

"The questions of goldenrod and asters was of course just emblematic of what I really wanted to know. it was an architecture of relationships, of connections that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together. And I wanted to know why we love the world, why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.”

“It’s not just the words that will be lost. The language is the heart of our culture, it holds our thoughts, our way of seeing the world.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“In principle, agent-based modelling should make some of the grandest social and political questions of our time accessible to rational experiment, such as whether the globalization of the economy is likely to lead to greater cultural harmony or to cultural conflict. But some social scientists remain uneasy, suspecting that any particular agent-based model of a social phenomenon risks coming to conclusions that depend on the underlying assumptions of the model. How do we know whether any one set of rules or assumptions will lead to truly representative behaviour, and not to an excessively crude caricature of the real situation? In short, such models can hardly be expected to provide a sound basis for policy until we can distinguish what is contingent from what is robust: what a particular model will produce as opposed to what all good models will produce.”
― Philip Ball, Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another

“All the laws of physics can be derived from the principle of least action which, roughly speaking, states that, of all the possible configurations that a system can have or that it can follow as it evolves in time, the one that is physically realized is the one that minimizes its action.”
― Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies

“Break habits.
Look for differences.
Notice connections.”
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being