Kate

“All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick: or, The Whale

“Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Sure, I've worried that this will be yet another year in which I'll somehow convince myself, as in every other year, every other relationship, that whatever I see in him must be a mirage - a projection of my own thirst. I worry that this will be as bad as selling off land to oil companies, and offering up land to recreationists who think they are in love with the idea of wilderness, of preservation, but really have the worst carbon footprint of all. I worry there will be toxic waste. I worry that the prehistory - the way I was before these casualties - will be erased, and I'll never claim the whole human I once was.

This is the grand illusion. That we were once whole. That our ecosystems were intact, self-sustaining. That everything we need is within - and to need others is as vampiric as drilling for every last drop of oil.

If this is why we seek solitude, we are in danger of extinction.”
― Amy Irvine, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness

“Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are... One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.
And then they met - the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve - and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echoes of our stories. They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I can only imagine the conversation between Eve and Skywoman: 'Sister, you got the short end of the stick...”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants