Yilin

“As the trolley pulled back in front of the building on Trade Street about an hour after it had left, Charlotte thought she understood why she loved this place so much, too, why it spoke so strongly to her, and probably Zoey, and countless others. Mallow Island had reinvented itself over and over. And just like the candy itself, no one here had to be made up of what they used to.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Other Birds

“There is no question that all living beings experience some level of scarcity at various points, and therefore that competition for limited resources, like light or water or soil nitrogen, will occur. But since competition reduces the carrying capacity for all concerned, natural selection favors those who can avoid competition. Oftentimes this avoidance is achieved by shifting one's needs away from whatever is in short supply, as though evolution were suggesting "If there's not enough of what you want, then want something else." This specialization to avoid scarcity has led to a dazzling array of biodiversity, each species avoiding competition by being different. Diversity in ways of being is an antidote.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

“Our metrics of economic value like GDP count only monetary value in the marketplace, of that which can be bought and sold. There is no room in these equations for the economic value of clean air and carbon sequestration and the ineffable riches of a forest filled with birdsong. Where is the value of a butterfly whose species has prospered for millennia and lives nowhere else on this planet? There is no formula complex enough to hold the birthplace of stories. It pains me to know that an old-growth forest is “worth” far more as lumber than as the lungs of the Earth. And yet I am harnessed to this economy, in ways large and small, yoked to pervasive extraction. I’m wondering how we fix that. And I’m not alone.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

“And I knew the point of love right then.

The point of love was to help you survive.

The point was also to forget meaning. To stop looking and start living. The meaning was to hold the hand of someone you cared about and to live inside the present. Past and future were myths. The past was just the present that had died and the future would never exist anyway, because by the time we got to it the future would have turned into the present. The present was all there was. The ever-moving, ever-changing present. And the present was fickle. It could only be caught by letting go.”
― Matt Haig, The Humans