Amy

“You can look at any human life as the sum of a complex collection of chemical reactions,
in much the same way as you can look at any beautiful painting as a simple collection of pigments,
Which is to say, you can miss the point of anything.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Field Guide to the Haunted Forest

“Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities — call them spirits if you like — other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing---
each stone, blossom, child---
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“It’s easy to look at the contours of a forest and feel a bone deep love for nature. It’s less easy to remember that the contours of your own body represent the exact same nature. The pathways of your mind. Your dreams, dark and strange as sprouts curling beneath a flat rock. Your regret, bitter as the citrus rot of old cut grass. It’s the same as the nature you make time to love. That you practice loving. The forest. The meadow. The sweeping arm of a galaxy. You are as natural as any postcard landscape and deserve the same love.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Field Guide to the Haunted Forest