Juan

“A slow nature such as Maurice's appears insensitive, for it needs time even to feel.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“You are born into a family and those are your people, and they know you and they love you, and if you are lucky they even on occasion manage to understand you. And that ought to be enough. But it is never enough. Abe had not been dressing up, styling himself, for all these years because he was trying to prove how different he was from everyone else. He did it in the hope of attracting the attention of somebody else—somewhere, someday—who was the same. He was not flying his freak flag; he was sending up a flare, hoping for rescue, for company in the solitude of his passion.

“You were with your people. You found them,” I said.

He nodded.

“That’s good,” I said. “You’re early.”
― Michael Chabon, Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces

“However you refer to it, what this practice has in common with Deep Listening is that observing birds requires you quite literally to do nothing. Bird-watching is the opposite of looking something up online. You can’t really look for birds; you can’t make a bird come out and identify itself to you. The most you can do is walk quietly and wait until you hear something, and then stand motionless under a tree, using your animal senses to figure out where and what it is.”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“The things my mother did not see about herself, I did not see, either.”
― Nadja Spiegelman, I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This