The language of plants …

I think now that it was a longing to comprehend the language I hear in the woods that led me to science, to learn over the years to speak fluent botany. A tongue that should not, by the way, be mistaken for the language of plants. 

Robin Wall Kimmerer,  Braiding Sweetgrass. Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants  (Minneapolis 2013)

Montaigne and his cat

 

When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?

Michel de Montaigne, An apology for Raymond Sebond 1576

The timeless way of building ….

Don’t you think there is enough anxiety at present?

Do you really think we need to manufacture more anxiety in the form of buildings?

Christopher Alexander, 1936-2022

… immersion in the Whole …

The feeling of nature exists in the Gospels. Jesus speaks of the splendour of the lilies of the field. But I said that the oceanic feeling, as I experienced it - which is different from the sentiment of nature - is foreign to Christianity because it does not involve either God or Christ. It is something situated at the level of the pure feeling of existing. I am not certain that it was familiar to the Greeks. You are right to say that they had the feeling of nature, and they had it to the highest degree, but they speak very rarely of immersion in the Whole.

From Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone is Our Happiness (Stanford, 2011)

Basic goodness

 

It is not just an arbitrary idea that the world is good, but it is good because we can experience its goodness. We can experience our world as healthy and straightforward, direct and real, because our basic nature is to go along with the goodness of situations.

From Chogyam Trungpa, Shambhala. The Sacred Path of the Warrior (Boulder, 1984)

Cutting open the vegetables …

Cutting open the vegetables left me awestruck. Where did all these things come from? Why are they the way they are? And how is it that I am here with them, resonating in harmony and well-being? And no, I didn’t need scientific answers - I wanted poetry, like Rumi, who said, “What was said to the rose that made it bloom is being spoken here in my heart now.”

From Edward Espe Brown, The Complete Tassajara Cookbook (Boston, 2009)

My aims and my means

 

I am often reminded that if I had bestowed on me the wealth of Croesus, my aims must still be the same and my means essentially the same.

Henry Thoreau, in his Journal on 29th January 1852.