16 Sep

connectedness

..an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlessness. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialisation. The almost infinite connectivity of the technological world, for all the benefit it has brought, has exacted a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappiness which are product of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world – its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits – as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. A constant and formidably defining exchange occurs between the physical form of the world around us, and the cast of our inner world of imagination. The feel of the hot dry wind on the face, the smell of the distant rain carried as a scent stream in the air, the touch of the bird’s sharp foot on one’s outstretched palm: such encounters shape our beings and our imaginations in ways which are beyond analysis but also beyond doubt. There is something uncomplicatedly true in the sensation of laying hands upon sun-warmed rock, or watching the a dense mutating flock of birds, or seeing snow fall irrefutably upon one’s upturned palm.

~ Robert Macfarlane in The Wild Places

12 Mar

extreme

Should one still continue to collect stamps esp the new ones? Won’t they be good as green leaves than wrapped up perforated squares?!
Seems like time will be here soon!

01 Aug

living real

“People came into a world like this, rich, natural, but not without danger. The prospects for real trouble here are low, but the prospects for feeling alive are guaranteed. Many people are shadowed most dangerously by beasts of their own imaginations. Being here is real. That’s why this silence, coiled and charged, speaks volumes. Too often, we let fake things stalk us. Accept no substitutes for real experience, real friends, true love, and real bears. Either you set the bar high and keep striving or you create a danger greater than any Griz sneaking up on you: letting real life sneak away”
~ Carl Safina in The View from Lazy Point

13 Mar

to read

“… though in random variation there are orderly patterns, patterns are not always meaningful. And as important as it is to recognize the meaning when it is there, it is equally important not to extract meaning when it is not there. Avoiding the illusion of meaning in random patterns is a difficult task.”

~ Leonard Mlodinow in The Drunkard’s Walk