Such a “glimmering perception” of nature’s interdependence, Humboldt observes, was always present in so-called “primitive” societies as kind of shadow form, intuited rather than investigated, until science emerged to illuminate its elemental truth through its process of “long and laborious observation.”

we are now doing to human nature what we have already done to nature, turning a biodiverse wilderness into a monoculture of a single crop deemed correct, forgetting there are infinitely many valid ways of being alive, that they can and must be complementary rather than contradictory if the ecosystem is to thrive.

Peter Gabriel is right, if you hear the world as music, you can sing along with it, join in with it, celebrate and dance with it even while never knowing precisely what is going on.

Perhaps this is because music trades in mystery, while conversation trades in opinion — that subterranean species of certainty.

Rising from the pages is a prayer for abundance against the backdrop of all that is taken away, an insistence on the possibility of finding beauty amid the ruins of our hopes.

We walk the world to discover it and in the process discover ourselves.

It can be hard to bear, how the cosmos went from hydrogen to the double helix by its own insentient laws, forged from the iron rib of dying stars creatures capable of the Benedictus and the atomic bomb, hurled ice ages and earthquakes at the rocky body of a world we now walk in skins and nervous systems over which have had no say, born into... See more

H.D. would devote her life to undoing the damage Descartes has done to our cultural mythos, insisting instead on the synthesis of body and mind, of spirituality and sexuality, of love and reason

a brain without embodiment is “a disease comparable to cancerous growth or tumor” (what a prophetic indictment of AI), a body without a mind is “an empty fibrous bundle of glands,” and an over-mind without the other two is madness. A healthy body, therefore, is not a conglomeration of certain parts, abilities, and attributes, but a harmonious... See more