Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
Salman Ansari
salman.io
But please, let us not turn this heartbreak into something useful just yet. If we do, we will be tempted to walk in old ways. We will rely on tired words. We will make memes of ourselves. Easy, digestible phrases that fill a short term longing for solutions.
Instead let us truly bear witness.
Let the fog of confusion obscure our clarity for a time. To not know how – or where – we’ll live. To be fumbling and full of grief, because what we always counted on has been struck from our horizon. And we may never be as magnificent again.
» From Advocate to Activist: Cheryl Alexander and the outsized influence of Takaya the Lone Sea Wolf
Kristen Weissprojectcoyote.org
I asked Cheryl what she thought was the most effective way to dispel people’s misplaced fears and animosity towards wolves, and replace it with awe and respect for life. She emphasized the importance of telling stories about individual lives like Takaya’s. Our tendency as humans is to glaze over when we are overwhelmed by numbers and statistics; but when we learn about the injustices faced by an individual, or the challenges they’ve overcome, we naturally build an emotional connection. Empathy takes root. That’s where real change can happen.
Sojourns in the Parallel World: America Ferrera Reads Denise Levertov’s Ode to Our Ambivalent Relationship with Nature
Maria Popovathemarginalian.org
We could lament that the price we have paid for our so-called progress in the century and half since Muir has been a loss of perspective blinding us to this essential kinship with the rest of nature. But that would be a thoroughly ahistorical lament. We humans have always had a troubled relationship with this awareness — from the pre-Copernican days, when we hailed ourselves as the center of the universe, to the campaign launched against Darwin for demonstrating our evolutionary consanguinity to every single creature on this beautiful planet.
Still, something deep inside us — something elemental, beyond the ego and its conscious reasonings — vibrates with an irrepressible sense of our belonging to and with nature
My child, my little one. Please do not try to achieve your way to serenity: I assure you that it cannot be done. Look around for evidence of this truth — nobody has ever, ever accomplished inner peace through the act of “killing it” yet, despite all their most heroic efforts.
This is the sad, but perhaps logical, endpoint of the anonymity problem. If fans don’t know anything about their favorite artists, does it matter if they even exist?
sometimes the most important thing we can do is let ourselves stay blurry. to be unbranded, unpositioned, undone for a while. because real self-knowledge is a slow, unmarketable process. and the lost feeling might just be the first sign that you’ve finally stopped performing someone else’s idea of a good life.