The experience delivered me into the central project of my adult life as a writer, which is to know and love what we have been given, and to urge others to do the same.

In this trembling moment, with light armor under several flags rolling across northern Syria, with civilians beaten to death in the streets of Occupied Palestine, with fires roaring across the vineyards of California and forests being felled to ensure more space for development, with student loans from profiteers breaking the backs of the young, and with Niagaras of water falling into the oceans from every sector of Greenland, in this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?

Barry Lopez, Love In A Time Of Terror

The sharper the knife, the cleaner the line of the carving. We can appreciate the elegance of the forces that shape life and the world, that have shaped every line of our bodies—teeth and nails, nipples and eyebrows.

We also see that we must try to live without causing unnecessary harm, not just to fellow humans but to all beings. We must try not to be stingy, or to exploit others.

There will be enough pain in the world as it is.

Such are the lessons of the wild. The school where these lessons can be learned, the realms of caribou and elk, elephant and rhino, orca and walrus, are shrinking day by day.

Creatures who have traveled with us through the ages are now apparently doomed, as their habitat—and the old, old habitat of humans—falls before the slow-motion explosion of expanding world economies.

If the lad or lass is among us who knows where the secret heart of this Growth-Monster is hidden, let them please tell us where to shoot the arrow that will slow it down.

And if the secret heart stays secret, and our work is made no easier, I for one will keep working for wildness day by day.

Gary Snyder, Etiquette Of Freedom

We Are All Connected

To Beings, Biologically
To Earth, Chemically
To Universe, Atomically

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Symphony Of Science

A fallen tree is arguably more alive than a standing one, so much of their mass is taken up with other organisms.

As a famous worm once wrote,

I think that I shall never see
a poem as lovely as
a big, rotting tree carcass.

Gary Larson, There’s A Hair In My Dirt!

When the last tree has been cut
Down, the last fish caught,
The last river poisoned,
Only then will we realize
We cannot eat money.

Cree Proverb

But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

Rachel Carson

Just like the seed
I don’t know where to go
Through dirt and shadow, I grow
I’m reaching light through the struggle

Just like the seed
I’m chasing the wonder
I unravel myself
All in slow motion

Cuz just like the seed
Everything wants to live
We are burning our fingers
But we learn and forgive

Aurora, Seed

Wasp lays egg in oak tree
New kind of wood forms around egg

Gall, growth: twisting ball of nut and root
Like teratoma, but doesn’t hurt

No need
For tree
To fight

P Willy, Gall

One love, one game, one desire
One flame, one bonfire, let it burn higher

I never show signs of fatigue or turn tired
Cuz I’m the definition of tragedy turned triumph

Roots, Fire

Big, healthy trees don’t burn very easily, unless the flames are stoked with a lot of fallen branches and debris.

Occasional fires (if certain two-legged vertebrates would just let them run their course) benefit the forest by keeping all that dangerous “kindling” from piling up.

But, boy, if it does pile up, WHOOSH!, better watch your anterior end.

Gary Larson, There’s A Hair In My Dirt!

See me and you, we ain’t that different
I struck the fuck out and then I came back swinging

Take my time to finish, mind my business
A life ain’t a life til you live it

I was digging me a hole, big enough to bury my soul
Weight of the world, I gotta carry my own, my own

With these songs I can carry you home…

Mac Miller, 2009

Even though you’re alone in your boat, it’s always comforting to see the lights of the other boats bobbing nearby.

Irvin Yalom, Love’s Executioner

It is man’s participation in culture and the realization of his mental powers through culture that make it impossible to construct a human psychology on the basis of the individual alone.

Human beings do not terminate at their own skins; they are expressions of a culture.

To treat the world as an indifferent flow of information to be processed by individuals each on his or her own terms is to lose sight of how individuals are formed and how they function.

Jerome Bruner, Acts Of Meaning

Emotions are real, but not in the objective sense that molecules or neurons are real.

They are real in the same sense that money is real—that is, hardly an illusion, but a product of human agreement.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made

Culture can shape biology by altering our brain architecture, molding our bodies, and shifting our hormones.

Cultural evolution is a type of biological evolution; it’s just not a type of genetic evolution.

Growing up in a culturally constructed environment shapes our bodies and brains over development nongenetically.

At the most basic level, cultural learning shapes the reward circuitry in our brains so that we come to like and want different things.

Cultural learning influences what we want to eat, the characteristics we prefer in sexual partners, and how much something hurts.

By shaping both the incentives in our social world and our motivations, culture causes us to train our brains in particular ways.

Joseph Henrich, Secret Of Our Success

On December 14, 2012, the deadliest school shooting in US history took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty-six people inside the school, including twenty children, were massacred by a lone gunman.

Several weeks after this horror, the governor of Connecticut gave his annual “State of the State” speech. He spoke in a strong and animated voice for the first three minutes, thanking individuals for their service. And then he began to address the Newtown tragedy:

We have all walked a very long and very dark road together. What befell Newtown is not something we thought possible in any of Connecticut’ s beautiful towns or cities.

And yet, in the midst of one of the worst days in our history, we also saw the best of our state: teachers and a therapist that sacrificed their lives protecting students.

As the governor spoke the last two words, “protecting students,” his voice caught in his throat ever so slightly. If you weren’t paying close attention, you might have missed it.

But that tiny waver devastated me. My stomach instantly knotted into a ball. My eyes flooded. People in the crowd started to sob too. As for Governor Malloy, he stopped speaking and was gazing downward.

Emotions like these seem primal—hardwired into us, reflexively deployed, shared with all our fellow humans. When triggered, they seem to unleash themselves in each of us in basically the same way.

Humanity has understood sadness and other emotions in this way for over two thousand years. But if humanity has learned anything from centuries of scientific discovery, it’s that things aren’t always what they appear to be.

Because we experience anger, happiness, surprise, and other emotions as clear and identifiable states of being, it seems reasonable to assume that each emotion has a defining underlying pattern in the brain and body.

Emotions are thus thought to be a kind of brute reflex, very often at odds with our rationality. The primitive part of your brain wants you to tell your boss he’s an idiot, but your deliberative side knows that doing so would get you fired, so you restrain yourself. This kind of internal battle between emotion and reason is one of the great narratives of Western civilization.

More significantly, this view of emotions is embedded in our social institutions.

The American legal system assumes that emotions are part of an inherent animal nature and cause us to perform foolish and even violent acts unless we control them with our rational thoughts.

In medicine, researchers study the health effects of anger, supposing that there is a single pattern of changes in the body that goes by that name.

And yet, there is abundant scientific evidence that this view cannot possibly be true. Even after a century of effort, scientific research has not revealed a consistent, physical fingerprint for even a single emotion. You can experience anger with or without a spike in blood pressure. You can experience fear with or without an amygdala, the brain region historically tagged as the home of fear.

When we set aside the classical view and just look at the data, a radically different explanation for emotion comes to light:

Emotions are not built-in.

Emotions are not universal.

Emotions are not triggered—you create them.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made

Nothing about us, mental or physical, can be comprehended apart from the many-faceted milieu in which we exist.

Gabor Maté, Myth Of Normal

Culture and the quest for meaning within culture are the proper causes of human action.

The biological substrate, the so-called universals of human nature, is not a cause of action but, at most, a constraint upon it or a condition for it.

The engine in the car does not “cause” us to drive to the supermarket for the week’s shopping, any more than our biological reproductive system “causes” us with very high odds to marry somebody from our own social class, ethnic group, and so on. Granted that without engine-powered cars we would not drive to supermarkets, nor perhaps would there be marriage in the absence of a reproductive system.

Biologically imposed limits on human functioning are also challenges to cultural invention. The tool kit of any culture can be described as a set of prosthetic devices by which human beings can exceed or even redefine the “natural limits” of human functioning.

Biology constrains, but not forevermore.

Jerome Bruner, Acts Of Meaning

So, yes, we are smart, but not because we stand on the shoulders of giants or are giants ourselves.

We stand on the shoulders of a very large pyramid of hobbits.

The hobbits do get a bit taller as the pyramid ascends, but it’s still the number of hobbits, not the height of particular hobbits, that’s allowing us to see farther.

Joseph Henrich, Secret Of Our Success

There was no denying that man had come an incredible distance.

But could he come even further?

Or was he spent, and in need of a lie down?

Philomena Cunk, Cunk On Earth

Strong lyrical content cuts through crude circuitry, supplying the Experience Machine with cornucopious positive vibrations, and supplying some somber compadres within with some much craved copacetic spiritual salves…

Jay: I do this for my culture.

Nas: All I need is one mic.

Girt: Ooh baby—I like it raw!

Talib: Just to get by.