[this book was gifted to me a good friend of mine. I've been going through a pretty nihilistic period in life - my work doesn't seem to have a point. Even worse, no work seems to have any point. Thus, I really appreciated the chapter "Sycamore Tree". Maybe the point really is to just witness - even it is to witness the destruction we are causing and the brief bursts of joy at the attempts of making things better. Going through my quotes again I am in awe at how John Green can hold so much witness and sorrow and hope at the same time. And I think that's a lesson I need to learn to live into.]
"From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires."
"And yet I feel as if I'm committing a sin whenever I drink Diet Dr Pepper. Nothing that sweet can be truly virtuous. But it's an exceptionally minor vice, and for whatever reason, I've always felt like I need a vice. I don't know whether this feeling is universal, but I have some way-down vibrating part of my subconscious that needs to self-destruct, at least a little bit."
"So much of what feels inevitably, inescapably human to me is in fact very, very new, including the everywhereness of the Canada goose."
"I wonder if you have people like that in your life, people whose love keeps you going even though they are distant now because of time and geography and everything else that comes between us. Todd and I have both floated down through the decades - he's a doctor now - but the courses of our lives were shaped by those moments we shared upstream."
"Rivers keep going, and we keep going, and there is no way back to the roof of that hotel. But the memory still holds me together."
"It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us. But mostly, I think I'm just scared that if I show the world my belly, it will devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism, and hide behind the great walls of irony, and only glimpse beauty with my back turned to it, through the Claude glass."
"I am thoughtful - full of thoughts, all the time, inescapably, exhaustingly. But I am also mindless - acting in accordance with default settings I neither understand nor examine."
"Now, like all places that survive on nostalgia, it is mostly a memory of itself."
"When you have the microphone, what you say matters, even when you're just kidding. It's so easy to take refuge in the 'just' of just kidding. It's just a joke. We're just doing it for the memes. But the preposterous and absurd can still shape our understanding of ourselves and one another. And ridiculous cruelty is still cruelty."
"I'll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. So we raise a glass to them - and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us."
"We live in hope - that life will get better, and more importantly that it will go on, that love will survive even though we will not. And between now and then, we are here because we're here because we're here because we're here."
"The fact that our political, social, and economic systems are biased in favor of the already rich and the already powerful is the single greatest failure of the American democratic ideal. I have benefitted from this, directly and profoundly, for my entire life... But if I don't grapple with the reality that I owe much of my success to injustice, I'll only further the hoarding of wealth and opportunity."
"I don't believe we have a choice when it comes to whether we endow the world with meaning. We are all little fairies, sprinkling meaning dust everywhere we go. This mountain will mean God, and that precipitation will mean trouble. The vacuum of space will mean emptiness, and the groundhog will mean nature's scorn for human absurdity. We will build meaning wherever we go, with whatever we come across. But to me, while making meaning isn't a choice, the kind of meaning can be."
"But for now I'm just looking up at that tree, thinking about how it turned air and water and sunshine into wood and bark and leaves, and I realize that I am in the vast, dark shade of this immense tree. I feel the solace of that shade, the relief it provides. And that's the point."
"I feel like I am a human being planting carrot seeds into Earth, but really, as my brother would tell me, I am Earth planting Earth into Earth."
"'I smell the wound and it smells like me,' Terry Tempest Williams writes in Erosion. I live in a wounded world, and I know I am the wound: Earth destroying Earth with Earth."
"What an astonishment to breathe on this breathing planet. What a blessing to be Earth loving Earth."
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