If one is inclined to wonder at first how so many dwellers came to be in the loneliest land that ever came out of God’s hands, what they do there and why stay, one does not wonder so much after having lived there. None other than this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections. The rainbow hills, the tender bluish mists, the luminous radiance of the spring, have the lotus charm. They trick the sense of time, so that once inhabiting there you always mean to go away without quite realizing that you have not done it.
–Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain
You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all…
Being alone in an aeroplane for even so short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage, nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces, and the hopes rooted in your mind — such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger.
–Beryl Markham, “West With the Night”
We professors, who should be studying connection, study distinctions instead. In white laboratories, biologists find it easy to forget that they are natural philosophers. Philosophers, for their part, pluck ideas out of contexts like worms out of holes, and hold them dangling and drying in bright light. When people lock themselves in their houses at night and seal the windows shut to keep out storms, it is possible to forget, sometimes for years and years, that human beings are part of the natural world. We are only reminded, if we are reminded at all, by a sadness we can’t explain and a longing for a place that feels like home.
–Kathleen Dean Moore, Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World
It wasn’t who I wanted to be anymore. Where did Isabel Taylor get the idea that identity was so malleable? Not that Katya wanted her identity to be malleable, but it was fascinating how some people thought that the world would just go along with whatever they decided their lives were like at any given moment.
–Doree Shafrir, Startup
It is imperative to reject identitarianism, and to recognise that there are no identities, only desires, interests, and identifications.
–Mark Fisher, “Exiting the Vampire Castle”
Art: Detail of acrylic pour on watercolor paper, Rebel XIII, August 7, 2017
I like it better here where I can sit just quietly and smell the flowers.
Rebel XIII 
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