Words&Dirt

“The center of identity is constructed of those stories we tell ourselves––the poems and philosophies, memories and mythologies and scientific explanations––and the ten thousand things remain always beyond them. Seen at its most fundamental level as generative ontological tissue, that elsewhere beyond our stories is what Lao Tzu called ‘dark enigma.’ To see landscape, the ten thousand things of that elsewhere, directly as dark-enigma, as planetary stuff in and of itself, unmediated by thought and knowledge and story––that changes everything. If landscape is dark enigma, then consciousness as an opening that mirrors landscape is also dark enigma. And what else could it be, for that opening is a site where the Cosmos, all dark-enigma in perpetual transformation, evolved a way of being aware of itself.”

––Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape, by David Hinton, pg. 140

“Somebody has to start. Somebody has to step forward and do what is right, because it is right. If nobody starts, then others cannot follow.”

––The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson, loc. 11466