Words&Dirt

“‘We’re so––impoverished, you know? We don’t look out at reality at all, we look in at this model, this caricature our brains cobble together out of wavelengths and pressure points. We squint down over handwritten notes that say two blocks east, turn left at the bridge and we think that reading those stupid scribbles is the same as seeing the universe passing by on the other side of the windshield.”

––Echopraxia, by Peter Watts, pg. 64

“When I use the word spiritual, I am not contradistinguishing it from the material. I have little patience with any philosophy or religion that seeks to transcend the material realm. Indeed, the separation of the spiritual from the material is instrumental in our heinous treatment of the material world. Sacred economics treats the world as more sacred, not less. It is more materialistic than our current culture––materialistic in the sense of deeply and attentively loving our world. So when I speak of meeting our spiritual needs, it is not to keep cranking out the cheap, generic, planet-killing stuff while we meditate, pray, and prattle on about angels, spirit, and God. It is to treat relationship, circulation, and material life itself as sacred. Because they are.”

––Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition, by Charles Eisenstein, pg. 426