“poetry is the displacement of silence, while prose is the continuation of noise.” Similarly, a poem doesn’t need to tell you the details of what a moment looked like, but it can find ways to show you what it felt like.

silence’s grammar Embodied presence also liberates us from the need to prematurely reach for explanations and solutions — for an answer. If I can only speak, then the use of words will require me to search for sense. Silence can contemplate the mysterious, the absurd, and the act of grace, but words must search for reasons and solutions.

…the physical world can accommodate emptiness and silence, or at least acknowledge them; online, those voids are just filled by other people’s content, and thus vanish instantly.

…the dark makes you hear the water more.

When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book — to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves. ​ Her purpose in this project is to bring to the attention of the whole community, art that exists in its own context, ​ The artist creates a structure — whether that’s a map or a cordoned-off area — that holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit and familiarity that constantly threaten to close it. ​ Actually, I’ve always found it weird that it’s called birdwatching, because half if not more of birdwatching is actually birdlistening. I personally think they should just rename it birdnoticing. ​ That ended up being two years. I recently asked him how he spent that time, and his answer was that he read a lot, rode his bike, studied math ​ In nature, things that grow unchecked are often parasitic or cancerous. And yet, we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Indeed our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.

the ones with whom I can sit and stare out into the earth. but—if we’re being honest, and we are— they tackle-danced in the 2pm breeze. I bought a Casper Glow. It’s so silly, but it’s really good. But I’m quite happy, with—and you have to imagine me gesturing wildly all around me—all of this.

headphones reposition us each within our own unique reality.