just so the world

The stones of Stenness, Orkney, Scotland, 1906

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...light from Andromeda, the galaxy closest to our own, takes 2.4 million years to reach us. When we see it, the light has been rushing towards us a 186,000 miles a second for 2.4 million years. And beyond our galactic neighborhood lie an estimated 80 billion more galaxies, unimaginably far away. 

We know outer space is vast and mostly empty, but we usually consider our familiar world as more solid. Yet the atoms that make up our own bodies are actually 99.99 percent empty space. The distance between atoms, and the space within atoms, compared with their mass makes us as spacious internally as the universe we live in. 

I was struck by the reality that inner space is a microcosmic version of outer space.

—Tara Brach

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I would like you to show me, if you can, where the line can be drawn between an organism and it’s environment.

The environment is in you. It’s passing through you. You’re breathing it in and out. You and every other creature.


—Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry & Gary Snyder: Distant Neighbours
wait - what ?

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