offering

 

bower bird courtship installation

.

... if you think about the construction of the Hill by a colony of a million ants, each one working ceaselessly and compulsively to add perfection to his region of the structure without having the faintest notion of what is being constructed elsewhere, living out his brief life in a social enterprise that extends back into what is for him deepest antiquity [...], performing his work with infallible, undistracted skill in the midst of the confusion of others, all tumbling over each other to get the twigs and bits of earth aligned in precisely the right configurations for the warmth and ventilation of the eggs and larvae, but totally incapacitated by isolation, there is only one human activity that is like this, and it is language. 

[...] None of the words are ever made up by anyone we know; they simply turn up in the language when they are needed.

—Lewis Thomas
The Lives of a Cell
p 129

.

When I make things, I know they are taken to be quiet and small. I know there may be no place for them. I know no one is waiting for them. I know it may be that no one wants them. But I must make them. I must.

—Souvankham Thammavongsa

Notes on Craft 

.

He showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding and thought: what may this be? And it was answered generally thus: it is all that is made.


—Julian of Norwich

.