heart in place

 

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Paradise is having a connection — roots in the garden, stem from the branch, current to the light. To be unaware of the connection is to have one’s heart in the wrong place — far out in the fruit instead of within, in the tree.


—Alan Watts
The Body Journal

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But civilized human beings are alarmingly ignorant of the fact that they are continuous with their natural surroundings. It is as necessary to have air, water, plants, insects, birds, fish, and mammals as it is to have brains, hearts, lungs, and stomachs. The former are our external organs in the same way that the latter are our internal organs. 

If then, we can no more live without the things outside than without those inside, the plain inference is that the words “I” and “myself ” must include both sides. The sun, the earth, and the forests are just as much features of your own body as your brain. Erosion of the soil is as much a personal disease as leprosy, and many “growing communities” are as disastrous as cancer.


—Alan Watts
Does it Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

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… I’m in words, made of words, others’ words, what others, the place too, the air, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all words, the whole world is here with me, I’m the air, the walls, the walled-in one, everything yields, opens, ebbs, flows, like flakes, I’m all these flakes, meeting, mingling, falling asunder, wherever I go I find me, leave me, go towards me, come from me, nothing ever but me, a particle of me, retrieved, lost, gone astray…


—Samuel Beckett
The Unnamable

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we must be very strong

and love each other

in order to go on living.


—Audre Lorde 
Equinox (Undersong) 


 

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