kin(dred

 

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... down deep, at the molecular heart of life, 
we are essentially identical to trees.


—Carl Sagan

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The general imprecise way of observing sees everywhere in nature as opposites (as, e.g., ‘warm and cold’) where there are, not opposites, but differences of degree. 

This bad habit has led us into wanting to comprehend and analyse the inner world, too, the spiritual-moral world, in terms of such opposites. 

An unspeakable amount of painfulness, arrogance, harshness, estrangement, frigidity has entered into human feelings because we think we see opposites instead of transitions. 


—Friedrich Nietzsche
The Wanderer and his Shadow

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In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. 

The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.


—Dag Hammarskjöld

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