here

 

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Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. 

Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly - in you.

—Bill Bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything

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Let your mind and heart release all that disturbs you.

Let your body be still, and all the frettings of your body, and all that surrounds it.

Let the earth and sea and air be still, and heaven itself;
and then think of spirit as streaming, pouring, rushing, and shining into you, through you, and out from you in all directions while you sit quiet.

—Plotinus, 204/5 - 270 CE

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later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.

—Warsan Shire
What They Did Yesterday Afternoon

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