on every act the balance of the whole depends

Earthrise, Apollo Astronauts

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There’s something so crisp and clear and purposeful about the earth by night, its thick embroidered urban tapestries… The spread of life. The way the planet proclaims to the abyss: there is something and someone here. 

And how, for all that, a sense of friendliness and peace prevails, since even at night there’s only one man-made border in the whole of the world; a long trail of lights between Pakistan and India. That’s all civilisation has to show for its divisions, and by day even that has gone.

—Samantha Harvey
Orbital, a novel
more from Maria Popova's Marginalian here

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Do you see how an act is not like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that’s the end of it? When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls, the universe is changed. On every act the balance of the whole depends. 

The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth and light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale’s sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the gnat’s flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole.

But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.


—Ursula K. Le Guin

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Often I imagine the earth
through the eyes of the atoms we’re made of—
atoms, peculiar
atoms everywhere—
no me, no you, no opinions,
no beginning, no middle, no end,
soaring together like those
ancient Chinese birds
hatched miraculously with only one wing,
helping each other fly home.

—Dan Gerber

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