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A forest is what exists between its trees, between its dense undergrowth and its clearings, between all its life cycles and their different timescales

[...] A forest is also a meeting place between those who enter it and something unnameable and attendant, waiting behind a tree or in the undergrowth. Something intangible and within touching distance. Neither silent nor audible.

—John Berger
Into the Woods

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After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?

This is how I answer when I am asked – as I am surprisingly often – why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?


—Richard Dawkins

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I've no idea what my child is thinking.
Between two unknowns, I live my life.
Between my mother's hopes, older than I am by coming before me, and my child's wishes, older than I am by outliving me.  

And what's it like?
Is it a door, and good-bye on either side?
A window, and eternity on either side?
Yes, and a little singing between two great rests.


—Li-Young Lee
The Hammock, excerpt
Book of My Nights

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