treat each day as a word spoken to us, your(self—as an answer to the word —Anna Kamieńska

Late Victorian mountaineers, including a lady fully dressed and corseted,

cross a crevasse in the Alps, 1900 Decades of the 20th Century —Nick Yapp

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Consciousness is reflected in a word as a sun in a drop of water. A word relates to consciousness as a living cell relates to a whole organism, as an atom relates to the universe. A word is a microcosm of human consciousness.


—Lev Vygotsky

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Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persian has eighty, Greek three, and English only one. This is indicative of the poverty of awareness or emphasis that we give to that tremendously important realm of feeling.

Eskimos have thirty words for snow, because it is a life-and death matter to them to have exact information about the element they live with so intimately. If we had a vocabulary of thirty words for love we would immediately be richer and more intelligent in this human element so close to our heart. 

An Eskimo probably would die of clumsiness if he had only one word for snow; we are close to dying of loneliness because we have only one word for love. 

Of all the Western languages, English may be the most lacking when it come to feeling. 


—Robert Johnson
The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden

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We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. 

But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are. 


—Anthony Marra
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, excerpt Thought and Language, 2012, p.271

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veins of the spirit

    

 

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Consciousness is reflected in a word as a sun in a drop of water. A word relates to consciousness as a living cell relates to a whole organism, as an atom relates to the universe. 

A word is a microcosm of human consciousness.


—Lev Vygotsky
Thought and Language, 2012, p.271 

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Plants are all chemists, tirelessly assembling the molecules of the world, and in their transactions with insects, birds, animals, and fungi, they find elaborate ways to defend themselves, to seduce pollinators, to confuse.


—Gary Snyder

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Every tree, every plant, has a spirit. People may say that the plant has no mind. I tell them that the plant is alive and conscious. 

A plant may not talk, but there is a spirit in it that is conscious, that sees everything, which is the soul of the plant, its essence, what makes it alive. The channels through which the water and sap move are the veins of the spirit.

—Pablo Amaringo

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