The Flea

The element of obscurity, related to nature's self-concealment, is necessary to the soul's capacity for growth, for it vexes the latter toward self-dependence.

Experience is mind-centered and free of reference to actualities of space and time.

If value resides everywhere, it resides nowhere, as it ceases to be a basis for making distinctions and decisions.

Wilderness is above all an opportunity to heighten one's awareness, to locate the self against the nonself. It is a springboard for introspection. And the greatest words, those which illuminate life as it is centrally lived and felt, intensify that process.

All forms of life modify their contexts.

Where it is not grown deliberately, rapunzel is considered a weed. 

For a genuinely contextualist ethic to include the land, the land must speak to us; we must stand in relation to it; it must define us, and we it."

Love is a trampoline bed. It is a bit of taut strong fabric stretched over a steel frame. The steel itself is cold. It is cold enough to make the frame even more uncomfortable. The trampoline bed is not elastic itself. It uses a lot of coiled springs. It always takes time to coil the springs to the frame and effort to stretch the fabric. Elasticity is provided by the springs that connect the fabric to the frame. There are trampoline artists - more commonly known as lovers. It is now elasticity which enables lovers to jump up and down on the trampoline bed. It is now elasticity that sends artists into and out of the satisfying possibility of smashing onto the floor at every elevation on the trampoline bed. How high lovers bounce away heightens their commitment and how fast they fall down deepens their attachment. 

What we want then is language that grows out of experience and articulates it, language intermediate between self and world, their intersection , carrying knowledge of both, knowledge charged with valuation and instruction.

"The bits and pieces of life are so numerous that we need to order and classify them before we can think of them. Our sort of brain cannot handle the world in the raw. We have to arrange all the bits into piles, and if there are too many piles we arrange those into clusters. Without ordering systems, which is what taxonomies are, we can't think, live, or work with our world."

“Words are the litmus paper of the mind.”