A tree is a light-catcher that grows life from air.*
Maria Popova

Keeping it simple in the twenty-first century involves another set of important tasks. These include decluttering our minds by switching off our devices and disconnecting from digital distractions.**
Anna Katharina Schaffner

There is much I love about civilisation in its many forms, measuring, as it does, the journeys of the Human over many thousands of years:

we are emergent beings, in the flow of life, part of evolution^.

Yet sometimes it can feel suffocating with its endless multiplicity of layers: making and thinking and achieving, laying down ground cover and emitting noise and light pollution.

There remains in each of us a primal, wildness needing to be nourished. I do not mean a lawless primality, but one that is in awe of nature and our place within it:

however much we might uncover, nature will never cease to be filled with surprise ripe for the reaping*.

We all have a season ticket.

The things you do not have to say make you rich.
Saying things you do not have to say weakens your talk.
Hearing things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing.
And things you know before you hear them – those are you,
Those are why you are in the world.^^

*From Maria Popova’s The Marginalian: Every Loss Reveals What We Are Made of: Blue Bananas, Why Leaves Change Color, and the Ongoing Mystery of Chlorophyll;
**From Anna Katharina Schaffner’s The Art of Self Development;
^From Paul Gilbert’s The Compassionate Mind;
^^William Stafford, from John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.