adam shand

2018

  • We make the path by walking. — Chuang Tzu
  • Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design. — Dieter Rams
  • Have nothing in your house which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. — Willian Morris
  • The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.

    In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is. ― Albert Einstein, On Cosmic Religion and Other Opinions and Aphorisms
  • If there is anything we are trying to protect ourselves against, it’s shareholders. — Martyn Rawlinson
  • It’s one thing to say, ‘Another world is possible’. It’s another to experience it, however momentarily. — David Graeber, The New Anarchists
  • Anger is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. — David Whyte, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
  • Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless. That is because they are intrinsically systems problems—undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it. — Donella Meadows
  • Grief requires of us that we know what time we’re in. And the great enemy of grief is hope. The basic proposition of hope is: you hope for something that ain’t. You don’t hope for something that is. It’s always future oriented, which means, hope is inherently intolerable of the present. The present is never good enough. Our time requires of us to be hope free. To burn through the false choice between hopeful and hopeless … it’s the same con job. We don’t require hope to proceed. We require grief to proceed. — Stephen Jenkinson
  • First, Anishnaabe regard plants, like all beings, as persons that assemble into nations more so than “species”. The arrival of new plant nations is viewed by some Anishnaabe as a natural form of migration. The second insight highlights the importance of actively discovering the purpose of new species, sometimes with the assistance of animal teachers. — Nicholas J. Reo & Laura A. Ogden, Anishnaabe Aki: an indigenous perspective on the global threat of invasive species
  • For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life. — Oliver Wendell Holmes
  • If you eat Jello 360 days out of the year but if you’ve got to eat rocks the other five days, your teeth had better be designed to eat rocks. — Peter Ungar, providing an analogy for Liem's Paradox
  • Beethoven once remarked that the music he had written was nothing compared with the music he had heard. — Heinz Pagels
  • […] the women were the shamans, and a woman became a shaman if she had a true dream. When she thought she had a true dream, she'd go to the elders and tell these women the dream she had, and they would decide whether it had been a true dream. If it was, then she was initiated by going to a sweat hut for 10 days with only water, and then 10 days of eating acorn gruel, and then 10 days of dancing inside the sweat hut with only water, and then 10 days of acorns. This continued until she could literally disgorge her dis-ease or shadow, hold it, show it, and see it. She was then asked to re-engorge it, to reclaim it. Once she had seen it inside herself, and it was back inside, she could see it everywhere and in all things. With this she became a shaman, a healer, because she had integrated her dis-ease within herself. […] When we understand that it's us and not them, we become powerful with our capacity to offer salve and succour, help and assistance, aid and generosity and healing to the world. […] The mind that heals is the mind that sees itself in everything. — Paul Hawken, A Regenerative World, repeating a story from Alfred Kroeber of a Native American tradition (edited for brevity and hopefully clarity)
  • It's perversely a privilege to be here at this moment, at this time, with the knowledge of what's happening. It makes it very clear what our job is, what our roles are and where our heart belongs. — Paul Hawken, A Regenerative World
  • The opposite of war isn't peace … it's creation. — Jonathan Larson
  • Comparison is the thief of joy. — Theodore Roosevelt
  • All being, it seemed, was built on opposites, on division. […] Always the one paid for the other, though each was equally precious and essential. ― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund
  • Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness. ― Peter A. Levine
  • Eventually all things merge into one and a river runs through it. — Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
  • The problem with efficiency is it eliminates any resilience. — Neal Spackman
  • Suffering arises whenever there is a conflict between 'is' and 'should'. — Andrei Volkov
  • Every species which has ever existed, every individual of every generation, comes equipped to fulfil their tasks and roles and is moved by an innate pleasure at performing their functions.1) — Ernst Götsch, Agrofloresta do Futuro
  • When will we begin to learn from what is being born instead of what is dying? — Murray Bookchin
  • In my youth I committed black deeds.
    In maturity I practised innocence.
    To say more than this would only cause weeping and laughter.
    What good would it do to tell you?
    I am an old man.
    Leave me in peace.
    — Thaye Dorje, The Life of Milarepa
  • When one tugs at a single thing in nature, they find it attached to the rest of the world. — Jon Muir
  • Myth is a wild way of telling the truth. — Martin Shaw
  • […] political scandal is what happens when someone in power inadvertently speaks the truth. — Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind
  • When one is screening raw footage of people in costume tripping on mushrooms and dancing sloppily to a reggae band, a little goes a long way. — Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind
  • The true method of knowledge is experiment. — William Blake
  • Mysticism is the antidote to fundamentalism. — Rick Doblin, via How to Change Your Mind
  • The soul should always stand ajar. — Emily Dickinson
  • One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. — Aldo Leopold
  • One touch of nature makes the whole world kin. — William Shakespeare, Troilus & Cressida
  • Somehow, in the midst of ruins, we must maintain enough curiosity to notice the strange and wonderful as well as the terrible and terrifying. […] Such curiosity also means working against singular notions of modernity. How can we re-purpose the tools of modernity against the terrors of Progress to make visible the other worlds it has ignore and damaged. — Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, via nicolasnova.net
  • I was foolishly optimistic and energetic. – Christopher Horvath, vfxblog.com
  • I want to live a savage life, off bared teeth and beauty and love. — Twm Gwynne
  • Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without…men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters. — Edmund Burke, A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly
  • You can have a king, and you can have a lord, but the man to fear is the tax collector. — Sumatran Proverb
  • Raiding is our agriculture. — Berber saying, via Against the Grain
  • … his lips drink water but his heart drinks wine … ― e.e. cummings
  • House finished, man dies. — Chinese Proverb (unsubstantiated)
  • … because learning is a ramshackling affair [… and] the culture that I know doesn’t believe in learning. It believes in knowing. Rewards knowing. — Stephen Jenkinson, Dumbo Feather, Issue 54
  • It’s just not that big an achievement to be sure of yourself. — Stephen Jenkinson, Dumbo Feather, Issue 54
  • We don't grow through certainty, we grow through doubt. So ambiguity is unavoidable for anyone who's really being honest about their life and about the nature of the universe. Today's certainty becomes tomorrow's imprisonment. — James Hollis, A Summons to a Deeper Life
  • If there were forks in the road and each time there was a fork, the right decision was made, then you get to a goat rodeo. — Yo-Yo Ma, The Goat Rodeo Sessions
  • We will not fight to save what we do not love. — Stephen Jay Gould
  • Visions become responsible through all sort of processes. The best one I know is sharing it with other people who bring in their knowledge, their points of view, and their visions. The more a vision is shared, the more responsible it gets, and also the more ethical. — Donella Meadows, via Making Permaculture Stronger
  • In a living system what is to be, always grows out of what is, supports it, extends its structure smoothly and continuously, elaborates new form — sometimes startlingly new form — but without ever violating the structure which exists. — Christopher Alexander, via Making Permaculture Stronger
  • Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so. — Galileo Galilei
  • … don't worry, about a thing, 'cause every little thing, gonna be alright … — Bob Marley
1)
This is a simplified version by Adam, the original translation by Priscila Bahia Diniz was, “All species who have appeared and will appear and are living in the present, each and all individuals of all generations come equipped to fulfil their tasks, their roles, moved by an innate and functional pleasure.”
♡2014 by adam shand. sharing is an act of love, please share.