“the signifieds butt-heads with the signifiersand we all fall down slackjawed to marvel at wordswhile across the sky sheet impossible birdsin a steady illiterate movement homewards.”

Joanna Newsom

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“Last week, our picture windowProduced a half-word,Heavy and hollow,Hit by a brown bird.We stood and watched her gape like a rattlesnakeAnd pant and labor over every intake.I said a sort of prayer for some rare grace,Then thought i ought to take her to a higher place.Said, “dog nor vulture nor cat shall toy with you,And though you die, bird, you will have a fine view.”


“We've got to simplify, pull back all these layers of supposed complexity , and get down to the essentials. If we want people to engage with government, we should use the same tools that are getting them engages with companies and institutions in private life. If we want people to care about political issues, we should give them a way to understand and get involved in them.”


“The jobs in the greatest demand in the future don't yet exist and will require workers to use technologies that have not yet been invented to solve problems that we don't yet even know are problems.”


“In the first movement, our infancy as a species, we felt no separation from the natural world around us. Trees, rocks, and plants surrounded us with a living presence as intimate and pulsing as our own bodies. In that primal intimacy, which anthropologists call "participation mystique," we were as one with our world as a child in the mother's womb.Then self-consciousness arose and gave us distance on our world. We needed that distance in order to make decisions and strategies, in order to measure, judge and to monitor our judgments. With the emergence of free-will, the fall out of the Garden of Eden, the second movement began -- the lonely and heroic journey of the ego. Nowadays, yearning to reclaim a sense of wholeness, some of us tend to disparage that movement of separation from nature, but it brought us great gains for which we can be grateful. The distanced and observing eye brought us tools of science, and a priceless view of the vast, orderly intricacy of our world. The recognition of our individuality brought us trial by jury and the Bill of Rights.Now, harvesting these gains, we are ready to return. The third movement begins. Having gained distance and sophistication of perception, we can turn and recognize who we have been all along. Now it can dawn on us: we are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again -- and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way than before, in our infancy.”


“How is it we come through the most difficult miles?  Do we come silent or singing?  Do we come in company, or do we come alone?  Are we all alone on the open plains under starlit skies, all alone with the cooing owls in the dark of early morning?  Our ancestors, our grandmothers, will their spirits take pity on us?”


“Failure isn't something to be embarassed about; it's just proof that you're pushing your limits, trying new things, daring to innovate.”