But when Rex was 4, he reframed my view of religion. One night, I was cooking dinner, and he asked, “Is God real?”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I think that for real God is pretend and for pretend God is real,” Rex announced.

I was stunned. That’s a big thought for a 4-year-old.  

- Scott Hershovitz, "How to Pray to a God You Don’t Believe In," New York Times, May 2, 2022

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Integration vs. assimilation

"Assimilation is described as a process where outsiders change themselves to become part of the more dominant host society....Integration isn’t about loosing identity, rather maintaining your beliefs and being able to celebrate your differences to work with other societies. It is seen as a mutual compr[rom]ise. 

"A really good way to remember, is that assimilation as being a soup, where ingredients are able to lose their identity as they are blended together. Where integration is linked a a fruit salad with a bit of granola where it tastes wonderful because the difference in flavour, colour, and size all contribute to make one beautiful dish."

Shukura Babirye, November 18, 2017

Stability lies in diversity

While modern agriculture has done its best to impose the mentality of monoculture on our knowledge of the natural world, the lesson that keeps re-emerging, both from the failures of science and from the successes of wild nature, is that stability lies in diversity. And diversity, in all of its mystery, is what the grasses can teach us to see.
- Matilda Essig, “Benediction of the Grasses”

Time then and now

Now five years is nothing in a man’s life except when he is very young and very old...
from The Good Earth (1931)
by Pearl S. Buck (26 June 1892 – 6 March 1973)

"An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being." --Bertrand Russell in his essay “How To Grow Old.”

Love and attention

Sister Sarah Joan: You clearly love Sacramento.
Christine 'Lady Bird' McPherson: I do?
Sister Sarah Joan: You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care.
Christine 'Lady Bird' McPherson: I was just describing it.
Sister Sarah Joan: Well it comes across as love.
Christine 'Lady Bird' McPherson: Sure, I guess I pay attention.
Sister Sarah Joan: Don't you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?

From Lady Bird, a 2017 film written and directed by Greta Gerwig

I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
- Willa Cather, My Antonia