Tag: self

So each Summer, for the past 3 years, I have fostered and fed red-back spiders. I catch them in my yard (in Australia of course) in the hopes of keeping them away from my animals, and I can’t bear to kill them, so I keep them. They’re homed separately, stacked on top of each other. I’ve grown unexpectedly attached to my little, fatal, towering-death army.

“Furthermore, selfhood is not limited just to animals
with brains. Plants are also selves. Nor is it coterminous with a
physically bounded organism. That is, selfhood can be distributed over
bodies (a seminar, a crowd, or an ant colony can act as a self), or it
can be one of many other selves within a body (individual cells have a
kind of minimal selfhood).”

— Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think

I’ve ridden a motorbike for a few years now and it never stops amazing me how every town smells different. So many scents linked to so many memories coming at me faster than I can accelerate.

Loving kindness towards ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. It means we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already.

Pema Chodron