She ponders here the personality of trees and their intimacy with the human world of suffering and death. 

Deborah Lutz

This Dark Night

 Her yearning nature was constitutional. Something vital seemed unreachable for her, as if she were trapped and meaning happened on the other side of a wall. Occasionally she had access to what she desired, and then existential delight flooded her. For the most part, though, she looked for more and more—whatever she had, it wasn't enough. From this seam of insatiability (or dispossession) she mined the ore of her art.

Deborah Lutz

This Dark Night, Emily Brontë, A Life

Can the landscape hold on to absence? 

Deborah Lutz 

This Dark Night

 The worry is that we might be preaching a kind of acquiescence and complacency by asking people to treat a man-made condition as an ontological condition of existence. But the fact that we are doomed to be anxious in an existential sense should lead us to demand that our material conditions not aggravate the basic anxieties that we already have. This calls for an active engagement with the world. A creature that is bound to be anxious as a condition of its existence should be especially interested in ordering a world that does not make it more anxious than it needs to be.

-Samir Chopra

I might not need to read the book, but I might.

 We will see the next time if there's a nest behind the dissolving head.

 The process of learning to live with anxiety begins with accepting that it is going to be ever-present. I must no longer have a relationship of success or failure with respect to its removal and I also need to fundamentally change how I view it. For instance, I have to stop thinking of anxiety as inherently undesirable. Moreover, I can also learn to navigate certain triggers that exacerbate my anxiety. And this can be quite valuable because facing our anxiety can often lead to greater self-knowledge. When you feel anxious, try not to immediately push it away. As Paul Tillich says, one of the best things we can do with anxiety is to think about it and make it into a fear, i.e. give it a concrete object.

-Samir Chopra

I'm going to cut back on sugar.

For Buddha, there are certain failures of knowledge, particularly our failure to realize certain existential truths, that lead to our suffering, such as the fact that the world is eternally changing or that everything in the world is dependent upon everything else.
-Samir Chopra