Yet here you are, stringing together days like flowers in your crown
I picked up this book expecting a Braiding Sweetgrass type experience, but ultimately this book was more about the author’s struggles with depression, and nature just happened to be a convenient, and often stretched, source of metaphors. I found myself speed running through the “meat” of the book, just to get to the first and last few pages of every chapter, when the author would step back from the pop-philosophical musings and return to the natural world.
I got very tired of the writing style. The one-sentence paragraph was heavily abused, and it made a large portion of the book seem like a string of quotes from motivational posters.
This is not to say that this was not a good book. There were plenty of salient and beautiful moments, the quote above being a good example. It’s just that this book was not what I was looking for and it was not what I needed. Maybe 10 years ago.
Some other favorite quotes:
Whimsy is enthusiasm that refuses to defend itself with practicality. It is play. It is romance and nostalgia. It is finding meaning in pure feeling, respecting emotionality without tethering it to logic or narrowly defined utility. It is the practice of honoring delight for delight’s sake…
…we are all inherently co-owners of human progress and fellow stakeholders in the march of human ingenuity, at least insomuch as it applies to collaborating with nature to produce the necessities of life and health.