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Alison Hawthorne Deming

Alison Hawthorne Deming Books

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“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”

ThinkingFirstsMatterYoungDeathFallEasyConsciousnessStepsBalanceWeightScalesLife And DeathGravityUnthinkable
Book:Temporary Homelands
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“There is a difference between our wisdom and nature's simplicity. That reflects the burden of a complex intelligence. A complex intelligence like ours is impotent compared to the intelligence of a monarch butterfly migrating from Canada to Mexico, or the intelligence of hummingbirds that have co-evolved with the flowers all along their migration route. That seems so simple; it just happens, it just unfolds.”

SeemsHappensDifferencesSimpleFlowerComplexesSimplicityBurdenCanadaMexicoButterflyRoutesMigrationMonarchsHummingbirdsMonarch Butterfly
Author:Alison Hawthorne Deming
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“You see this incredible capacity for replication in nature, survival, development, all of these things that are around us all the time in nature that just happen. By comparison, human life is really, really complicated. We're gifted animals, but we are so complicated. Nothing is easy for us, except maybe eating too much.”

HumansHappensLife IsEasyAnimalToo MuchDevelopmentEatingSurvivalCapacityIncrediblesComplicatedHuman LifeComparisonGiftedReplicationNothing Is Easy
Author:Alison Hawthorne Deming
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“The environment is becoming so much a central concern, I see environmental concerns just bleeding into poetries all over the place. My hope is that we won't have these environmental poets tucked over here and everybody else doing cool stuff with language and consciousness elsewhere, but that all of it will become one thing.”

LanguageStuffConsciousnessEnvironmentOne ThingPoetBecomingConcernEnvironmentalElsewhereBleedingCool Stuff
Author:Alison Hawthorne Deming
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