"The person figured here is not an autonomous, rational actor but an unfolding, shifting biography of culturally and materially specific experiences, relations, and possibilities inflected by each next encounter (...) in uniquely particular ways." (Lucy Suchman, Human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions, 2009, 281)
"What if we could fashion a restoration plan that grew from understanding multiple meanings of land? Land as sustainer. Land as identity. Land as grocery store and pharmacy. Land as connection to our ancestors. Land as moral obligation. Land as sacred. Land as self. (..) Land as home." Robin Wall Kimerer (2020). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,
Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.
Weaving roots to a better world. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC) 2024.
"Beauty is not only formal, and lies not only in the superficial qualities that are appealing to the eye or ear, it lies in patterns of meaning, in evocations of values, and its connection to the life the reader is living and the world she wants to see." Rebecca Solnit (2022). Orwell's Roses. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC) 2024.
"Time as objective reality has never made much sense to me. It's what happens that matters. (...) If there is meaning in the past and in the imagined future, it is captured in the moment. (...) And we think of it as simply time, as if it where a thing, as if we understood it. Maybe there is no such thing as time; there are only moments, each with its own story." Robin Wall Kimerer (2020). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC), taken January 21, 2024.
"Space is transformed into place as it acquires definition and meaning." Yi-Fu Tuan (2005). Space and Place. The perspective of experience. Photo taken in July by Monica Pinheiro, free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).
"If you don't recognize a young man's will to meaning, a men's search for meaning, you'll make him worse, you'll make him doll, you'll make him frustrated." (video below)
"Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast." (wishlist)
"Viktor Emil Frankl, M.D., PhD (26 March 1905, Leopoldstadt, Vienna – 2 September 1997, Vienna) was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaust survivor. Frankl was the founder of logotherapy, which is a form of existential Analysis, the "Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy". His best-selling book, Man's Search for Meaning (published under a different title in 1959: From Death-Camp to Existentialism, and originally published in 1946 as Trotzdem Ja Zum Leben Sagen: Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager), chronicles his experiences as a concentration camp inmate which led him to discover the importance of finding meaning in all forms of existence, even the most sordid ones, and thus a reason to continue living. Frankl became one of the key figures in existential therapy and a prominent source of inspiration for humanistic psychologists." (link)
