mothwood:

“We have forgotten that the world is there prior to us. We have forgotten how things have preceded us, how mountains grew up before our gaze existed, we forget how plants are called before we think to call them and recognize them, we have forgotten what it is plants that call us, when we think about calling them, that comes to meet our bodies in blossom. :
In these violent and lazy times, in which we do not live what we live, we are read, we are forcibly lived, far from our essential lives, we lose the gift, we no longer hear what things still want to tell us, we translate, we translate, everything is translation and reduction, there is almost nothing left of the sea but word without water: for we have also translated the words, we have emptied them of their speech, dried, reduced, and embalmed them, and they can no longer recall to us the way they used to rise up from the things as the burst of their essential laughter, when, out of joy, they called each other, they rejoiced in their fragrance-name; and “sea,” “sea” smelled of seaweed, sounded salt, and we tasted the infinite loved one, we licked the stranger, the salt of her word on our lips.
:
To allow a thing to enter in its strangeness, light from the soul has to be put into each look, and the exterior light mixed with the interior light. An invisible aura forms around beings who are looked at well. Seeing before vision, seeing to see and see, before the eyes ‘narrative. This is not sorcery. Its the science of the other! An art in itself; and all the ways of letting all the beings with their different strangeness enter our proximity are regions that ask to be approached, each with an appropriate patience.
:
There is a patience for the egg, a patience for the rose; a patience for each particular animal, there is a patience for all kinds of patiences, to practice, to develop […] A patience pays attention […] doing nothing, not upsetting, filling, replacing, taking up the space. Leaving the space alone. Thinking delicately of. Directing the mixture of knowing looks and loving light toward. A face. Surrounding it with a discreet, confident, attentive questioning, attuning to, watching over it, for a long time, until penetrating into the essence. […]
:
We need everything. All things: all the time. Everything that has happened, everything that can happen. We need the time of presences, to approach things until they are close to us, us with them, before them, giving each to each other…”

— Hélène Cixous, from Coming to Writing and Other Essays