in the water that runs, in the water that sleeps

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Though I do not expect that I shall be reborn directly as a crocus, I know that one day my atoms will inhabit a bacterium here, a diatom there, a nematode or a flagellate - even a crayfish or a sea cucumber. I will be here, in myriad forms, for as long as there are forms of life on Earth.

I have always been here, and with a certain effort of will,
I can sometimes remember.

—John A. Livingston
One Cosmic Instant, A Natural History of Human Arrogance

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Listen in the wind to the sighing of the bush:
This is the ancestors breathing.
Those who are dead are never gone;
The dead are not down in the earth:
They are in the trembling of the trees,
In the groaning of the woods,
In the water that runs, in the water that sleeps.


—traditional saying from Senegal

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wait - what ?

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