Here’s a thing that’s true for writers and non-writers alike, and also true for very young people and very old people and everyone in between: People don’t need you to be better than you really are. They’ll take you exactly as you are right now. Your job is to get out of your own way, to stop trying to seem better and rediscover your curiosity instead, to stop grinding your gears and throwing off sparks and second-guessing everything you do while judging the way everyone else does everything, and just FIND NEW WAYS TO DELIGHT YOURSELF.

Heather Havrilesky

An ecological understanding allows us to identify "things"—rain, cloud, river—at the same time that it reminds us that these identities are fluid. Even mountains erode, and the ground below us moves in giant plates. It reminds us that—while it's useful to have a word for that thing called a cloud—when we really get down to it, all we can really point to is a series of flows and relationships that sometimes intersect and hold together long enough to be a "cloud."