"The quality of owning freezes you forever in "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we.

The things you own end up owning you. It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything.

But I think I cannot own a thing and love it at the same time. Owning diminishes the innate sovereignty of a thing, enriching the possessor and reducing the possessed. — Barbara Kingsolver writes, 'It's going to take the most selfless kind of love to do right by what we cherish and give it the protection to flourish outside our possessive embrace'.

We have to possess before we can give.

I am poor — you are my riches; dark — you are my light; I own nothing, need nothing. And how could I own anything? After all, it is a contradiction that he can own something who does not own himself. I am happy as a child who is neither able to own anything nor allowed to. I own nothing, for I belong only to you; I am not, I have ceased to be, in order to be yours.” — Johannes the Seducer, from_Either/Or_

I am trying to understand what it means to own a thing, especially a wild and living being. To have exclusive rights to its fate? To dispose of it at will? To deny others it’s use? Ownership seems a uniquely human behavior, a social contract validating the desire for purposeless possession and control.

"What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered."

"It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with "I," "me," "mine," that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's."

Loss and sorrow are only possible with respect to things we own.

I think we're property.

I should say we belong to something:

That once upon a time, this earth was No-man's Land, that other worlds explored and colonized here, and fought among themselves for possession, but that now it's owned by something:

That something owns this earth — all others warned off.

Know what you own, and know why you own it

"Freud said to Putnam: "We are what we are because we have been what we have been.

We insist on being Someone, with a capital S. We get security from defining ourselves as worthless or worthy, superior or inferior. We waste precious time exaggerating or romanticizing or belittling ourselves with a complacent surety that yes, that’s who we are. We mistake the openness of our being — the inherent wonder and surprise of each moment — for a solid, irrefutable self. Because of this misunderstanding, we suffer.

When we work merely for material gain, we build our own prison. We enclose ourselves in isolation; our coins turn to ashes and buy nothing worth living for.