“In Learning to Live (Aprendendo a Viver), Clarice Lispector calls for ‘patience to observe the flowers, imperceptibly and slowly opening.” As plant philosopher Michael Marder points out in his essay, “Lispector and the Seeds of Time,” Lispector calls for a type of patience that would make one still enough to observe a plant’s movement:
‘Patience, tying together the world of plants and the psychic existence of a human, demands the impossible: to accompany a rhythm of being that is radically foreign to me, slowing down to the pace of florescence and dehiscence, of germination and growth. Now, this impossibility is indispensable for life, which vibrates with its nonhuman echoes outside and within me.'”