"There are seven million homeless children in the streets of Brazil. Are vanishing trees being reborn as unwanted children?" - Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild

“Look at the stars.”
“What about them?”
“Did you ever think about how many of them are ghosts?”
“I don’t get it.”
“We’re not seeing the stars as they are right now. We’re seeing them as they were thousands of years ago, maybe millions of years ago – however long it took their light to reach us. Some of them don’t exist anymore. What we see when we look at them now aren’t the stars themselves, but the light that they gave off – images of themselves, of what they once were.”
“So…?”
“So maybe that’s what ghosts are.”
-Charles de Lint, "The Wishing Well"