“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” — Søren Kierkegaard As I write this,…
“In the soul of man,” Herman Melville wrote, in one of his terrifying flights of prophecy in Moby-Dick, “there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.” Cast off from that protected world, he’d gone on, and “thou canst never return!” But the…
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” — Joan Didion “You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities…
“You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.” — Joan Didion Life is change. Those of us afflicted with wanderlust amplify our lives with travel and exploration. But eventually, perhaps even relentlessly, we come home again. Whatever that means to us. In a few weeks I’ll have been anchored to the same…
“We, I would venture to guess, are the books we have read, the paintings we have seen, the music we have heard and forgotten, the streets we have walked. We are our childhood, our family, some friends, a few loves, more than a few disappointments. A sum reduced by infinite subtractions. We are shaped by…
When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,pray that the road is long,full of adventure, full of knowledge.The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,the angry Poseidon – do not fear them:You will never find such as these on your path,if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fineemotion touches your spirit and your body.The Lestrygonians and the…
“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem.” ― Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart “Imagine that you’re unwell and in a foul mood, and they’re taking…
Sunsets must be earned in winter. There are no casual seaside deck conversations with a few pictures between sips of rum. No, you must seek out December sunsets by going to where it falls into the bay while bracing against biting cold winds galloping towards you in a stampede of frothy fury. Still, it makes…
“The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have…
“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” — Anaïs Nin (with a nod to Marginarian) I might have said something about this process of becoming in…