Morning shadow

“You cannot draw lines and compartments and refuse to budge beyond them. Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping-stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair. Yes, in the end it is all a question of balance.”

from A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

Restoration

"The monkey wrench is not a symbol of destruction. Ed Abbey told me right here on this ranch, the monkey wrench is a symbol of restoration. It's symbolic of your own talents. That's how you are going to fix the world - with your own gifts and talents."

- Ken Sleight

Making the images

"The world and this country need artists that have the strength and the singularity of vision to know that the best gift they can give is the commitment to making the images, because images are the magic. An artist should never lose sight of the first obligation – an artist is the only one who can make the art."

- Barbara Dougherty

Impermanence

“The realization of impermanence is paradoxically the only thing we can hold on to, perhaps our only lasting possession.”

Tibetan Lama Sogyal Rinpoche

Flow

“People are most content when experiencing flow, a state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one’s abilities.”

- Csikzentmihalyi

Travel

The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.

- Agnes Repplier

Dark nebulae

"In my frigid room I read about dark nebulae - immense clouds composed of the detritus of dying stars. The nebulae are made of molecular hydrogen, high concentrations of gas and dust whose effect in the universe is to produce "visual extinction". Yet the nebulae are detectable because of the obscuration they cause. I looked up at the sky: the dark patches between constellations are not blanks but dense interstellar clouds through which light from distant stars cannot pass. They are known variously as the Snake, the Horsehead, the Coalsack. Darkness is not a blank, a negation, but a rich and dense obstruction, a kind of cosmic chocolate, a forest of stellar events whose presences are only known by their invisibility. "

from This Cold Heaven, Seven Seasons in Greenland by Gretel Ehrlich

Every time you tell your story

“Every time you tell your story you change it: you add adjectives, you add color, you end up forgetting all the grays in between and you only remember the highlights and the darklights. People who don’t tell their stories, who don’t have to reinvent themselves, have, I’m sure, a different memory of their lives than a person who only has to grab the big moments, good or bad. Those are the ones you tell. Those are the ones that end up defining you.”

Isabel Allende in A Sense of Place, Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Lives by Michael Shapiro

It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.

- Barry Lopez

Cure for loneliness

"The cure for loneliness, I have come to understand, is not more socializing. It’s achieving and maintaining close friendships."

- Barry Lopez