“I do not ask of God that He should change anything in events themselves, but that He should change me in regards to things, so that I might have the power to create my own universe about me, to govern my dreams, instead of enduring them.”
–Gerard de Nerval
experience
Morning Trip (263)
“Experience and success don’t give you easy passage through the middle space of struggle. They only grant you a little grace, a grace that whispers, ‘This is part of the process. Stay the course.’ Experience doesn’t create even a single spark of light in the darkness of the middle space. It only instills in you a little bit of faith in your ability to navigate the dark. The middle is messy, but it’s also where the magic happens.”
–Brene Brown, Rising Strong
Morning Trip (227)
“Today, I will let myself enjoy what is good. I don’t have to wreck my good day or good feeling. I don’t have to let others spoil it for me.”
–Melody Beattie
Morning Trip (217)
“Experience and success don’t give you easy passage through the middle space of struggle. They only grant a little grace, a grace that whispers, ‘This is part of the process. Stay the course.’ Experience doesn’t create even a single spark of light in the darkness of the middle space. It only instills in yo a little bit of faith in your ability to navigate the dark. The middle is messy, but it’s also where the magic happens.”
–Brene Brown
Morning Trip (122)
“…It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell….”
–Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero p. 136
Morning Trip (121)
“Anna pulls her face back from an orange lily, aware of its pollen and of the hovering bee. Its ancestors must have done the same, shimmering down a stem of chicory some day in 1561, here or beside the church in the distance. She has noticed the gardien cycle past to unlock its doors. There must have always been a bee here to hear Catholic music and witness a verger’s arrival. The past is always carried into the present by small things. So a lily is bent with the weight of its permanence. Richard the Lion-heart may have stepped up to this same flower on his journey to a Crusade and inhaled the same presence Anna does before he rode south into the Luberon.”
–Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero p.77
Morning Trip (113)
“The Zen disciple sits for long hours silent and motionless. Presently he enters a state of impassivity, free from all ideas and all thoughts. He departs from the self and enters the realm of nothingness. This is not the nothingness or the emptiness of the West. It is rather the reverse, a universe of the spirit in which everything communicates freely with everything, transcending bounds, limitless. There are of course masters of Zen, and the disciple is brought toward enlightenment by exchanging questions and answers with his master, and he studies the scriptures. The disciple must, however, always be lord of his own thoughts, and must attain enlightenment through his own efforts. And the emphasis is less upon reason and argument than upon intuition, immediate feeling. Enlightenment comes not from teaching but through the eye awakened inwardly. Truth is in the discarding of words, it lies outside words.”
– Yasunari Kawabata
Elisa's Spot 