live simply and thrive
It’s like a long sea journey to a country where you don’t know the language, where land is in sight for such a long time that after a while it’s just the horizon - and then one day birds wheel over that dark shape and it’s suddenly close, and all you can do is hope like hell you’ll do it right.
-Adapted from a quote by Emily Perkins from Novel About My Wife
The traces of our life here will lie still, dreaming, like an abandoned RV, and the last men will look to them for explanations, or apologies.
Adapted from a quote by Tim Cahill
“The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.”
~ Paul Valery
Go outside.
Don’t tell anyone and don’t bring your phone.
Start walking and keep walking until you no longer know the road like the palm of your hand, because we walk the same roads day in and day out, to the bus and back home and we cease to see.
We walk in our sleep and teach our muscles to work without thinking and I dare you to walk where you have not yet walked and I dare you to notice.
Don’t try to get anything out of it, because you won’t.
Don’t try to make use of it, because you can’t.
And that’s the point.
Just walk, see, sit down if you like.
And be.
Just be, whatever you are with whatever you have, and realize that that is enough to be happy.
There’s a whole world out there, right outside your window. You’d be a fool to miss it.
-Charlotte Eriksson
A water lily is born underneath the water, inside the soil at the bottom of the river or lake. And the water lily has always been a water lily for that whole time that it was sprouting out of the wet soil, reaching up through the dark water towards the sunlight, stretching and grasping for the surface; where it then buds and blooms on the outside in the sunshine. It doesn't bud and bloom on the surface and then try to reach down below into the soil.
The best kind of change is a change that comes from the inside and begins its way out until it emerges on the outside; a change that is born underneath and continues to spread until it has reach the surface. That's a true change. A powerful change.
While we are emerging, changing to something glorious, it is actually us becoming who we really are.
-C. JoyBell C.
Mushrooms in Santa Barbara, 2017
“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
― Anaïs Nin
The Icelandic wilderness, June, 2016
“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” - Henry David Thoreau, from Walden: Or, Life in the Woods
He or she who does not turn things topsy-turvy...
who does not risk certainty for uncertainty,
to thus follow a dream...
He or she who does not travel, who does not read,
who does not listen to music,
who does not find grace in himself,
she who does not find grace in herself,
dies slowly.
-Pablo Neruda, "Die Slowly"
My husband in an Icelandic hot-spring
In 1988, John Ashbery wrote this poem for the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge, connecting Loring Park with the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.
And now I cannot remember how I would
have had it. It is not a conduit (confluence?) but a place.
The place, of movement and an order.
The place of old order.
But the tail end of the movement is new.
Driving us to say what we are thinking.
It is so much like a beach after all, where you stand
and think of going no further.
And it is good when you get to no further.
It is like a reason that picks you up and
places you where you always wanted to be.
This far, it is fair to be crossing, to have crossed.
Then there is no promise in the other.
Here it is. Steel and air, a mottled presence,
small panacea
and lucky for us.
And then it got very cool.
—John Ashbery
Photo taken in Logan Square, Chicago, 2015
But the true voyager is the one who leaves
Just to be leaving; heart light, like a balloon
always saying: "Let's go!"
-Adapted from Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods
"Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt." - John Muir
“This whole earth in which we inhabit is but a point is space.”
-Henry David Thoreau
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.
-John Steinbeck, East of Eden
If we contemplate the beauty of every passing season - the stir of summer as well as the stillness of winter - we will develop a therapeutic relationship with our surroundings. As Rachel Carson suggests in Silent Spring, "There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter."
"The Future is, of all things, the least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time -- for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays."
-C. S. Lewis
The heaviest of burdens is simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute essence of burden causes us to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and our earthly beings, and become only half real, our movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
As long as we have voices to speak, as long as we have hands to create, we need to be generous and thankful, forever and sincerely.
-Everthrive
When we emerge from the encapsulation of our individual concerns, and rise above our weakness and our fears, we allow ourselves to engage with the deeper responsibilities of humanity.
-Everthrive
Gleaned soybeans near Woodstock, IL