Contour

"Believe in the holy contour of life."

Jack Kerouac

Word organize reality

"I have always used songwriting as a way to help me organize reality."

Jason Mraz

Land Art

Land really is the best art.



-Andy Warhol

Chiaroscuro

"All the diversity, all the charm, and all the beauty of life are made up of light and shade."

Leo Tolstoy

Your armor

"I think midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in you ear: I'm not screwing around. It's time. All of this pretending and performing--these coping mechanisms that you're developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt -- has to go.

Your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts. I understand that you needed these protections when you were small. I understand that you believed your armor could help you secure all of the things you needed to feel worthy of love and belonging, but you're still searching and you're more lost than ever.

Time is growing short. There are unexplored adventures ahead of you. You can't live the rest of your life worried about what other people think. You were born worthy of love and belonging. Courage and daring are coursing through you. You were made to live and love with your whole heart. It's time to show up and be seen.

Brene Brown

It is not weight; it is wings

"Some Christians carry their religion on their backs. It is a packet of beliefs and practices which they must bear. At times it grows heavy and they would willingly lay it down, but that would mean a break with old traditions, so they shoulder it again. But real Christians do not carry their religion, their religion carries them. It is not weight; it is wings. It lifts them up, it sees them over hard places, it makes the universe seem friendly, life purposeful, hope real, sacrifice worthwhile. It sets them free from fear, futility, discouragement, and sin--the great enslavers of men's woulds. You can know a real Christian, when you see him, by his buoyancy."

Harry Emerson Fosdick

Invisible

"It's the things inside us that feel the most real, but are the most unknown from the outside looking in."

@alimakesthings

Give up control and trust the soil

"It’s more about trusting your own instincts — recognizing that, even in your messiness, you are perfectly made, that you have these seeds, these gifts, that must be planted and trusted.

In many ways, eradicating self-doubt is the pathway to a deeper humility. When you don’t doubt the seed you have planted, you, in a sense, give up control. You admit how little you have to do with the fruits of your own labor. It’s the water and the air and the photosynthesis and maybe, depending on your belief system, it’s an inexplicable, jaw-dropping miracle. You trust that your biggest gifts may actually conspire to exist even without your careful cultivation, that perhaps they will have an even greater chance of appearing if you don’t obsess over them.

I’m going to try to heed Alonzo’s call. I’m going to try to forget time, like Maya. I’m going to try to trust the soil, like Louise. I’m going to give up thinking that I can micromanage miracles — big or small."

Courtney Martin, On Being

Too many considerations

"The singing intent dies a slow death. Our most basic fear is intellectualized and called “revision.” This is not watering the seed; it is poisoning the dirt with too many considerations. "

Courtney Martin, On Being

Keep the seed underground

“Self-doubt has to be eradicated. If you plant a seed, you don’t dig it up to see if it’s growing. You plant it. You believe in it. You nurture it. You go with it.”

Alonzo King interview, via OnBeing

A Real Picture of Hope

"Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields...but in the impervious and quaking swamps."

-Henry David Thoreau

Get used to it

"Substantive change is anxiety provoking-- even those changes we are actively pushing for."

Harriet Lerner