“Our personal attempts to live humanely in this world are never wasted.” – Pema Chodron
Viewing entries tagged
Life
“Wanderer, there is no path. You lay a path in walking.” - A. Machado, Spanish Poet
People see in others what they feel themselves. Criticism is a clue.
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because it is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and it will be lost. The world will not have it.
It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges the motivate you. Keep the channel open.
No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
- Martha Graham, to Agnes de Mille,
as quoted by Sara Bareilles in her book “Sounds Like Me”
Anyone who has lived knows that nothing good comes without some heartache, struggle, and failure along the wall. Any truthful trajectory showing a result doesn’t look like a rocket. It looks like a squiggly diagonal line to the right. Success is an upwards sloping line, but at any point of the line, the slope wasn’t upwards.
"While it is evolutionarily helpful to worry about what could go wrong, if you are being chased by a cheetah, it can make it hard to soak up the joy that is around you."
- Amy Whitaker, the author of Art Thinking
"Life is not what happened to you, but what happened for you." - Timber Jim Serrill