order.

May 18, 2024 § Leave a comment

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.” ― Gustave Flaubert

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Near Holbrook, AZ

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“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.” ― Albert Camus

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vacuum.

May 16, 2024 § Leave a comment

“Amazing. You were so attached to it, and it still disappeared for you.”
“Attached! I was whocking that cloud with everything I had! Fireballs, laser beams, vacuum cleaner a block high…”

“Negative attachments, Richard. If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production out of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking. That’s all there is to it.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

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Cliff Palace kiva

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“We want to be loved,’ ” quotes Britt-Marie. “ ‘Failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. The soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.’ ” ― Fredrik Backman

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garden.

May 15, 2024 § Leave a comment

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” ― Cicero

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Bears Ears

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“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” ― Marcel Proust

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reflect.

May 14, 2024 § Leave a comment

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”
― Confucious

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Taos, NM

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“The beauty of a woman is not in the clothes she wears, the figure that she carries, or the way she combs her hair. The beauty of a woman is seen in her eyes, because that is the doorway to her heart, the place where love resides. True beauty in a woman is reflected in her soul. It’s the caring that she lovingly gives, the passion that she shows & the beauty of a woman only grows with passing years.”
― Audrey Hepburn

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subtle.

May 11, 2024 § Leave a comment

“No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence–that which makes its truth, its meaning – its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream–alone.” ― Joseph Conrad

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Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Culture National Historical-Park, New-Mexico

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“If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack.”
― Winston S. Churchill

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serene.

May 9, 2024 § Leave a comment

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Highway 58

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“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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divest.

May 6, 2024 § Leave a comment

“Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling “betrayals” of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.”
― Sue Monk Kidd

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Highway 395

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“Loving others means divesting ourselves of our status. We’re not being naive in doing it. We’ve surrendered it for good reason, believing that there is something better in exchange.”
― Brant Hansen

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house.

May 5, 2024 § Leave a comment

“A house without books is like a room without windows.” ― Horace Mann

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Aerial Castle Butte Monument Valley

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“There is an Indian proverb that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emtional, and a spiritual . Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person.”
― Rumer Godden

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haven.

May 3, 2024 § Leave a comment

“I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” ― Susan Sontag

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Angels Landing, Zion NP

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“Sections in the bookstore

– Books You Haven’t Read
– Books You Needn’t Read
– Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading

– Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written
– Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
– Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First
– Books Too Expensive Now and You’ll Wait ‘Til They’re Remaindered
– Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback
– Books You Can Borrow from Somebody
– Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too
– Books You’ve Been Planning to Read for Ages
– Books You’ve Been Hunting for Years Without Success
– Books Dealing with Something You’re Working on at the Moment
– Books You Want to Own So They’ll Be Handy Just in Case
– Books You Could Put Aside Maybe to Read This Summer

– Books You Need to Go with Other Books on Your Shelves
– Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
– Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now Time to Re-read
– Books You’ve Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It’s Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

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epiphany.

April 30, 2024 § Leave a comment

“Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world – the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.” ― Leonard Bernstein

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Truchas Peak

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“I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal.”
― Nick Hornby

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