“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.
Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.”
–Neil Gaiman
Photography art – Ralph Steiner, This Year Ride a Bicycle, 1924
“Remember we really don’t know anything. Keep your baby eyes (which are the eyes of genius) on what we don’t know. That is your playground, bare and graveled, safe and unbreakable.”
– Lincoln Steffens
Art – Queen Mab’s Cave by William Turner
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
– Anaïs Nin
In photo – Anais Nin, 1930s
What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself…”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
A yet lived life comes with new trousseau of thought and feeling. At times we have to give in to treading softly and happily as if we have to relive it all over again…and there are never too many moonlit paths, nor enough spiders.
That is why we write, to feel in the mouth the sky of the life already-lived.
Write down all the things that make you so goddamn glad you’re alive. Simple things like: watering plants, the sunlight that seeps on your bed at 10:00 A.M, smelling the crispy autumn air, dancing in the rain or playing in the snow, watching the sunrise or sunset, decorating your room with fairy lights, googling for surrealistic paintings, lighting too many candles in mid-days, eating pizza while watching your favorite show, searching how many people have the same name as you in the world…
Write down more ways and words to say: “I love you”… Armors for moments when you feel depleted and drenched of kindness. Dissolve this by writing.
This is my predicament, situations and people that make me forget who I am, how kind I am, who make my heart turn to stone, but who never, ever, were permitted to steal the real Me.
Léon Frédéric – Flemish Lace Maker
“Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.”
― Maya Angelou
In photo – the incredible, beautiful, brilliant-minded Hedy Lamarr.
“Best Witchcraft is Geometry.” – Emily Dickinson
10 rules of writing (which apply to all creative work) from one of our greatest living writers:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/09/05/jeanette-winterson-10-tips-on-writing/
They all boil down to: “Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.” – Neil Gaiman
Donating = Loving
“Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky.”
– Kahlil Gibran
Art by Daniel Garber.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination…”
– Mary Oliver
Art by Albert Marquet.
“Kiss a lover,
Dance a measure,
Find your name
And buried treasure.
Face your life,
It’s pain,
It’s pleasure,
Leave no path untaken.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
Art by Anthony Goicolea.
