“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
Epigraph
Say It Again
Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything has to be said again.
Wisdom
You can lead a person to wisdom but you can’t make them think.
Follow
“The Road goes ever on and on down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, and I must follow, if I can.”
– Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit
Risk
“Take the risk or lose the chance.” – Someone
Be Curious
”Be curious, not judgmental.”
Someone, (not Walt Whitman)
Strict
Be strict with yourself and tolerant of others. Your standards are for you.
Mystery
“We don’t know enough about ourselves. I think it’s better to know that you don’t know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you. But, these days, of course, everybody knows everything, that’s why so many people are so lost.”
– James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk
Less Study More Life
[I]n order to write a book, do a deed, paint a picture with some life in it, one has to be alive oneself. And so, unless you never want to progress, study is a matter of very secondary importance for you. Enjoy yourself as much as you can, have as many diversions as you can, and remember that what people demand in art nowadays is something very much alive, with strong colour and great intensity. So intensify your own health and strength and life a little; that is the best study.
Vincent Van Gogh
Preservationists
“We’re all so frightened by time, the way it moves on and the way things disappear. That’s why we’re photographers. We’re preservationists by nature. We take pictures to stop time, to commit moments to eternity. Human nature made tangible.
People are taking more pictures now than ever before, billions of them, but there are no slides, no prints. Just data. Electronic dust. Years from now when they dig us up there won’t be any pictures to find, no record of who we were or how we lived.”
Ben Ryder, Kodachrome
The Journey Changes You
Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable.
Anonymous
Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But
that’s OK. The journey changes you; it should change
you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your
consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You
take something with you. Hopefully, you leave
something good behind.
Take Five
What is the most enjoyable five-minute stretch of your day? How could you lengthen it to ten minutes?