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“The roots of loneliness are very deep … They find their food in the suspicion that there is no-one who cares and offers love without conditions.”

— Henri Nouwen

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Painter unknown

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"The inaccessibility of this loch is part of its power. Silence belongs to it. If jeeps find it out, or a funicular railway disfigures it, part of its meaning will be gone. The good of the greatest is not here relevant. It is necessary to be sometimes exclusive, not on behalf of rank or wealth, but of those human qualities that can apprehend loneliness."

— Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

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17. So I guess it’s time to let go of my tears, to let you go on into the night, quietly, quietly, as you let the world go, voice cut from you by the surgeon’s knife, only your hands to say goodbye, touching the leaves of the lemon tree one last time, or Britta’s pale, shivering arm, or trying to hold forever in your eyes this olive-tree twisted in the valley winds, or this flash of sunlight off the high Sierra snows.

Burton Hatlen, from Crossing Altamont

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A bird came down the walk: He did not know I saw; He bit an angle-worm in halves And ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a dew From a convenient grass, And then hopped sidewise to the wall To let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyes That hurried all abroad,- They looked like frightened beads, I thought; He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger; cautious, I offered him a crumb, And he unrolled his feathers And rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean, Too silver for a seam, Or butterflies, off banks of noon, Leap, splashless, as they swim.

— Emily Dickinson, A Bird Came Down

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David Lupton, illustration for the Folio Society edition of The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin

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I taught myself to live simply and wisely, to look at the sky and pray to God, and to wander long before evening to tire my superfluous worries. When the burdocks rustle in the ravine and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster droops I compose happy verses about life's decay, decay and beauty. I come back. The fluffy cat licks my palm, purrs so sweetly and the fire flares bright on the saw-mill turret by the lake. Only the cry of a stork landing on the roof occasionally breaks the silence. If you knock on my door I may not even hear.

—Anna Akhmatova

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Metamorphosis

10″x6″ Pencil and powdered graphite on bristol

Sometimes letting go changes everything.

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“الشجاع حر.”

— سنيكا الأصغر المصدر: خلِّدها - مقولات عن الحرية

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Tanka # 227

In all the places where I imagined I'd find you I found only my longing

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“Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we’ve seen, novels we’ve read, speeches we’ve heard, and daydreams we’ve savoured, and out of all that jumble it weaves a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going. This story tells me what to love, whom to hate and what to do with myself. This story may even cause me to sacrifice my life, if that’s what the plot requires. We all have our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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Life’s overflow is the infinite, Which gathers and glimmers around him—he’ll never catch it. Yet it lives in him, and, present, warming, And fertile, the fruit contains its surfeit.

Friedrich Hölderlin, 'Rousseau' (Trans. Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover)

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Obscure