I would love to live like a river flows,
carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.
– John O'Donohue

Sometimes, cause and effect are centuries apart.

| Rebecca Solnit

The only person who acts sensibly is my tailor. He takes my measure anew every time he sees me. Everyone else goes by the old measurements and expect them to fit me.

| George Bernard Shaw

Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this [. . .] sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.

∆ Salman Rushdie, from The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Henry Holt & Co., 1999)

ikče wičaša, ikče winyan ( Lakota ): to be a common man, to be a common woman.

To be common. To do things that no one will see. To die unknown was an honor. In fact it was sought out. To be shielded from view meant you could serve with no agenda to be seen. To be common, to be lost in the crowd, gave power to the crowd itself, the collective.