Give yourself permission to focus on something until you master it. Enjoy the process. This life is yours.

What does it mean to document something, an object, our lives, a story? I suppose that documenting things--through the lens of a camera, on paper, or with a sound recording device--is really only a way of contributing one more layer, something like soot, to all the things already sedimented in a collective understanding of the world.

∆ p.54, Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli

Have you ever noticed that when your mind is awakened or drawn to someone new, that person's name suddenly pops up everywhere you go? My friend Sophie calls it coincidence, and Mr. Simpless calls it Grace. He thinks that if one cares deeply about someone or something new one throws a kind of energy out into the world, and "fruitfulness" is drawn in.

| Mary Ann Shaffer

The universe could have been created ugly, and would have functioned. And yet there is beauty everywhere in creation. Beauty gives us an ache, to be worthy of that creation.

| Mary Oliver

It’s impossible to be lonely
when you’re zesting an orange.
Scrape the soft rind once
and the whole room
fills with fruit.
Look around: you have
more than enough.
Always have.
You just didn’t notice
until now.

∆ Amy Schmidt “ABUNDANCE,” in memory of Mary Oliver from Poets Respond, January 20, 2019

Voicing uncertainty is creative currency.

∆ Lucy McRae