what has been taken in

“- Do the best you can, whatever arises.
- Be at peace with yourself.
- Find a job you enjoy.
- Live in simple conditions; housing, food, clothing; get rid of clutter.
- Contact nature every day; feel the earth under your feet.
- Take physical exercise through hard work; through gardening or walking.
- Don’t worry; live one day at a time.
- Share something every day with someone else; if you live alone, write someone; give something away; help someone else somehow.
- Take time to wonder at life and the world; see some humor in life where you can.
- Observe the one life in all things.
- Be kind to the creatures.”

From the book, “Loving and Leaving the Good Life” by Helen Nearing

(via miss-autopsy)

Still working on the third & fourth ones!

(via rambleready)

(via rambleready)

“We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We’d never expect to understand a piece of music in one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once. Books and music share more in terms of resonance than just a present-tense correlation of heard note to read word. Books need time to dawn on us, it takes time to understand what makes them, structurally, in thematic resonance, in afterthought, and always in correspondence with the books which came before them, because books are produced by books more than by writers; they’re a result of all the books that went before them. Great books are adaptable; they alter with us as we alter in life, they renew themselves as we change and re-read them at different times in our lives. You can’t step into the same story twice — or maybe it’s that stories, books, art can’t step into the same person twice, maybe it’s that they allow for our mutability, are ready for us at all times, and maybe it’s this adaptability, regardless of time, that makes them art, because real art (as opposed to transiet art, which is real too, just for less time) will hold us at all our different ages like it held all the people before us and will hold all the people after us, in an elasticity and with a generosity that allow for all our comings and goings. Because come then go we will, and in that order.” Ali Smith, from Artful, copyright 2013

“Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain.” Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek