“I think a lot of the work comes out of that—turning what starts as claustrophobia or containment into something that is releasing and infinite, the paradox that we live within a body that has a skin that is our bounding condition and yet have this faculty of imaginative extension into endless space.”

~ Antony Gormley

While I’m waiting impatiently for the rest of the world to calibrate to my ideal technology habits, I’ve started to watch myself watch other people peer into their devices as they walk down the street, sit in coffee shops, and stand at urinals.

This impulse has grown into a challenging, but fascinating attention exercise that has lead to some liberating insights that have shifted my reactions to other people’s observable tech habits.  

"You are the awareness of your thoughts. You are not your thoughts. You can let your thoughts happen. Just know that the real you is the awareness."

~ RuPaul

"I began to realize that the only place where things were actually real was at this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you." 

~ David Whyte

the strangest things can conjure up the past,
and forgotten time will find its long way back. 

as thin as air, as light as snow
some combination of the unknown,
but it doesn’t matter, i just know i need more.

~ Sleeping at Last
 

"When blind people learn to see, sighted people seem inspired to want to learn to see their way better, more clearly, with less fear, because this exemplifies the immense capacity within us all to navigate any type of challenge, through any form of darkness, to discoveries unimagined when we are activated."

~ Daniel Kish

"This is just simply asking, again, as if we had arrived for the first time, what is the relationship of the human project to time and space?"

~ Antony Gormley

"Truth clears away / So many souvenirs. The shelves come clean." ~ Clive James

"The world in front of me and the world 'inside' me are not merely adjacent, but overlapping; superimposed. A book feels like the intersection between these two domains – or like a conduit; a bridge; a passage between them." ~ Peter Mendelsund 

"Meditating on the body means meditating on body sensation, not mental images of the body."

~ Michael Taft

Mindfulness practice leads to better decision making due to the skills it develops over time.  It’s about paying attention to ordinary experience differently.

Stories and our individual lives share the same elements: protagonists, antagonists, conflict, plot, action, climax, and resolution.  What are the atomic components that make these narrative elements possible? 

"Meditation as a path to enlightenment could be described as merely setting the stage for nature/grace to eliminate from you what needs to be eliminated."

~ Shinzen Young