"If I had to write a poem to end all poems,
it would be the word ‘lonely’
in every language."

~ Caitlyn Siehl

"The success of Homo sapiens as a species is built on our inability to tell the difference between a fiction and a reality."

~ Yuval Noah Harari

"It’s easier to live in the story you tell yourself about the world rather than the world itself."

~ Nate Staniforth

"Meditation practice supports mindfulness, but meditation is not mindfulness; meditation merely helps train the mind to be in a mindful state."

~ Manuel A. Manotas

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.  

Making sense is our second language.

Sensing comes first.

"Dive in with your eyes closed
For the life you were born to claim
And the water will be paralyzed
By the courage you contain
And the flutter of your earnest heart
It will fill the silent seas"

~ Ryan O'Neal 

"Take a deep breath.

Do not smart off to a policeman.

Do not step off the curb until you can walk all the way across the
street. From the curb you can study the pedestrians who are trapped
in the middle of the crazed and roaring traffic.

Be good.

Walk down different streets.

Backwards."

~ Ron Padgett

"Holiness is reached not through effort or will, but by stopping; by an inward coming to rest; a place from which we can embody the spirit of all our holy days, a radical, inhabited simplicity, where we live in a kind of ongoing surprise and with some wonder and appreciation."

~ David Whyte

"Those things that motivate people are often the exact opposite of what makes them effective and successful politically."

~ Robb Willer 

What does it mean to let our thoughts drift by like clouds?

Shifting our awareness from what our thoughts mean to how they fluctuate is an attentional exercise that develops liberating abilities over time. 

Observing the movement of clouds can provide a glimpse into how we can relate to mental activity more objectively, but it oversimplifies things when the analogy is taken too literally.

I took this photo with a disposable camera – after accidentally frying the digital one I'd brought on the first day of the trip – and it's one of my all-time favorite shots. It's a reminder to me that holiness and human imperfection are inseparably tangled up together.

Burn the scorecards, balance out the scales
We are one wind distracted by our different sails
Underneath what's detectable with eyes
Every particle's vibrating with the same life

"There's a lot more going on in your brain and your body than you can ever be aware of. And yet, most people identify themselves with this little flash-lit area of consciousness."

~ Rae Armantrout 

"Brains seek a balance between exploiting the knowledge we’ve earned and exploring new surprises. In developing over eons, brains have gotten this tension well balanced – an exploration/exploitation tradeoff that strikes the balance between flexibility and rigor. Too much predictability and we tune out; too much surprise and we become disoriented. We live in a constant tug-of-war between routine and novelty. Creativity lies within that tension."

~ David Eagleman

"It’s a very difficult principle to grasp, this idea that actually, what I don’t know matters enormously, and what I can’t see matters enormously."

~ Daniel Kahneman

"Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer."

~ Brad Aaron Modlin

"I think mindfulness meditation is very well suited to becoming more aware of our how minds work and doing something about it."

~ Robert Wright

"I will always hold you close,
But I will learn to let you go.
I promise I’ll do better."

Sleeping at Last

"No matter how confident you are about your ability to read other people, your brain is always just guessing, and then it's checking those guesses against what's going on in the world and either correcting them or not."

~ Lisa Feldman Barrett