I try to impress upon my students the importance of looking, listening. . . paying attention, in other words. You must pay attention.
A procession is a participants' journey, while a parade is a performance with an audience.
In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.
If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.
Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our lives.
Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.
An option hides where we don't want it to hide.
What a childhood I had. Once on my birthday my ol' man gave me a bat. The first day I played with it, it flew away.
To God all things are beautiful, good, and right; human beings, on the other hand, deem some things right and others wrong. It would not be better if things happened to people just as they wish.
The best piece of advice that I have ever received is from my mom. And she said, "Do you, boo boo. " That is forever going to be the best advice.