Koa Home

my commonplace book - quotes // collages //everyday artistry // food // poetry // music // feng shui // dreams // archetypes //

[koahome]

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.

- Rebecca West

[koahome]

“I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.” ― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

[koahome]

[koahome]

The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings (...) - Rebecca Solnit https://lithub.com/how-to-be-a-writer-10-tips-from-rebecca-solnit/

[koahome]

C.S. Lewis

[koahome]

“I love to doubt as well as know.”

- Dante Alighieri

[koahome]

... Philosophy is, first and foremost, equipment for living, for making existential sense of this very real world we inhabit. - Thomas Chatterton Williams

[koahome]

You fail only if you stop writing

- Ray Bradbury

[koahome]

If you would escape moral and physical assassination, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing—court obscurity, for only in oblivion does safety lie.

- Elbert Hubbard

[koahome]

“That is part of the beauty of all literature . You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

[koahome]

Most of us have two lives. The life we live and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance. - Steven Pressfield

[koahome]

“To be ourselves we must have ourselves – possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must “recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves." ― Oliver Sacks

[koahome]

[koahome]

“The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.”

—Anaïs Nin

[koahome]

If you are not willing to be a fool, you can't become a master.

Jordan B. Peterson

[koahome]

“We cannot wait until we we feel like we are enough according to the standards that are set around us.

We live in a world that gives us a picture of what the ideal change-maker looks like, or what the ideal entrepreneur looks like, or whatever it is that you want to be. A lot of people are striving to be that so that they feel like they can be the person that they see themselves as.

But that's not how it works.

You start where you are with what you have. If it's nothing, you start with nothing. You take the first step.

I learned when we were building the movement that if I only knew what to do now, that was enough. People were asking us as we were building the movement, ‘So Evan, what's next? What's next?’ And eventually, I said to them, ‘I don't know what's next.’ And some people said, ‘Ah, so you're not serious,’ or ‘You don't know what you're doing.’

But it was knowing what I needed to do now and doing it that opened the door to what I needed to do next. So start where you are. You cannot wait until you know everything. You cannot wait until everyone knows you.

You cannot wait until you have all the resources, because that day will probably not come. The resources come as you do. Networks come as you go, as you start. Ideas come when you put that first idea that seems impossible or weird or stupid into motion, you get the next idea of what to do.”

- Evan Mawarire

[koahome]

Alive Together by Lisel Mueller Speaking of marvels, I am alive together with you, when I might have been alive with anyone under the sun, when I might have been Abelard's woman or the whore of a Renaissance pope or a peasant wife with not enough food and not enough love, with my children dead of the plague. I might have slept in an alcove next to the man with the golden nose, who poked it into the business of stars, or sewn a starry flag for a general with wooden teeth. I might have been the exemplary Pocahontas or a woman without a name weeping in Master's bed for my husband, exchanged for a mule, my daughter, lost in a drunken bet. I might have been stretched on a totem pole to appease a vindictive god or left, a useless girl-child, to die on a cliff. I like to think I might have been Mary Shelley in love with a wrong-headed angel, or Mary's friend. I might have been you. This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless, our chances of being alive together statistically nonexistent; still we have made it, alive in a time when rationalists in square hats and hatless Jehovah's Witnesses agree it is almost over, alive with our lively children who-but for endless ifs- might have missed out on being alive together with marvels and follies and longings and lies and wishes and error and humor and mercy and journeys and voices and faces and colors and summers and mornings and knowledge and tears and chance.