Dawn Stowell

“I discovered I was infected with a terrible suspicion of myself and my inability to stay still, my dreadful insomnia of place.”
― Aritha Van Herk, Restlessness

“When you first open a book, you enter a liminal space. You are neither in this world, the world wherein you hold a book (say, this book), nor in that world (the metaphysical space the words point toward). To some extent this polydimensionality describes the feeling of reading in general-one is in many many places places at at once once.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“The lived experience of the earth element is unique to every woman, but it is always marked by a persistent beckoning to come home to a more ancient version of herself, to escape from the overnarrowed and conventional life she had been living, and to seek authenticity more than approval.”
― Danielle Dulsky, The Holy Wild: A Heathen Bible for the Untamed Woman

“There is, in fact, no way back either to the wolf or to the child. From the very start, there is no innocence and no singleness. Every created thing, even the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple. It has been thrown into the muddy stream of being and may never more swim back again to its source. The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life. Nor will suicide really solve your problem [...] You will, instead, embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace. This is the road that Buddha and every great man has gone, whether consciously or not, insofar as fortune has favored his quest.”
― Hesse Hermann