Matthew

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“At the same yoga retreat, we stood and faced each other in pairs, really looking at each other from a close distance. We were told to simply BE with the other person, maintaining eye contact, with no social gestures like laughing, smiling, or winking to put ourselves at ease.

Grown women and men cried. Really and truly sobbed.

When we were finished with the exercise, we talked about how it had felt. The thread echoed again and again: many people had never felt so *seen* by another person. Seen without walls, without judgment....just seen, acknowledged, accepted. The experience was -- for so many painfully rare.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“When scholars study a thing, they strive
To kill it first, if its alive;
Then they have the parts and they’ve lost the whole
For the link that’s missing was the living soul.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

“We don't see people as they are. We see people as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin, Little Birds