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I felt untethered from my age and femininity, and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time. One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one’s own.

If life was completely incredible, if every moment was a perfect 10, then we’d all be totally present all the time.

There did not have to be an answer to the question why; everything important started out mysterious and this mystery was like a great sea you had to be brave enough to cross. How many times had I turned back at the first ripple of self-doubt? You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new.

…since time moved forward, not backward, sixty-five was tomorrow and twenty-five was moot…. I understood that death was coming and that all my current preoccupations were kind of naive; I still operated as if I could win somehow. Not the vast and total winning I had hoped for in the previous decades, but a last chance to get it together before winter came, my final season.

“On a trail, it is nearly impossible to be distracted for any significant amount of time. We are forced to pay attention in the truest sense of the phrase. This attention is a currency we trade for a more fulfilling life, a life lived on our terms, a life that allows for and even embraces discomfort and pain so that we may acquire a fuller experience of joy.”

When we stumble upon momentary discomfort, we don’t look for the underlying cause. Instead, we look for a modern-world quick fix…. Headaches, digestive, upset, low energy, unfulfillment, and general unhappiness are no match for the technological “solutions“ our species has created, and this is precisely why it is so easy to become addicted to them…. we are becoming softer and less resilient by the minute.

“We’re not playing to win, we’re playing to play. And ultimately, playing is fun. Perfectionism gets in the way of fun. A more skillful goal might be to find comfort in the process. To make and put out successive works with ease. / Oscar Wilde said that some things are too important to be taken seriously. Art is one of those things.”

“If you see tremendous beauty or tremendous pain where other people see little or nothing at all, you’re confronted with big feelings all the time. These emotions can be confusing and overwhelming. When those around you don’t see and feel what you feel, this can lead to a sense of isolation and a general feeling of not belonging, of otherness…. It’s a blessing and a curse.”

“There was no north to my compass. No planned route to follow. I had been living a life of childlike simplicity, day after day exploring caves and coves, poring over rock pools, riding swells, dangling from clifftops. Now I had no idea how I was supposed to fit myself into adult life, and there was a growing pressure of expectation.”

“It was a pilot whale, and I don’t know why it died…. But I felt a reverence in its presence, a pull that I could not fully explain…. I wanted to know how it had died, but, more than that, I was curious to know how it had lived. Where it had been, what it had seen. I wanted to leave the shore behind, to venture into a world of motion, dictated by the tide and wind, the world of the whale.”

“It’s not an unpleasant place to be, out there on Alcatraz with only the flowers and the wind, and a bell buoy moaning and the tide surging through the Golden Gate, but to like a place like that, you have to want a moat.

I sometimes do, which is what I am talking about here.” (From “Rock of Ages”)

Unputdownable!

“I lay down on the grass, and felt of the wildflowers with my open hand. And I looked up through the branches of the olive tree. I wanted it that way—the sky in bits and pieces. I was happy…. I could hear something that was like the grass growing, but it wasn’t that, I knew. It was all the sounds coming together, and being soft—so unlike the sounds of a city.”

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s store at 4 a.m. of a bad night, and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”

“The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself…. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

“I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.“

Describing Ira Sandperl in “Where the Kissing Never Stops”: “…the general look of a man who has, all his life, followed some imperceptibly but fatally askew rainbow.”

Morality often impedes free thinking. Moral indignation is a salve for people unable or unwilling to try to understand. Again the maelstrom: understand your world and detach from it, or be drowned by it. The world is understandable; too much information makes it feel like it isn’t. Look for patterns. Invert your biases. Debate the other sides point of view—anything except take it for what it first appears to be.