Sarah Avenir

“But I find that for myself, without exception, the more I deal with the work as something that is my own, as something that is personal, the more successful it is.

“A familiar pantry is like being surrounded by friends who won’t let you down, within instant reach.”

“I tell you these stories because these things happen to everyone.

“Albert Einstein put it best: The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant.

“When I was younger, I had wanted to be at the very center of all the action in New York, but I slowly came to realize that there is no one center.

“It’s hard to convince people that catastrophic weather changes are coming on a nice day.”

“From a distance, most things look beautiful.”

In this podcast, designer/developer Bryan Zavestoski and I chat about when to take risks, how to be strategically creative, and how to remain entrepreneurial even when being part of a larger organization.

In this episode of To Build a Swing, Adam and I are talking about the soul vs. the personality and the importance of integrating the two.

“Adults, I understand, have many faults, they are not perfect—even though they have lived longer, even though they offer themselves as examples to children.

Gather the Courage is a guided journaling project we made at &yet to help creative leaders to reflect, be encouraged, and make courageous decisions.

Adam and I made a podcast!

Not known, because not looked for But heard, half heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea.

It is a small step to remember how life led to this moment’s hesitation.

“The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears…the price of our passion and commitment involves the shattering of deep personal illusions of immunity and safety.”

“If you are too good and too quiet for too long, it will cost you.

“The truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do.”

“The main risk information abundance poses is not that one’s attention will be occupied or used up by information, as though it were some finite, quantifiable resource, but rather that one will lose control over one’s attentional processes.

“The fascinating thing—and the thing to remember, is that if you have enough going for you in the way of momentum and luck, everyone looks at the developing pattern on the rug whether it’s an Oriental design or the stain from the egg, and says, ‘What a be…

“Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

“Ah, sweet mysterious, boundless feast at which we so often wander blind and bound and starving.

“For the greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.

“Change…can backfire.

“Presence emerges when we feel personally powerful, which allows us to be acutely attuned to our most sincere selves.

“When we consider what…is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other.

“Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.”

“When you get clear enough, you will realize that the real problem is that there is something inside of you that can have a problem with almost anything.”

“Looking for ways to minimize risk is a form of collusion.

“But it was all the same choice, every time.

“If we forsake willpower, the power-oriented approach to dealing with ourselves, we are free to turn to love and desire for motivation.

“If being an artist seems too good to be true to you, you will devise a price tag for it that strikes you as unpayable.”

“…when they asked me whether I had anything else to say I told them that in the beginning you understand the world but not yourself, and when you finally understand yourself you no longer understand the world.”

“To chart that landscape fully, three important paths must be taken—intellectual, emotional, and spiritual—and none can be ignored.

Dear friends, family, and folks we know from the Internet who have squirreled their way into our hearts, We have a new name!

“If I live to age 83.4, I have just forty-five more times to see the flowers bloom in the spring, and I will shuffle off this mortal coil precisely as they bloom that forty-fifth time.”

I wrote a newsletter for &yet a few weeks ago from Nashville, TN, host of my angsty teen years.

When I was in the eighth grade, one of my teachers (who was also a self-proclaimed prophet) told me that the lesson I would need to learn in my life was “Do not strive.”

I’ve always valued the privilege to deeply focus on whatever I’m working on, but I’ve strived to do this while still having multiple big projects and priorities going at the same time.

You know how you hear about a book so many times that you feel like you’ve read it, but you actually haven’t?

This fall, my partner and I bought Tumbleweird, a local free alternative paper started a few years ago by some great people who wanted to see a counter-cultural publication in our area along the lines of The Stranger in Seattle and The Portland Mercury. […

For the past year and a half, my counselor has been working with me through some hard personal stuff.

“Here, in the new venture, the extraordinary, the magical, the wonderful, and even the strange come out of the ordinary and the familiar.”

“I’m not looking to be offended.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

“Loving oneself is no easy matter…because it means loving all of oneself, including the shadow where one is inferior and socially so unacceptable.

“For it is humanly certain that most of us remember very little of what we have read.

Last month, I wrote that I’m doing a complete re-write of Gather the People (rather than a heavy edit).

“In your whole life nobody has ever abused you more than you have abused yourself.