Sarah Avenir

So…fun update for you.

“What is easy is sustainable.

“The impulse toward order is born of fear and desire, and the impulse toward chaos is born of the same.

“Being present to the life that presses upon us does not mean simply being alert and full of consciousness.

“They may be right.

“We ache to have our absence from the circle of belonging noticed.

“Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy.

“People used to write about how I seemed stiff.

The river is famous to the fish.

“To love another person isn’t only to admire their strengths and see what’s great about them.

““Those who want to create life must also embrace it and be reborn from within.

“There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China.

“Stop walking through the world looking for confirmation that you don’t belong.

Oh, not because happiness exists, that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.

The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and say, sit here.

“Suffering is not bad; it helps you very much.

“The way to greater confidence is not to reassure ourselves of our own dignity; it’s to come to peace with our inevitable ridiculousness.

“There are moments on the brink, when you can give yourself to a lover, or not; give in to self-doubt, uncertainty, and admonishment, or not; dive into a different culture, or not; set sail for the unknown, or not; walk out onto a stage, or not.

“A choice confronts us.

“Perhaps the most important thing I learned is that the artist is not separate from the work and therefore cannot judge it.

“When you’re religious in a deep way, you sense the sacred in things—a faint and mysterious pulse.

“You can’t make people use streets they have no reason to use.

My faith is a great weight hung on a small wire, as doth the spider hang her baby on a thin web, as doth the vine, twiggy and wooden, hold up grapes like eyeballs, as many angels dance on the head of a pin.

“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

“We say ‘far away’; the Zulu people have a word for that which means ‘There where someone cries out: O mother, I am lost.’”

“We will be given every opportunity to lean through joy, and when we deny ourselves that, we will learn through pain.

“Having banished art to the museum, we fail to give it a place in ordinary life.

“Intimacy means that we can be who we are in a relationship, and allow the other person to do the same.

“Why does one feel so different at night?

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life.

The final shadow may close my eyes, carry me off from white of day, unchaining my soul at the hour of its anxious obsequious desire. but it will not leave the memory of that other shore where it once burned, for my fire can swim me through the frigid wate…

“Risk!

A heavy sleeper’s guide to getting up in the morning My problem with waking up started 17 years ago.

Act one: Get laid off If that’s not possible, make some other kind of drastic/heroic/insane move that will make step number two possible.

It’s almost New Years!

I love to work on the areas of my life that are not quite what I know they could be.

When I was a kid, I loved playing role-playing games.

“Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going…I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry.

They say that when you’re your own boss, you’ve got the worst boss in the world.