Sarah Avenir

when I did nothing but search myself and steep in each minute of the deepening indigo sky, I suddenly had somewhere everywhere to be.

The way to dissolve our resistance to life is to meet it face to face.

“And do you know, do you know that mankind can live without the Englishman, it can live without Germany, it can live only too well without the Russian man, it can live without science, without bread, and it only cannot live without beauty.” from Demons by…

If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue.

As I’ve been working on my prototype for the path of Action in The Self-Taught Life, I’ve noticed something strange.

“As J.J.

All day I think about it, then at night I say it, Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?

What I can’t get used to here (I’ll tell you While we hide together, you faceless in shadow) is the smallness.

“It’s life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, not the discovery itself, at all.

c/o Stanisław Lem Dear The Futurological Congress, Have you ever met someone who made you laugh so hard while you were with them, but then when you went home they had you pondering the meaning of life, and whether or not society is barreling toward its own

c/o James Ramsay Ullman Dear The Day on Fire, There is so much I want to say to you, I don’t know where to begin.

Or: Why I don’t do things anymore I don’t know if it’s getting older or the experience of running businesses and having to make all of these meta-decisions all the time, but somehow I’ve become a “forest” person.

c/o Rick Rubin Dear The Creative Act, The time we spent together has been transformative.

WHO WILL WIN THE EPIC BATTLE OF OUR TIMES?

c/o Anne Truitt Dear Daybook, First, an apology.

c/o Ursula K.

c/o Anthony Doerr Dear All the Light We Cannot See, I was so excited to read you.

c/o Virginia Woolf Dear Orlando, I’ve been wanting to write you for a while to tell you how much I enjoyed getting to know you.

c/o Victor Hugo Dear Hunchback of Notre Dame, Forgive me for using your English name.

c/o Virginia Woolf Dear A Writer’s Diary When we first met, it was kismet.

c/o Alice Walker Dear Meridian, Hoo boy, you are captivating.

c/o Penelope Fitzgerald Dear The Blue Flower, I cried when we said goodbye.

c/o Patricia Highsmith Dear The Price of Salt, I ached when I read you.

c/o Peter Mayle Dear A Year in Provence, I know we said our goodbyes last week, but I wanted to tell you how special our time together was to me.

Well then: it’s a pointless task, and that’s exactly why I need to do it.

My brother died two weeks ago.

Part one: A story about productivity systems, personal growth, and discovering alternatives to both I was on a podcast the other day, and the host asked me, “Are you a startup CEO or a maintenance CEO?”

“To leave the distracted masses to join the focused few…is a transformative experience.”

During the pandemic, David Whyte (one of my favorite poets and thinkers) has been offering online seminars.

”I’ve been thinking, you know—I’m not sure that primarily the perception of beauty isn’t just intensity of feeling free from pain; intensity of perception without any tissue destruction.”

”You don’t really own anything.

”If the push and the pull are not greater than the anxiety and the habit, they’re not going to move.

“’You have set us both free,’ he said.

”Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake.

As the season of the weirdo at &yet is coming to a close, I wrote this piece to make a business case for weirdness.

”Fear is the mind-killer.

“Not belonging can manifest in different degrees of intensity.

“Joyful chaos, working in tune with the seasons, telling the time by the sun, variety, change, self-direction; all this was replaced with a brutal, standardized work culture, the effects of which we are still suffering from today.”

I wrote this piece for &yet’s Find Your Weirdos project.

“She says it is a good thing to have no sense of how it is done in the things that amuse you.

“The key to warrior ship is not being afraid of who you are.”

“Only a few achieve the colossal task of holding together, without being split asunder, the clarity of their vision alongside an ability to take their place in a materialistic world.

“All these years of thinking ended up like this: in front of all this beauty, understanding nothing.”

“When they came back from vacation, they felt really good.

“The right scale in work gives power to affection.

“Nature is, above all, profligate.

“We either get success or lessons.

“Ain’t every woman’s daughter made from the death of the mama, somehow or another?”

“They were used to waiting for orders and being told how to live.

“Feminism has a plan to transform the magic circle, to embrace the interests of every living creature and to promote a vision of flourishing for the whole.