Between Shadow & Soul

“The sense of sadness and of finality in leaving a place is a good emotion; I love that the story can’t be changed again and one more place is haunted –”

“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.”

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art – write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding.

They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life…but there’s still one more tier to all this; there is always that one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it always happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of those lovable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable… This is because the individual who embodies your personal definition of love does not really exist. The person is real, and the feelings are real— but you create the context. And context is everything. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they’re often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else.

It is a lonely feeling when someone you care about becomes a stranger.

I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people; to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole.