STUDY OF THE SOUL

Life and all its good and bad and ugly things scary things which I would like to forget beautiful things which I would like to remember —the whole messy lovely true story of myself pulses within me. I believe that the sun shines if not here, then somewhere. Somewhere it rains, and things will grow green and wonderful. Somewhere inside me, too, it rains, and things will grow green and wonderful. Sometimes my insides rain from the inside out. And then I know I am alive I am alive I am alive

It takes courage…to endure the sharp pains of self discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives.

“Compassion was the most important, perhaps the sole law of human existence.”

“One of the things I try to do: memorize the smallest, most mundane and ordinary, unprepossessing, and virtually invisible of physical moments: the look and feel of a certain wall at a certain time on a certain day. Those walls, those little shacks, those cats in the sun: all that is lacking in self-consciousness I seek to hold in vision, memory. (Simple composition, color tints, a wash of light, crumbled brick, cold shadow, stillness, rose-color dirt, a twitching whisker.) Not knowing why, but thinking I may want it later, I try to keep it and I never can.”