i want to say

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Of all the pitfalls in our paths and the tremendous delays and wanderings off the track I want to say that they are not what they seem to be. I want to say that all that seems like fantastic mistakes are not mistakes, all that seems like error is not error; and it all has to be done. That which seems like a false step is the next step.

—Agnes Martin
Writings

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Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will toss it all and not look back.
 

—Annie Dillard
The Writing Life

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seeker of truth

follow no path

all paths lead where

truth is here


—E. E. Cummings

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love is not all

   

Agnes Martin, Friendship, 1963

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Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship is always an act of recognition. 

—John O'Donohue

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Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.

Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolutions power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It may well be. I do not think I would.


—Edna St. Vincent Millay

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the parable of the equal hearts

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Once there were two lovers that had equal hearts.

One would pursue one,
the other would pursue the other.

Then the angels looked down and said:
“What a waste,” and made them perceive each other.
Their hearts melted into one.

They had no use for the world
so they leaped into the swift river.
This heart was always restless
and the only place where it had any rest at all was on the beach.

But even on the beach one said:
“I wish we’d never been made one.”
And immediately one half flew up in the sky
and the other half into the sea.
But they yearned for each other.
And when it rained the one in the sea said:
“This is a message from my other half in the sky.”
And when the water was evaporated from the ocean and rose
up, the other said:
“This is a message from my other half in the sea.”

The angels were stumped.
There’s one thing that God is not able to endure –
a suffering heart.
He felt one half in the sky and one half in the sea.

God thought what to do.
So the one in the sky fell down into the sea
and immediately both turned to sea water.
Ever since that time when the water is drawn up from the sea
and it rains this is not an ordinary rain. It’s the rain
that affects people and softens them.
I painted a painting called This Rain.


—Agnes Martin
the parable of the equal hearts

—Agnes Martin
This Rain, 1960 Oil on canvas

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