verbatim

## the palace guards are more powerful than the emperor

“If you see beauty in something, don't wait for others to agree.”

— Jack Elias

What I saw of their faith, finally, was not through their answers to my generic questions about Christian beliefs, it was reflected in their faces and enacted in their gestures as I attended religious services beside them. In the process, pretty much every reductive and monolithic position I’d unthinkingly held about Christianity was turned on its head.

Consistency, over a long period of time, looks like magic to others.

The technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die.



\- DFW

The friendship problem

People will embrace their own degradation and subjugation, if you just make it sufficiently addictive and distracting.

A panel from the comic strip <n>Calvin and Hobbes</n> by artist <n>Bill Watterson</n>.

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

“The ability to ask beautiful questions, often in very unbeautiful moments, is one of the great disciplines of a human life. And a beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it as it does by having it answered. And you don’t have to do anything about it. You just have to keep asking. And before you know it, you will find yourself actually shaping a different life, meeting different people, finding conversations that are leading you in those directions that you wouldn’t even have seen before.”

— David Whyte, On Being interview “The Conversational Nature of Reality”

the majority of the people learned to play freely on the street. They learned social negotiation. They learned unscripted, un-choreographed, unmonitored interaction with people. They fought, they made rules, they made peace, they made friends, they broke up, they made friends again. They developed social muscles. And the majority of these very same people’s children do not play freely on the street. And I think that an adult needs to play freely on the street as well.

the people who draw you in, i mean really draw you in aren’t doing it through color palettes or clever tweets. they’re animated. by something real. something felt. something that leaks out in everything they say, wear, post, love, fear, make.

& you know it when you see it.

your nervous system knows it.

it hums.

<n>Intimacy These Days</n>, a piece by writer <n>Jess Janz</n>.

Perhaps there’s a bravery complex when we’re staring ahead versus at one another, giving ourselves permission to go places we’ve stopped ourselves from going before.