
It is vital (in all senses of the term) that we enter into a dialogic relation to what is around us, and that we acknowledge the extent to which the knower is implicated in what comes to be known.*
(Annie Pirrie)
Life and reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others.**
(Alan Watts)
If we only wear business and knowing, we will never be able to move from what we know into what we do not know. Nan Shepherd, understanding that all things have an inside, confesses on our behalf:
‘I knew when I looked for a long time that I had hardly begun to see.’^
Better to wear compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience and love – clothes we can only wear slowly, clothes that are taking a lifetime of learning to wear.
(*From Anne Pirrie’s Virtue and the Quiet Art of Scholarship.)
(**Alan Watts, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: I and Thou.)
(^From nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain.)