That’s why they always put two blank pages in the back of the atlas.  They’re for new countries.  You’re meant to fill them in yourself.*
The BFG

We have misunderstood our need to adventure. 
It is not to conquer the world but to conquer ourselves.

I’ve been collecting a few words as I’ve been reading this morning –
Strength and love,
Grace and mercy,
Hope and joy –
Leaving me with the question,
What if I were to play with these more than I do,
To bring them together in some artist-palette kind of way
today?

*Roald Dahl’s The BFG.

One of the best things a man can bring into the world with him is a natural humility of spirit. About the next best thing he can bring, and they usually go together, is an appreciative spirit — a loving and susceptible heart.*
John Burroughs

Here is my Secret. It’s quite simple. One see clearly with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.**
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

It’s not that we do or don’t see with the heart;
We’re all learning.

*From Maria Popova’s The Marginalian: Cosmic Consolation for Human Hardship: The Great Naturalist John Burroughs on How to Live with Life;
**Austin Kleon’s blog: How to draw what is invisible.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.*
David Whyte

A morning when you become a pure vessel
For what wants to ascend from silence
…
To reach beyond silence
And the wheel of repitition.
…
In order to come to birth
In a clean line of form,
That claims from time
A rhythm not yet heard
That calls space to
A different shape.**
John O’Donohue

I do not know this day,
I have never met it before.

Perhaps,
Before I imprint it with memory,
I can allow it to be its own freshness and newness,
Welcoming me to find my newness, too.

What will I leave in yesterday?
What will begin in me
today?

If you are comfortable with where you are, you will never know how far you can go. If you refuse to change, then you refuse to grow.^

*David Whyte’s A Morning Poem:
**John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For Artists at the Start of the Day;
^Erwin McManus’ The Way of the Warrior.

Whether we like it or not, the lives we live are stories. … Stories can be edited. Stories can be fixed. Stories can go from dull to exciting, from rambling to focused, and from drudgery to read to exhilarating to live.**
Donald Miller

Your job as a writer is making sentences.
Your other jobs include fixing sentences, and arranging sentences.
If this is the case – making, fixing, killing, arranging –
how can your writing possibly flow?
It can’t.^
Verlyn Klinkenborg

We can wish it weren’t so,
But to make the improvements we desire to the story we are writing for ourselves
we will need to look beyond the obvious,
Beneath the surface:

The secret to diagnosing the problem with a broken scene lies in the subtext.^^

There we will find
the things we must create, mend, get rid of and rearrange,
Words before phrases, phrases before sentences …
We get the idea.

Even the most broken stories can be improved
with the help of others
and time
and small steps.

Each society and each individual usually explores only a tiny fraction of their horizon of possibility.*^

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home i a new rhythm
For you soul senses the world that awaits you.^*

*The Beatles’ Paperback Writer to listen to;
**Donald Miller’s Hero on a Mission;
^Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing;
^^Robert McKee‘s newsletter: The Secret to Fixing Broken Scenes;
*^Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens;
^*John O Donohue’s Benedictus: For a New Beginning).

Our future doesn’t depend on everybody being the same; it depends in each person sharing his talents, his blessings, his beliefs and his passions.*
Mary Reckmeyer

In out of the way places of the heart,
Where you thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.**
John O’Donohue

We first have to deal with the junk that gets in the way,
Errors, wrongfulness, ways of thinking
and behaving,
Hurts, ill feelings.

Journaling is a great place to begin,
To be honest and open without being destroyed,
At the beginning of the day.

To find on the other side,
New ways, fresh starts, more ideas,
Different actions,
Healing, strong emotions:
Way more different than we knew..

*Mary Reckmeyer’s Strengths Based Parenting;
**John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For a New Beginning.

Knowledge allows us to get our bearings, but it’s imagination and action that give us the forward motion we need to start and finish.*
Bernadette Jiwa

Keep on learning,
Enlarge imagining,
Dive into doing.

It’s always an option.

*Bernadette Jiwa’s blog The Story of Telling: Start to Finish.

boutique (n.) “trendy fashion shop,” 1950, earlier “small shop of any sort” (1767), from French boutique (14c.), from Old Provençal botica, from Latin apotheca “storehouse” (see apothecary). Latin apotheca directly into French normally would have yielded *avouaie.

You’re holding an audition.
Many sentences will try out.
One gets the part.*
Verlyn Klinkenborg

What is the one thing that you have to offer through your life,
That no-one else can replicate because,
When they try,
It becomes something else?

*Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing.

May I live this day
Compassionate of heart,
Clear in word,
Gracious in awareness,
Courageous in thought,
Generous in love.*
John O’Donohue

Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisite for growth?: the openness to experience events, and the willingness to be changed by them.**
Warren Berger

Am I willing to fail at something new,
To be the stranger,
To admit my need to learn,
To live with uncertainty?

Perhaps I am ready to do what I
must
do next.

*John O’Donohue’s Benedictus;
**Warren Berger’s Glimmer.

What is the new horizon in you that wants to be seen?*
John O’Donohue

Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.**
Bernard Malamud

A vibrant life –
“Sparky,” as Roald Dahl labelled it^ –
Includes continually setting out towards
Self,
Moving towards yet another horizon of our lives.

We may only know it to be a curiosity at first,
A call to explore something more,
Before we come to hold it as pure treasure.

Through the innocence of beginning we are often seduced into growth.*

Life is exploring horizons,
A surer way of bringing us to each other.

*John O’Donohue’s Benedictus;
**Quoted in Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals;
^Roald Dahl’s Danny, Champion of the World.

The Greeks believed that time had secret structure.  There was the tie of “epiphany” when time suddenly opened and something was revealed in luminous clarity.  There was the moment of “krisis” when time got entangled and directions became confused and contradictory.  There was also the moment of “kairos”; this was the propitious moment.**
John O’Donohue

There were times when nothing played back.**
Lynda Barry

We love the moment of epiphany:
An idea and its pursuit.

We dream of the kairos moment:
Creation completed and delivered.

In-between lies the ‘land” of krisis:
Plans don’t work, direction is lost, motivation wanes,
Failure looms.

Our habits are important if we are to keep turning up in
krisis
and move on through to
kairos.

You’re in the right place because:

Scientists have … found that to achieve a state of flow, a task must be roughly four percent beyond your current ability.^

But our habits will need to be smart;
That is,
Developing in response to the shape-shifting challenge:

Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery^

Make your habits work harder by reflecting and revising.

*John O’Donohue’s Benedictus;
**Lynda Barry’s What It Is;
^James Clear’s Atomic Habits.