to never forget.

(Some reminders for myself more than anything, on how to love, and how to live.)

Life is a succession of moments, to live each one is to succeed. - Corita Kent

[ Corita Kent ]

"What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we go downstairs, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed on order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why?"
- Georges Perec


"If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion."
- Dalai Lama

[ my granddad, one of the greatest people I know]

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. "
- Oscar Wilde

"Women's liberation is the liberation of the feminine in the man and the masculine in the woman."
- Corita Kent

[russian environmental posters, source unknown]

[my feet in the insanely clear water at Lake Tekapo, NZ 2010]

"Agape doesn't love somebody because they're worthy. Agape makes them worthy by the strength and power of its love. Agape doesn't love somebody because they're beautiful. Agape loves in such a way that it makes them beautiful."
- Rob Bell (*nb: the word 'agape' is one of the four greek words for 'love', used in the Bible to describe the love of God for humankind.*)

[ source unknown]

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable." - CS Lewis

[derek henderson: amazing photographer from NZ]

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."
- Anne Frank

"I am not young enough to know everything."
- Oscar Wilde

[photo I took in Cambodia 2009: kids coming to Sovanapoom Care centre to get free noodles on a Sunday]

"The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly."
- Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha)

[beautiful succulents: source unknown]

"The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget."
- Arundhati Roy

"This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
- Shakespeare

[river dolphin by Mark Cawardine- his show with Stephen Fry, 'Last Chance to See' is incredibly moving]