They are a means, among the sole means we have, for getting outside of oneself—a book is a kind of hard limit to the ego and the self, it requires parking one’s socially structured being at the perimeter of a book and leaping entirely into the consciousness of someone entirely different, often at a remove of continents or centuries

It’s generally impossible to characterize a day’s sky with a single image. I thought of the selection practice as a discipline, choosing one image out of the photographs I’d taken, which represented a tiny subset of all the possible images the day had offered. It took me a long time to realize that I was learning about my relationship to impermanence and to the limitations of circumstance

The child is the teacher of what is alive and unworked in you. His behavior is often the ‘score’ of the pain of the parent's unworked emotions. The child is an expert at shattering your structures and beliefs. All suffering and conflict are always a source of information, an informant of what still captivates, what has not been released or honored.