Go into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too.
Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn and unlock—more
than a maple—a universe. This is how you spend the afternoon, and
tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You
can’t take it with you.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Hanoi, Nikon F5, 35-70mm, Agfa APX 400 © Doug Kim
“Many newly sighted people speak well of the world, and teach us how dull is our own vision. To one patient, a human hand, unrecognized, is ‘something bright and then holes.’ Shown a bunch of grapes, a boy calls out ‘It is dark, blue and shiny….It isn’t smooth, it has bumps and hollows.’ A little girl visits a garden. She is greatly astonished, and can scarcely be persuaded to answer, stands speechless in front of the tree, which she only names by taking hold of it, and then as ‘the tree with the lights in it.’”
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
francis & noelia, los angeles; Nikon F5, 35-70mm, Kodak Tri-X © Doug Kim
Portrait of Michelangelo (after 1535) by Jacopino del Conte
“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something will arise for later, something better. These things fill in from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
“After Michelangelo died, someone found in his studio a piece of paper on which he had written a note to his apprentice, in the handwriting of his old age: ‘Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.’”
– Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
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