(Not the) Last Wednesday Wisdom for June 2019

I realize it's not the last Wednesday of the month, but I haven't done one of these compilations in quite a while, and I blew right past last month's bonus Wednesday, when I fully intended to post something extra. So I owe you! Besides, I've been finding some good stuff that I really want to share.

​So here you go . . . 

We tend to think of consciousness as skin bound, brain tethered. However, in nature we can sense something vaster--and that something larger senses us. And from here our perception and understanding transforms. We start to think from this bigger perspective.
-- Mark Coleman, Mindful magazine, April 2019

I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse. First things first.
-- Edward Abbey, "The First Morning," Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

Bees teach us so many lessons. When they take all this nectar from the tree, does that deprive the tree of anything? No, it enhances it. And when you give your time and energy to helping someone, does it deplete your skills? No, it gives you something to be proud of.
-- Brother Blaise Heuke, "The Beauty of a Bee," AARP The Magazine,  

Live with unremitting alertness.
-- Joseph Campbell

[W]ith art comes empathy. It allows us to look through some else's eyes and know their strivings and struggles. It expands the moral imagination and makes it impossible to accept the dehumanization of others. When we are without art, we are a diminished people--myopic, unlearned and cruel.
-- Dave Eggers, The New York Times, June 29, 2018

Authorship is a solitary business, always coming down to a writer and a blank page, but inevitably it becomes a social act as well, because the book is inextricably part of the world. It finds readers, it begins a conversation, it tells a kind of truth that can't be told in any other way--or else it fails to do that.
James Gleick, Authors Guild Bulletin, Spring-Summer 2018

But here's the thing: Humans are not what we do. Humans are everything we do, and feel, and think, with a dash of stardust thrown in. The same is true for writers.
-- Lenore Myka, "When to ignore good advice," Poets & Writers magazine, Sept/Oct 2018

You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.
-- Andy Warhol

Life is a great bundle of little things.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

For a long time, I was looking for happiness from success. Now I am looking for success from happiness.
-- Kathryn Budig, Yoga Journal, August 2018