What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
Annie DillardRead
You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the choices between service, creativity, and devotion, highlighting the emotional toll of hard work and spiritual engagement.
In this quote, Annie Dillard explores the dual paths of serving others and expressing oneself through art, such as singing. She points out that both paths involve deep emotional investment and hard work, suggesting that whether we choose to serve through labor or through creative expression, we are engaging in a form of prayer or devotion that can lead to personal fulfillment but also emotional challenges.
In practice
This quote can be used during a motivational speech about finding passion in work and creativity.
What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
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.
It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.
To crank myself up I stood on a jack and ran myself up. I tightened myself like a bolt. I inserted myself in a vise-clamp and wound the handle till the pressure built. I drank coffee in titrated doses. It was a tricky business, requiring the finely tuned judgment of a skilled anesthesiologist. There was a tiny range within which coffee was effective, short of which it was useless, and beyond which, fatal.
How carefully would I atone, if I might, for the time I have lost!
Circumstances are beyond human control, but our conduct is in our own power.
Worry - a God, invisible but omnipotent. It steals the bloom from the cheek and lightness from the pulse; it takes away the appetite, and turns the hair gray.
An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate.
When you think about growing and being empowered yourself, it is what you've been able to do for other people that leaves you the fullest.
Trust no future, however pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead! Act -- act in the living Present! Heart within and God overhead.
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