100 days

"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake...It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look...To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts."  - Henry David Thoreau

Another shift to my space here, as I try to give stability and constancy to some very trying days. In the months since my last post, my marriage has been unexpectedly blown apart, and it's been a disorienting, financially-stressful, and heartbreaking time, especially given that secrets and infidelity were a part of the breakdown. I also had emergency surgery for a hemorrhagic cyst in October (complications of a miscarriage at 15 weeks - late June - perhaps; not sure why I didn't share anything about the pregnancy here, but I had just started to tell people the week that I lost the baby 💔), and am now facing the sudden need to move out of my home.

It's been an awful whirlwind, and I find myself needing a focus, an outlet to the swirl of thoughts and worries in my mind all day. So:

I'm calling it the 100 Day Project. I've got stacks of books surrounding me, and although I've not been finding the time to read at all, some days, I'd like to try harder. They are self-help books, philosophical texts and fictional stories, and from them, I'd like to find little bits of hope and wisdom to help me through. Once a day, I'll share something I've read that gave me a boost...and hope that it can do the same for you.

My camera is lost and my mobile phone quality shoddy, but I'll try to find inspiring photos to share as well.

If you're reading along, thanks. I'm doing this bit of writing mostly for me, but if in some small way we can share what we're going through, when the going gets really hard, I think our burdens can feel a little lighter. As E.M. Forster said, "only connect"*...so here I am, "only connecting" is as many ways as I can.  

* I've always wondered if that little snippet is taken totally out of context, and so, here's the full quote:

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

(from Howard's End, E. M. Forster, 1910)

Live in fragments no longer. Pretty much sums up the direction I want to head in.