A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape. - Rebecca Solnit

Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use. [ — ] [T]ime spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space — for wilderness and for public space — must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space.

You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly.

I believe in hope as an act of defiance, or rather as the foundation for an ongoing series of acts of defiance, those acts necessary to bring about some of what we hope for while we live by principle in the meantime. There is no alternative, except surrender. And surrender not only abandons the future, it abandons the soul.