breathing space

Different Strokes (re-edited), a photo by litratcher on Flickr.

from Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

Jeanette Winterson 1985

http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/

published by Vintage Books London 2011

p. 137

'... the principle of personal space is always the same whether you're fending off an elemental or someone's bad mood. It's a force field around yourself ... 

they push out their power bit by bit, first within their hearts, then within their bodies, then within their immediate circle. It is not possible to control the outside of yourself until you have mastered your breathing space. It's not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change ...'

'The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door'

Indigenous Transience, a photo by Kalyne Link on Flickr.


'Don't allow your inward being to be hurt by what
You have or have not. Be glad, because every 
Perfect thing is on its way to nonexistence.'

from The Guesthouse With Two Doors

The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez
Translated by Rober Bly and Leonard Lewisohn
2008
Harper, NY
p. 59

'I am the happiest man alive ...'

Resilience, a photo by neekoh.fi on Flickr.

'I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity, and I am more invulnerabale than Achilles: fortune hath not one place to hit me. '

Sir Thomas Browne 1642 Religio Medici