To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself. Bukowski

Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do not belong among the favorable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible. Nietzsche

Life is long if you know how to use it. Seneca

“Nothing touches it,” Cohen said, as the light came into the cabin, of sitting still… Going nowhere, as Cohen described it, was the grand adventure that makes sense of everywhere else. Pico Iyer

Do anything you like, but do it with conviction! Henry Miller

I feel like a song is a secret of the heart on the sleeve. I don’t run away from truths or un-surviving loves. I also feel that a song in its simplest form is no different than a day in a season. It could be a silent and early hour or it could be nothing but despair and loss and anger, and yet it is still only an autumn day. Jason Molina

This love, and the ensuing emptiness of its ending, changed her. Of such events we are always changed — not necessarily badly, but changed. Who doesn’t know this doesn’t know much. Mary Oliver

And having returned from the woods, we remember with regret its restfulness. For all creatures there are in place, hence at rest. In their most strenuous striving, sleeping and waking, dead and living, they are at rest. In the circle of the human we are weary with striving, and are without rest. Wendell Berry

What are men to rocks and mountains? Jane Austen

Walking is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things. It is the one way of freedom. If you go to a place on anything but your own feet you are taken there too fast, and miss a thousand delicate joys that were waiting for you by the wayside. Elizabeth von Arnim

Top photo: Topping Chimney Tops. Above: View of LeConte from the Chimneys.

Downclimbing!