love

I'm 82, I'm going to die. We die because we are born. The only things that matter in life are food and love, in that order, and also our little dog Ruby. I truly believe this, and for me, the basis of art is love. I love life.

David Hockney, Letter to Ruth Mackenzie, April 2020

To practice loving requires practicing its foundations: discipline, concentration, and patience.

The Art of Loving - Erich Fromm

She takes his shaking hand in the dark. It feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground. There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.

Richard Powers - The Overstory (p 144)

(3.3) If you look at things in isolation there's nothing beautiful about them, and yet by supplementing nature they enrich and bring us in. It all gives pleasure. Things call out to us constantly- things unnoticed by others.

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

Mary Oliver