weaving your basket

Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house

of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy

any baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply.

“What!” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off,—that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and by some magic wealth and standing followed, he had said to himself; I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do.  Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

-Walden

let go of everything else

"Once you have touched it, you realize that all the things you have considered to be conditions for your happiness are nothing.  They may even be obstacles for your own happiness, and you can get rid of them without regret.  We are all looking for the conditions for our own happiness, and we know what things have made us suffer.  But we have not yet seen or touched the treasure of happiness.  When we touch it, even once, we know that we have the capacity of letting go of everything else".

Thich Nhat Hanh

mission statement

"I've decided to make up my mind about nothing, to assume the water mask, to finish my life disguised as a creek, an eddy, joining at night the full, sweet flow, to absorb the sky, to swallow the heat and cold, the moon and the stars, to swallow myself in ceaseless flow".
-Jim Harrison