As humans, we have a confused relationship with edges, boundaries and limitations, which can be seen as one and the same thing, unified paradoxically by their dividing potential... We seek them even when, as a psychological or relational construct, we recoil from their necessity, and will often find ourselves drawn to and entranced by the water’s e... See more

“things of the world,” by which she means precisely the human-built world, in, as she put it, “stabilizing human life”  — anchors of identity; but maybe not anchors but rather navigational beacons that help us map the self across time.)

The basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death. Human beings are naturally anxious because we are ultimately helpless and abandoned in a world where we are fated to die. “This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feeli... See more

All creative work is at bottom a means of self-liberation and a coping mechanism — for the loneliness, the despair, the chaos and contradiction within. It is the best means we have of transmuting that which gnaws at us into something that nourishes, and yet how little of that private ferment is visible in the finished work