Quito from the bus window, photo by Elie Gardner.

I almost fell out of my chair when I read the following words. The unconcealed message is extraordinarily inspiring:

“As a journalist, I’m a post processor. I don’t cry while I photograph funerals. I don’t clap when I hear a message I like. I react days, weeks later. It’s a professional necessity that has become a personal defense mechanism. Ecuador broke it down. The páramo’s spirit caught me off guard. On horseback, I closed my eyes only when the wind blew up the dust so bad it hurt my eyes. With my eyes closed, the sound of the horses’ hooves and the whipping of the wind kept the scenery alive in my mind. In Galápagos I jumped into the Pacific and within minutes a sea turtle swam to my left, a sea lion to my right. I could be no where but that moment. It’s all right now.”

Then I actually fell out of my chair when I picked up this meditative link on NY Times via Shannon O’Brien.

“But primarily, fundamentally, to live is to embrace each moment as if it were the first, last, and all moments of time. Whether you like this moment or not is not the point: in fact liking it or not liking it, being willing or unwilling to accept it, depending on whether or not you like it, is to sit on the fence of your life, waiting to decide whether or not to live, and so never actually living. I find it impressive how thoroughly normal it is be so tentative about the time of our lives, or so asleep within it, that we miss it entirely. Most of us don’t know what it actually feels like to be alive. We know about our problems, our desires, our goals and accomplishments, but we don’t know much about our lives.”