I am done

with great things and big things

with great institutions and big

success.

And I am for

those tiny, invisible, molecular

moral forces

that work from individual to individual

through the crannies of the world

like so many rootlets

or like capillary oozing of

water

yet which , if you give them time

will rend

the hardest monuments of man’s

pride.

William James

from a letter to Mrs. Henry Whitman, June 7, 1899

reprinted and broken into lines by Pete Seeger and included in Robert Fulghum’s “Words I Wish I Wrote”

 Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of ‘psst’ that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.

— David Foster Wallace

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting

for our senses to grow sharper.”

― W.B. Yeats