Possibilities

“When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this - you haven't.” 

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” 

― Thomas A. Edison

Leonard Cohen on Creativity

From Brain Pickings - Leonard Cohen on Creativity:

Considering his ongoing interest in the process itself rather than the outcome, Leonard Cohen makes a case for the art of self-renewal by exploring the deeper rewards and gratifications that have kept him going for half a century:

It [has] to do with two things. One is economic urgency. I just never made enough money to say, “Oh, man, I think I’m gonna get a yacht now and scuba-dive.” I never had those kinds of funds available to me to make radical decisions about what I might do in life. Besides that, I was trained in what later became known as the Montreal School of Poetry. Before there were prizes, before there were grants, before there were even girls who cared about what I did. We would meet, a loosely defined group of people. There were no prizes, as I said, no rewards other than the work itself. We would read each other poems. We were passionately involved with poems and our lives were involved with this occupation…
We had in our minds the examples of poets who continued to work their whole lives. There was never any sense of a raid on the marketplace, that you should come up with a hit and get out. That kind of sensibility simply did not take root in my mind until very recently…
So I always had the sense of being in this for keeps, if your health lasts you. And you’re fortunate enough to have the days at your disposal so you can keep on doing this. I never had the sense that there was an end. 

I implored both sky and water for some similar release, transformation, and peace.

Excerpt from Sejal Shah's review - Ritual as Resolution: Amarnath Ravva's American Canyon:

That summer, everything changed in my life. I left New York, a job, a relationship—it was a life I had wanted a great deal, but which was ultimately just not working. I packed up my apartment and office, and boarded a plane to India, where I would travel and live for the next several months. One October evening at an ashram in Rishikesh, a city in Northern India in the foothills of the Himalayas, I waded into the Ganga, tossed flower petals, placed a divo (a small flame in a vessel fashioned from leaves) into the river, and greeted the holy water rushing over my feet—a makeshift birthday ceremony I hoped would help unmoor the past and open new paths into the future.  While not a specific Hindu ceremony, this ritual connected me to two earlier, improvised art rituals I undertook in New York, when I began to dismantle my life there. I flung smooth stones gathered from the Rhode Island shore—as well as daisies, dried petals, shells, and even a silver ring into the East River. I had walked the few blocks from my apartment to the river and stood, before emptying my pockets of petals and shells and the silver ring—before flinging all, one by one, in some sort of prayerful gesture. I implored both sky and water for some similar release, transformation, and peace.