Here on this island...

[...] Here there is time; time to be quiet; time to work without pressure; time to think; time to watch the heron, watching with frozen patience for his prey. Time to look at the stars or to study a shell; time to see friends, to gossip, to laugh, to talk. Time, even, not to talk. At home, when I meet my friends in those cubby-holed hours, time is so precious we feel we must cram every available instant with conversation. We cannot afford the luxury of silence. Here on the island I find I can sit with a friend without talking, sharing the day's last sliver of pale green light on the horizon, or the whorls in a small white shell, or the dark scar left in a dazzling night sky by a shooting star. Then communication becomes communion and one is nourished as one never is by words.

Anne Morrow Lindberg, Gift from the Sea, p115-116 (Vintage Books, March 1978)

...

"When you allow yourself to pause for a moment - in that uncomfortable feeling of boredom, almost like tasting it - something happens, something new opens up, something new is created. That is where creativity lives, if anywhere - in the midst of boredom and the ordinary."

Sanna Vaara

How to Celebrate a Quiet Life - Daily Life in Finland

Belonging - to the land

In the days of the white settlement the natives of North America found ownership of land an incomprehensible concept. And so they lost it when the Europeans made them sign pieces of paper that were equally incomprehensible to them. They felt they belonged to the land, but the land did not belong to them. [emphasis added]

Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, p44 (Penguin Books 2009)

The tenderness of life...

"[...] 

The tenderness of life is preserved on islands of temporary calm. And today I find that a rather daring, albeit inexplicable, thought. [...] "

Excerpt from the war diary of
Yevgenia Belorusets, www.isolarii.com/kyiv: Islands of Temporary Calm, Tuesday, March 29, day 34

'Yevgenia Belorusets has been one of the great documentarians of Russia’s war against Ukraine since 2014, winning the International Literature Prize for her work. Her diary provides the news from a different vantage.' 

German (Der Spiegel)

'Ehrgeiz'

"Ganz ohne Ehrgeiz wird es wohl nicht gehen. Wobei ich nicht sagen kann, wo sich die Freude an der Tätigkeit und der Ehrgeiz zu unter­scheiden beginnen, zumal in meinem Falle Ehrgeiz nur bedingt notwendig war. Mein Ehrgeiz bestand darin, die jeweilige Aufgabe vernünftig zu bewältigen, und das hat bisher zu einem ziemlich schnellen Aufstieg geführt, der mich eher ängstigt."

Angela Merkel, Zitat aus einem Artikel der DW: Herlinde Koelbls Porträts von Angela Merkel

scanning

There is a funny thing about human consciousness [...] which is that our attention is captured by the figure rather than the background, by the relatively enclosed area rather than the diffuse area, and by something moving rather than what is relatively still. And to all those phenomena that—in this way—attract our attention, we attribute a higher degree of reality than the ones we don’t notice. That’s only because, for the moment, those are more important to us. Consciousness [...] is a radar that is scanning the environment to look out for trouble just in the same way as a ship’s radar is looking for rocks or other ships. And the radar, therefore, does not notice the vast areas of space where there are no rocks, no other ships. So, in the same way, our eyes—or rather, the selective consciousness behind the eyes—only pays attention to what we think is important.

Alan Watts: We as Organism