self-respect

ESSAY On Self-Respect by Joan Didion, 1961

excerpts:

"The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others - who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which... is something people with courage can do without... To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent... Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home."

re-spect in literal translation means to look back at, implying that, to have self-respect, is to have the ability to look back at oneself and self worth.

palo verde tree flowers + aloes

SITE Sunnylands Center and Gardens, Palm Springs 

resonant over three hundred sixty eight miles and one hundred twenty nine months of movements proceeding always the same suns setting on a steady horizon never really still, in spirit, still

desert in spring

EXCERPT from The Last Word by Jack Kerouac, 1959

"And all things vanished, what made of without being made into anything really, all things I then saw as unsubstantial trickery of the mind, furthermore it was already long gone out of sight, the liquid waterball earth a speck in sizeless spaces..."

notes: liminal drama in light and dark contrasts, fleeting floats of color in temporary bloom, evidence of time and sun - its beauty and burn, the backdrop of a far reaching horizon, and crunchy paths from here to there.