Quotes about me

If I am asked to describe myself, I will provide these three quotes:

1) “Mattina   
         M’illumino
         d’immenso.”
    (Morning
         I am filled
         with immense light.)
                 -- Giuseppe Ungaretti
Every morning, rain or shine, I meet a glorious new day with infinite possibilities.
           
2) “If you listen to Beethoven, it’s always the same, but if you listen to traffic, it’s always different.”
                  -- John Cage
It is my firm belief that we find beauty everywhere, even where we least expect to find it, and it is a great joy when we find it.

3) “No man ever steps in the same river twice.”
            -- Heraclitus

This statement, which I discovered in my first year in college, stayed with me all my life for its insight into the constancy of nature’s caprice and the infinite variety underlying the simpler order of things, like that of the individual leaves of a foliage.  Kamo no Chômei opens his essay, An Account of my Hut, with a line that expresses the same thought but more literally: “The flow of the river is ceaseless and its water is never the same.”