- Thoreau

- Shackleton’s Diaries, 1914

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time”

- T. S. Eliot

I held Antarctica as a destination inside for the better part of my life. Every since my father spun a globe in my room, the poles rooted in my imagination.

It was nothing like I imagined.  There are no words to describe the majestic beauty and delicate impermanence of icebergs the size of buildings floating like nature’s Brancusi’s at sea, and as we moved closer, around the continent.

It’s fair to say that I was blinded by my ambition to walk in the footsteps of explorers. Perhaps it was blindness that drew them to the poles, repelled them away from the comforts of home and into the wild. I still can’t explain where the inclination to touch something virgin and wild comes from – perhaps it is the wellspring of all life – that we yearn to preserve what is wild within ourselves.

PETER

“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.”

- RAINER MARIA RILKE

“For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke

“What is really important, really essential, is the way- after all, becoming is superior to being.”

- Paul Klee

“The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke