This is one of my favorite photos of 2019, taken by my son. I love it for a lot of reasons: Otter Cliffs in Acadia National Park is one of my very favorite places in the universe and it's where I first climbed, I love it because my son took it, and I love how happy and relaxed Tim and I look, hanging out on the edge of a sheer 70 foot drop above the ocean, even though I had just climbed a hard climb and gashed my arm on the granite. (Don't do this without ropes -- we are totally tied in and safe!) And I love it because it reminds me of a passage I love from Edith Wharton's novel, The House of Mirth: "The poor little working-girl who had found strength to gather up the fragments of her life, and build herself a shelter with them, seemed to Lily to have reached the central truth of existence. It was a meagre enough life, on the grim edge of poverty, with scant margin for possibilities of sickness or mischance, but it had the frail audacious permanence of a bird's nest built on the edge of a cliff—a mere wisp of leaves and straw, yet so put together that the lives entrusted to it may hang safely over the abyss." We humans, we live in the shelter of one another. Be the shelter for yourself and for others.
{see also: 5 Timeless Books of Insight on Fear and the Creative Process 
