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Daily Inspiration Podcast
January 05, 2023
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Thursday, January 5, 2023

Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.

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Fernando Pessoa

This quote comes from “The Book of Disquiet,” a posthumously published collection of Fernando Pessoa’s work left behind after his death in 1935. The Portuguese poet and writer saw identity as fluid and dynamic, and is famous for writing under numerous pseudonyms, giving each invented version of himself a full history and background — even going so far as to draft whole “autobiographies” for the imagined individuals behind his pen names. In the essay where this quote appears, Pessoa posits that our experiences are what we imagine, rather than what we encounter. "If I create it, it exists; if it exists, then I see it like any other scenery," he wrote. "Life is what we make of it."

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Fill in the blank: "___ is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy." - Anne Truitt
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