If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

—Elizabeth Bishop, from "At the Fishhouses"

Today, I finished the prototype for the Contemplation Path in the Self-Taught Life. This is probably my favorite path, because it's about learning for its own sake, not for anything else it can give you. It is the core of what my personal scholarship practice looks like, every day.

There is just one path left; the Path of Acceptance. This is the path you take when it's not possible to take action and change a difficult situation in your life right now, and it's not helpful to center personal scholarship in your days because you just...can't. This is a path of healing and of being with yourself. The prototype will likely take me 2 or 3 weeks to finish, because it was the least developed when I stopped working on it last year.

So if you need to start at the beginning and listen to your life, or if you got to the end of listening and you realized your life is calling you toward a Path of Action or a Path of Contemplation, all are ready for you. I'm so excited to share them.

Thank you for being here,

Sarah Avenir