Everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you

"Your perception of the world colors how you organize all the information that assaults you every day."

- Lori Andrews, Sequence

Notes from Nethers on saying goodbye

- "And then they were all gone, with scant or no goodbye from me. I felt that refusing to be involved with them was my best weapon. What I didn't know yet was that shutting down is a weapon that turns on the one who uses it.

"By withholding, I harmed only myself, as if love were an unrenewable resource, as if in loving even when we lose, we don't learn the better to love. I didn't know that love that flows freely is not lost, but circles around and comes back again to fill the heart, no matter the distance.

"I was losing more than I needed to. In refusing to let go - to give anything - neither could I receive..."

- "As an adolescent, I suppose I needed to be the one to push away. I was fifteen and hurt and angry, disconcerted by the intensity of my own feelings, and at a loss about how to deal with them, and at sea in my own life."

- "I rarely get the chance to say goodbye to people... Even with casual goodbyes, there is always the uncertainty of whether we will see each other again. This urgency is very alive in my heart. I strive to say what I need to say to people as immediately as I can."

- Sandra Lee Eugster, Notes from Nethers

Notes from Nethers on independence

- "My foothold sometimes felt fragile. It wasn't only about the unpredictability of how people acted - it was something about repeatedly having to retreat from them to feel safe."

- "Oddly, I am many things opposite to what I would expect from one who spent formative years on a commune, and I am reminded of the dialectic; how one extreme breeds the other. I am private and reserved to a fault... which makes it hard for people to know me.

"I am ruthlessly disciplined, finding it no problem to regiment myself for work or pastrime. I am completely counter-dependent. It is very difficult for me to let go of a fundamental, hard-won self-sufficiency. This is problematic in that it limits my range of intimacy...

"And finally, I am crushingly over-responsible, with one glaring exception."

- Sandra Lee Eugster, Notes from Nethers