| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Princess by Alfred Tennyson: For on my cradle shone the Northern star.
There lived an ancient legend in our house.
Some sorcerer, whom a far-off grandsire burnt
Because he cast no shadow, had foretold,
Dying, that none of all our blood should know
The shadow from the substance, and that one
Should come to fight with shadows and to fall.
For so, my mother said, the story ran.
And, truly, waking dreams were, more or less,
An old and strange affection of the house.
Myself too had weird seizures, Heaven knows what:
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Astoria by Washington Irving: insignificant in point of force, and severally destined to
traverse immense wildernesses where larger parties had
experienced so much danger and distress. When recruits were
sought in the preceding year among experienced hunters and
voyageurs at Montreal and St. Louis, it was considered dangerous
to attempt to cross the Rocky Mountains with less than sixty men;
and yet here we find Reed ready to push his way across those
barriers with merely three companions. Such is the fearlessness,
the insensibility to danger, which men acquire by the habitude of
constant risk. The mind, like the body, becomes callous by
exposure.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Three Taverns by Edwin Arlington Robinson: Or for your sons, more than a soul should mourn
In Paradise, done with evil and with earth.
There is not much of earth in what remains
For you; and what there may be left of it
For your endurance you shall have at last
In peace, without the twinge of any fear
For my condition; for I shall be done
With plans and actions that have heretofore
Made your days long and your nights ominous
With darkness and the many distances
That were between us. When the silence comes,
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