I thought, “But for the coping and the managing, and all the crowding movements of life, the eternal adjustments and the never-ending ‘fixing’ one has to do in the house and garden, as well as in oneself, to keep order and harmony, cleanliness and beauty of some kind, but for all this often tiresome detail of life, one’s soul would not be a storehouse; it is so true that the external life creates the inner, that is, if one really lives in each passing moment and takes into oneself its meaning and significance.

— Mabel Dodge Luhan, Winter in Taos, 50-51