Swaney went big, pushed hard, told the story over a beer after, and loved people well. He would remind us to live well. This page is a place to think about that.
Henry David Thoreau
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Walden, 1854
Go big
These turn over on their own. Tap one to turn it sooner.
Walt Whitman
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Song of the Open Road, 1856
Jack Kerouac
Watching his friend come leaping down Matterhorn Peak, yelling the whole way, he gets it all at once: you can’t fall off a mountain.
The Dharma Bums, 1958, paraphrased. Swaney loved this book.
Where would you go if you quit waiting to be ready?
Push hard
Marcus Aurelius
At dawn, when you don’t want to get up, tell yourself, I’m getting up to do the work of a human being.
Meditations, book 5, paraphrased
Epictetus
Some things are up to us and some are not.
The Enchiridion, the first line
What is the work in front of you today?
Love people well
Walt Whitman
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
Song of Myself, section 52
John of the Cross
In the evening of life we will be judged on love.
Sayings of Light and Love, paraphrased
Where will people look for you?
To an Athlete Dying Young
A. E. Housman · 1896
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears.
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.
The anvil
Why there is an anvil
How we carry him
Swaney is the reason for the anvil. It sits on the owl's chest in the Stoke logo, and it is in every drawing on this site.
The anvil was going to be a tattoo. Swaney and Scott Schrader, who started The Stoke, were working out the design together, and Swaney talked it over with his close friends many times. It mattered to him to get it right. He ran out of time before he could get it.
Scott has it on his hand now, next to his sunflower.
The anvil is where the work gets done.
