Media Res

"We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories."

-Mona Simpson

Ministering

"When messengers are sent to minister to the inhabitants of this earth, they are not strangers, but from the ranks of our kindred and friends. . . . In like manner, our fathers and mothers, brothers, sisters and friends who have passed away from this earth, having been faithful, and worthy to enjoy these rights and privileges, may have a mission given to them to visit their relatives and friends upon the earth again, bringing from the divine Presence messages of love, of warning, or reproof and instruction, to those who they had learned to love in the flesh."
-Joseph F. Smith

Race

“Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth doing.”

- Hunter S. Thompson

Journey

“It is better to travel well than to arrive.”

- Buddha

Unlikely Pair

"If we want to make the imagination feel at home, generosity 
shows us the way. How else can imagination thrive but in a 
place where welcoming comes first and where judgment feels 
no need to speak and finally feels no need to be?" --Sarah Wider

Btw

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath

Diary

"My bread bakes well.  All is rather rapt, simple, quick, effective–except for my blundering on at The Waves.   I write two pages of arrant nonsense, after straining; I write variations of every sentence; compromises; bad shots; possibilities; till my writing book is like a lunatic's dream.  Then I trust to some inspiration on re-reading;  and pencil them into some sense.  Still I am not satisfied.  I think there is something lacking.  I sacrifice nothing to seemliness.  I press to my center." 
-Virginia Woolf A Writer's Diary

Boys Men

“As I remember them, what unprotected faces they were; their very roughness and violence made them defenseless. These boys had no practised manner behind which they could retreat and hold people at a distance. They had only their hard fists to batter at the world with.”
-Willa Cather, My Antonia

A Litany for Survival

A LITANY FOR SURVIVAL
For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children's mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours:
For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother's milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.
And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive
- Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn


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step

“Little by little, one travels far.”

- J. R. R. Tolkien

Surrender

You can't get what you want in life. God can dream a bigger dream for me, for you than you can ever do for yourself. When you have worked as hard and done as much and strived and tried and given and plead and bargained and hoped.......Surrender.... When you have done all that you can do, and there is nothing left for you to do. Give it up. Give it up to that thing that is greater than yourself and let it then become a part of the flow. -Oprah Winfrey

Dear Void

Never

‎"Never assume that you can make it alone. You need the help of the Lord. Never hesitate to get on your knees in some private place and speak with Him. What a marvelous and wonderful thing is prayer. Think of it. We can actually speak with our Father in Heaven. He will hear and respond, but we need to listen to that response. Nothing is too serious and nothing too unimportant to share with Him." President Hinckley

Drawn

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.”

- Rumi 

Intuition

"Intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it's all written there."
-Paulo Coelho The Alchemist 

Innovation

"When failure is not an option neither is innovation." -Brene Brown

Steve Jobs

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

“Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have." -Steve Jobs (from Wired article 1996)

October

Dress up

“It’s the only time I feel like me, she said, & everyone else just thinks it’s dress up.”

- Brian Andreas

Stones

Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I’ll build a castle.

— Fernando Pessoa

*

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

— Elie Wiesel

Heal

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.

— Leo Tolstoy

Heart

Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart. -Martin Luther King Jr.

Rain

"The best thing one can do when it’s raining is to let it rain."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 

Steve

‎"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." -Steve Jobs

Change

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square hole. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” ~Apple Computer Inc.

Body

"Take note: You have a body, but you are not your body.
You have a mind, but you are not your mind. You have emotions, 
but you are not your emotions. You are the being behind it all, 
able to choose what you want, able to direct it all."
--Joe Vitale, Life's Missing Instruction Manual, 2006.

Weight

"sometimes i can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives i'm not living" jonathan safran foer 

Now

"When we let go of yearning for the future, preoccupation with 
the past, and strategies to protect the present, there is 
nowhere left to go but where we are. To connect with the 
present moment is to begin to appreciate the beauty of true 
simplicity." 
--Jack Kornfield