All

"You are mysterious, I love you. You’re beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, and that’s the rarest known combination."

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  F. Scott Fitzgerald 

Raise

"There is no single effort more radical in its potential for saving the world than a transformation of the way we raise our children."  -Marianne Williamson

Growing Orbits

I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt. —Rainer Maria Rilke

Energy

"Everything you do right now ripples outward and affects everyone. Your posture can shine your heart or transmit anxiety. Your breath can radiate love or muddy the room in depression. Your glance can awaken joy. Your words can inspire freedom. Your every act can open hearts and minds. 

— David Deida 

Breathless

"Life, for the most part, inevitably becomes routine, the random confluence of timing and fortune that configures its components all but forgotten. But every so often, I catch a glimpse of my life out of the corner of my eye, and am rendered breathless by it."

– Jonathan Tropper, Everything Changes 

Blow it away

"I am tired. I am tired of speech
and of action. In the heart of me
you will find a tiny handful of
dust. Take it and blow it out
upon the wind. Let the wind have
it and it will find its way home."
— Tennessee Williams, from “Blue Song”

Sun

"I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
Alive
with closed eyes
to dash against darkness"
— E. E. Cummings, from “I Will Wade Out”

Whole Hearted

+"I have carved shelves out of my heart
to try and bring an order to things
all it did was make space"
— Anis Mojgani, from “My Library Has 17 Books”

Mourn with those

This sadness is not mine
This sadness is not mine. It is the sadness of old people who can no longer climb stairs, the sadness of the child who cannot speak, the sadness of the man raging against his own helplessness, the sadness of this retard spring feeding upon my dead, the sadness of the woman who can’t seduce her husband any more, the sadness of the days that can’t abide, the sadness of the girl devoured by the light of the north. This sadness is not mine, but all the same, I can’t get rid of it.
— Doina Ioanid

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Unpolished

from “reassurance to shirley after graduation”

Leaves & Words

Nicole Krauss, from The History of Love

The Wound

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The Wound
The shock comes slowly
as an afterthought.

First you hear the words
and they are like all other words,

ordinary, breathing out of lips,
moving toward you in a straight line.

Later they shatter
and rearrange themselves. They spell

something else hidden in the muscles
of the face, something the throat wanted to say.

Decoded, the message etches itself in acid
so every syllable becomes a sore.

The shock blooms into a carbuncle.
The body bends to accommodate it.

A special scarf has to be worn to conceal it.
It is now the size of a head.

The next time you look,
it has grown two eyes and a mouth.

It is difficult to know which to use.
Now you are seeing everything twice.

After a while it becomes an old friend.
It reminds you every day of how it came to be.
— Ruth Stone

Blind Spots

“Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it’s noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.”

- Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

Seek

“Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find
all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.”

- Rumi

Magic Realm

"To read for an hour or so at night is to enter a magic realm in which people are more interesting, informed, amusing and intelligent than anyone you encounter in everyday life." — The Torchlight List, Jim Flynn

Day

"Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there’s always that day. That day is always in your possession. That’s the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don’t. Not always." — Charles Baxter 

still

"Seek out a tree and let it teach you stillness." — Eckhart Tolle

Discipline

"The disciplined person does not throw up her hands in despair and decide that her problems are too much for her. She understands the idea expressed by Elder Neal A. Maxwell as follows: ' When in situations of stress we swonder if there is any more in us to give, we can be comforted to know that God, who knows our capacity perfectly, placed us haere to succeed. No one is fore ordained to fal or to be wicked. When we have been weighed and found wanteding, let us remember that we were measured before and we were found equal to our tasks; and therefore, let us continue, but with a more determined discipleship. When we feel overwhelmed, let us recall the assurance that God will not over program us; he will not press upon us more than we can bear.'" (DC 50:40)
 -"Meeting the Challenges of Today", in 1978 Devotional BYU

Bright

“But I would never kiss anyone who doesn’t burn me like the sun." 
— Jens Lekman 

Energy

"Everything you do right now ripples outward and affects everyone. Your posture can shine your heart or transmit anxiety. Your breath can radiate love or muddy the room in depression. Your glance can awaken joy. Your words can inspire freedom. Your every act can open hearts and minds. "
-David Deida

Peacegiver

"We show the depth of our brokenness and the degree of our foolishness when we’re even tempted to think there’s some set of circumstances, some person, some relationship, some paramour, some lover, some change in our world, some sensual experience that can satisfy the restlessness in our hearts. But we’re made singularly for you, Jesus; we’re designed to be fulfilled and completed only by you. Never let us forget this, and allow us to come more fully alive to an insatiable thirst that you alone can meet. You are the most loving and tender bridegroom who cherishes a most unlikely and ill-deserving bride." 
— Scotty Smith 

You're a Peach

“You can be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, and there’s still going to be somebody who hates peaches. "
— Dita Von Teese 

Opposition

“But if we are to share his glory, we must also share his suffering." 
— Romans 8:17

Eyes

"I like you; your eyes are full of language. "
— Anne Sexton 

Fragments

“She often could not articulate her thoughts; they seemed like objects glimpsed peripherally, skittish and ungraspable, splinters and fragments that would not add up to much if bundled together; they refused to stand still for examination. For this reason, she was largely silent. "
— Katherine Min, After The Falls 

Silence

"What is the matter with me? I don’t want to be married just to be married. I can’t think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can’t talk to, or worse, someone I can’t be silent with." — The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society 

Monkey Bars

“Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.” - CS Lewis

Timing

"Nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come." ~Victor Hugo

Why Why Why

“I want you to start thinking about why you are doing this. And when you find yourself at the darkest point, I want you to hold on to that reason, and it will get you through to the light.”

                                                                                                                - First Kill  by Heather Brewer 

Original

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."

— C. S. Lewis 

Feathers and Elections

"I love the concept of unity and diversity...Most decisions are based on a tiny difference. People say this was right and that wrong - - the difference was a feather...I keep scales whenever I am to remind some of that...They're a symbol of my awareness of the distortion most people have of what's better and what isn't." -"Scales" by Laurance S. Rockefeller

Trees

 Hermann Hesse, in Bäume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte, to share my affinity for these wonderful creatures:

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

Be still! Be still! Life is not easy, life is not difficult.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.” 

You are already home. You are enough.

You don’t need anything than what you already have. Cultivate kindness in your heart towards who you are, right now, and a gentleness in spirit towards your soul. The place you are wanting to go? The things you need? You already have them.
You are enough.
You are good.

Green

“For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.” — Martin Luther

Life and Design

"I discovered these common, self imposed restrictions are rather insidious, though they start out simple enough. We begin by worrying we aren’t good enough, smart enough or talented enough to get what we want, then we voluntarily live in this paralyzing mental framework, rather than confront our own role in this paralysis. Just the possibility of failing turns into a dutiful self-fulfilling prophecy. We begin to believe that these personal restrictions are, in fact, the fixed limitations of the world. We go on to live our lives, all the while wondering what we can change and how we can change it, and we calculate and re-calculate when we will be ready to do the thing s we want to do. And we dream. If only. If only. One day. Some day.

Every once in a while — often when we least expect it — we encounter someone more courageous, someone who choose t

o strive for that which (to us) seemed unrealistically unattainable, even elusive. And we marvel. We swoon. We gape. Often , we are in awe. I think we look at these people as lucky, when in fact, luck has nothing to do with it. It is really about the strength of their imagination; it is about how they constructed the possibilities for their Life. In short, unlike me, they didn’t determine what was impossible before it was even possible.

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If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve. Do what you love, and don’t stop until you get what you love. Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities, don’t compromise, and don’t waste time. Start now. Not 20 years from now, not two weeks from now. Now."

Debbie Millman in Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design

Yellow Butterfly

"We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty."

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  Maya Angelou

Faith

"Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness, and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns." -Anne Lemott