Easy and Light

"Do not bring people in your life who weigh you down. And trust your instincts … good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don’t hurt. They’re not painful. That’s not just with somebody you want to marry, but it’s with the friends that you choose. It’s with the people you surround yourselves with." — Michelle Obama

Roots and Branches

"And so I’ve been trying to let Him in and then let *Him* shine light on my soul. Eth 12:27 is meaning more to me now as I try to let *Him* show me my weakness, rather than try harder to be stronger where *I* see weakness. I am getting a sense that the more I let Him in and let Him take the lead on my improvement process, the more He’ll help me change from the inside out, healing the roots rather than me continuing to hack at my branches."  -Wendy Ulrich found here

Stillness

“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”

- W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight

Life's Quilt

“You have to choose your combinations careful. The right choices will enhance your quilt. The wrong choices will dull the colors and hide their original beauty. There are no rules you can follow. You have to go by instinct and you have to be brave.”

― Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

Fog

“One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, ‘We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I’ll make one. I’ll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I’ll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I’ll make a sound that’s so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I’ll make me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.’

The Fog Horn blew.”

- Ray Bradbury, The Fog Horn

Trees

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity…” -John Muir”

Belief

“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.”

- J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Hidden

“When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.”

- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray 

Glance

"The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only. "
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables 

Energy

"It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan."

-Elenor Roosevelt

Stand Up

"Sometimes, I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed." 

-Mary Oliver

Sometimes

"It’s just this strange thing I do where I allow myself to briefly fall in love with another human being that I see on a train, or the sidewalk, or in a warm café."

 — Chelsea Fagan, Dear Beautiful Guys I Pass On The Street: I Love You

2013

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself." — Neil Gaiman  

Abnormal

"My darling girl, when are you going to realize that being normal is not necessarily a virtue? It rather denotes a lack of courage." — Alice Hoffman

Saving

"Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things—they save you."

▼

  Chuck Palahniuk  

Hemingway

"The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed."
 — Ernest Hemingway 

Read

"I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written." 
— Barbara Kingsolver

Never too

“Never too old, never too bad, never too late, never too sick to start from scratch once again.”

 -Bikram Choudhury

Hands

"I have buried you in every place I’ve been. You keep ending up in my shaking hands." — Bon Iver 

It's on the Truck

"She believed a great happiness awaited her somewhere, and for this reason she remained calm as the days flew by." — Gyula Krudy 

Rules

Blame is simply the discharging of pain and discomfort.

It has nothing to do with accountability. Accountability requires long, difficult, respectful conversations. Blame fizzles out with rage, where accountability is in for the long haul.

Self-righteousness is a sign of fear and uncertainty.

It has nothing to do with activism or change. The loudest and most vitriolic among us are often the most afraid. As my friend Harriet Lerner says, “Change requires listening with same level of passion that we feel when we speak.”

You can't shame a nation into changing any more than you can shame a person into changing.

Shame is much more likely to be the source of destructive, violent behaviors than it is to be the cure. We need courage, vulnerability, hard work, empathy, integrity (and a little grace wouldn't hurt). 

-Brene Brown

Now

"The most powerful person you can be is who you are RIGHT NOW. The most powerful thing you can do is what you’re doing RIGHT NOW. The most powerful moment of your life is the moment RIGHT NOW." -Deepak Chopra

Change

"You can’t just make me different and then leave. You can’t. You can’t change me and make my whole life centered around you, then leave." — John Green, (Looking for Alaska)

All of the Above

"You are mysterious. You’re beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, and that’s the rarest known combination". — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Stories

"I want you to tell me about every person you’ve ever been in love with. Tell me why you loved them, then tell me why they loved you. Tell me about a day in your life you didn’t think you’d live through. Tell me what the word “home” means to you and tell me in a way that I’ll know your mother’s name just by the way you describe your bed room when you were 8. See, I wanna know the first time you felt the weight of hate and if that day still trembles beneath your bones. Do you prefer to play in puddles of rain or bounce in the bellies of snow? And if you were to build a snowman, would you rip two branches from a tree to build your snowman arms? Or would you leave the snowman armless for the sake of being harmless to the tree? And if you would, would you notice how that tree weeps for you because your snowman has no arms to hug you every time you kiss him on the cheek? Do you kiss your friends on the cheek? Do you sleep beside them when they’re sad, even if it makes your lover mad? Do you think that anger is a sincere emotion or just the timid motion of a fragile heart trying to beat away its pain? See, I wanna know what you think of your first name. And if you often lie awake at night and imagine your mother’s joy when she spoke it for the very first time. I want you tell me all the ways you’ve been unkind. Tell me all the ways you’ve been cruel. See, I wanna know more than what you do for a living. I wanna know how much of your life you spend just giving. And if you love yourself enough to also receive sometimes. I wanna know if you bleed sometimes through other people’s wounds." — Andrea Gibson  

Call It

"The important thing is the obvious thing nobody is saying." - William S. Burroughs

Well You Don't Say

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.“

~ Anais Nin

Move

"Do not fear going forward slowly; fear only standing still." — Chinese proverb

Dark Light

"The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places. But still there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps, the greater." — J.R.R. Tolkien, (The Lord of the Rings)

Mad Reason

“The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.”
—Andre Gide

Style

“Style is to forget all styles.”
—Jules Renard

Audience

“To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.”
—Allen Ginsberg, WD

Who

Never waste your time trying to explain who you are to people who are committed to misunderstanding you.

— Unknown

Manifesto

I reject the notion that beauty, desirability and worthiness are one size fits all.  I think happy people are the healthiest people.  It's not enough to just look good on the outside.  I want to feel good on the inside too.

I will give my one precious body the respect it deserves.  We've been together a long time, and we've got miles to go.  When my body is strong, I am strong.  When my body feels good, I feel good.  Wherever I go, my body goes too.  When I take care of my body, it takes care of me.

I celebrate the little victories.  From the first pair of running shoes I lace up, to the morning I didn't feel like waking up at 5 a.m. to go the gym, but did it anyway.  These are my personal triumphs, and I think each one deserves a parade.

I believe sweat stains are a badge of honor, and each of my muscles has a story to tell.  I will stop seeing the gym as time wasted working out and start seeing it as time invested in working on me.

I will turn my inertia into my momentum.

 

I will do something with my mind, my body and my life.

I want to improve the world, and I believe that begins by improving me--because when I feel my best, I can be my best.  And when I am my best, anything is possible.

This is my commitment to me.

Found through Lyceum Newsletter

Questions

"I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

 —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

First Steps

"And what might seem to be a series of unfortunate events may, in fact, be the first steps of a journey."

Lemony Snicket