Depth

"True greatness is like a river. The deeper it is the less noise it makes." - Unknown

Stay Leave

"The only thing more impossible than staying, was leaving." -Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love

On keeping a notebook

"Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

[…]

[T]he point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess."

 - Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, On Keeping a Notebook

Journals

“The habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.”
 - Virginia Woolf

Faith

“Don’t we all want to use our faith to make things happen in our lives? I think we all want to pull down the powers of heaven for our good. We simply need to find the balance between relying on the Lord and using the agency we fought for, to choose to do good things with our lives.”

 – Kylee Shields, Make it Happen

Living

"I don’t want to earn my living; I want to live."

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  Oscar Wilde 

Be Still

"If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away."

 — John Steinbeck, on falling in love, a response to his eldest son’s 1958 letter, fromJohn Steinbeck: A Life in Letters 

Reading Honest

"Reading honest literature makes you love the world. Knowledge and understanding are love. Reading educates our feelings and enhances our sympathy. When you read for understanding, you are fundamentally changed. You are a different person at the end of the story or the novel than you were when it began." — John Dufresne

Faith

"Doubt is not the opposite of faith.  Certainty is." - Anne Lemott

Life 101

"INSTRUCTIONS FOR LIVING A LIFE: PAY ATTENTION. BE ASTONISHED. TELL ABOUT IT."

MARY OLIVER

Time

"No great thing is suddenly created."

-Epicetus

Chieko Okasaki

"Only you know your circumstances...Cherish your agency and don't give it away casually. Don't compare yourself to others-almost always this will make you despondent. Don't accept somebody else's interpretation of how you should be spending your time.

Be spiritually independent enough that your relationship with the Savior doesn't depend on your circumstances, or what other people say and do. Have the spiritual independence to be a Mormon - the best Mormon you can - in your own way." - Chieko Okasaki

Difference

"A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket." — William Wordsworth

Summer Night

"We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright."

— Ernest Hemingway

Bent and Perfect

"In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful."

— Alice Walker

What Still Might Be

"Never waste your time wondering about what might have been. Get busy thinking about what still might be. And trusting that whatever it is, it will leave you glad that what might have been, never came to be."

— Sandra Kring

I like that

"You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming."

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night 

Energy

"Any word that you speak exists. It is there. It is a vibration. Word is a cause and an effect. Nobody can escape from word. Realizing that we can't escape word is our basic duty."
- Yogi Bhajan

Pain as Joy

"…to me, Van Gogh is the finest painter of them all. Certainly, the most popular, great painter of all time, the most beloved. His command of color the most magnificent. He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world…no one had ever done it before. Perhaps, no one ever will again. To my mind, that strange, wild man who roamed the fields of Provence was not only the world’s greatest artist, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived."

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The Curator,  “Vincent and the Doctor” 

Travels

"Little by little, one travels far."

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  J. R. R. Tolkien 

Breaking Before You Bloom

By Ollin Morales 

It is clear to me that in the transition from Winter to Spring, nature must shatter.

Since we, ourselves, are a part of nature, our own transition from life’s Winter to life’s Spring must begin with a type of shattering as well.

We must break.

We must yawn and stretch. Our insides must be torn asunder. Our minds must pop. Our intestines must squeeze. Our eyes must bulge.

Before our new selves can bloom, we must explode, we must break, we must shatter, we must thaw…

The first step down a new path must, evidently, cut away at the old path—and that cutting hurts. It takes a lot out of us, and we are exhausted.
What can comfort us at this point of our journey is knowing that this is all normal: nature goes through a similar process in the beginning of Spring.

Everything in nature breaks before it blooms. The frozen pond shatters before it can flow freely again. The bud of a rose cracks before it opens. The sun stabs at the moon right before it rises.
So it is with nature, so it is with you.

Every new chapter in your life must begin with a break between two pages. A blank space with no words, no sentences, no paragraphs, no development in your story—just a long break that interrupts all action in an intrusive and almost jarring manner.

This break is wide and it is long and, yes, as your eyes float across this break, you may be filled with worry and anxiety as to what will happen next.

But do not worry.
In the Spring of your life, when things begin to break, it does not spell doom. It just means that a new you is about to bloom.
much love,
Ollin Morales

Empowered

"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any."- Alice Walker

Silent

Hi

"No matter what terror the earth could produce – winds, seas – a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world – no flower or stone – as a single hello from a human being."

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  Lorrie Moore, Birds of America 

Love

"Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more fierce than sun, more last than star..." -ee cummings

Why Do I

"I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I’m afraid of."

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  Joss Whedon 

Action vs. Surrender

"Life is a balance between what we can control and what we cannot. I am learning to live between effort and surrender." -Danielle Orner

Waiting

"There is nothing more tiring than waiting for something to happen." - Violet, Downton Abbey

Wounds

"Don’t allow your wounds to transform you into someone you’re not."

— Paulo Coelho

Responsibility

"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible."

— Voltaire

Black is Poetic

"Black is not sad. Bright colors are what depresses me. They’re so… empty. Black is poetic. How do you imagine a poet? In a bright yellow jacket? Probably not."

— Ann Demeulemeester

Travel

"Every place I have ever visited changed my life in some way, either spiritually, emotionally or intellectually. Isn’t that the point of travel?" — Anonymous

wholes

"I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature. My attachments are always excessively strong."

— Jane Austen 

More

"Young girls need to learn that sexiness isn’t about being naked."

— Marc Jacobs 

Beyond

"I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life."

— Virginia Woolf