Cracks

"We may think that the person who dies with the fewest cracks wins the game, but the lesson of Easter is this: nothing can emerge from an unbroken shell." 
Kathryn Soper

Christos Anesti.

referenced here

Appalling Strangeness

"You can't conceive, nor can I or anyone, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God." -Graham Green (English author)

"Our all is required. But our all isn't enough. It must combine with His. Only He can lift us to the full reaches of our potential. Much of our secular society says, 'Oh yes I can. I can do it my way." But that is disabling vanity. Even the slightest need for repentance requires Christs's purifying power. And for those of us near despair who cry, 'Oh no, even with Him I cannot go through with this', he replies, 'I can lift. I will heal.'" - Truman Madsen

both referenced here

eyes of my eyes

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

- e.e. cummings

Holy Week

"As we approach this holy week—Passover Thursday with its Paschal Lamb, atoning Friday with its cross, Resurrection Sunday with its empty tomb—may we declare ourselves to be more fully disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, not in word only and not only in the flush of comfortable times but in deed and in courage and in faith, including when the path is lonely and when our cross is difficult to bear. This Easter week and always, may we stand by Jesus Christ “at all times and in all things, and in all places that [we] may be in, even until death,” for surely that is how He stood by us when it was unto death and when He had to stand entirely and utterly alone." Elder Jeffrey R. Holland

Middles

"I like middles. . . It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules." --John Updike

Daring Greatly

"The only thing you need when you go [into the arena] in is clarity of values and faith." -Brene Brown

Natural

“The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.”

-Wendall Berry, Given

What Not To Do

“Get stuck. Stay in one place your whole life. Always order vanilla even though the menu is four pages long. Become the type of person who sends back lattes. Save up your money for a plasma TV instead of a plane ticket. Talk a lot about things you know nothing about. Have an affair with someone you don’t even find attractive. Refuse to forget your ex. Make it impossible for yourself to do anything without remembering that you used to do it with them. Hug your knees under the sheets and think about how safe you felt when they held you at night. Remind yourself daily of how empty you feel. Find new ways to make yourself sad. Get drunk all the time. Consider no Saturday night, national holiday or extended happy hour complete without a vodka-induced breakdown. Graduate college but keep drinking like you’re still in it. Notice that cheap beer tastes watery and stale when you drink it alone but drink it anyway. Look at old Facebook photos wasted and wonder where everyone went. Never drink. Never do anything that could potentially be “bad” for you. Treat your body like the temple it is and say no to carbs, yes to wheatgrass, go to bed at ten sharp and turn down cake on your birthday. Take fifteen different dietary supplements. Monitor carefully. Succumb to nothing. Miss out on everything. Compare yourself constantly, to everyone. Allow the standards of image-obsessed, age-obsessed culture to make you feel decrepit at 25. Scroll through skinny girls on Tumblr feeling wistful and inadequate. Pull at the skin on your hipbones, stomach, and underarms in the mirror. Sigh a lot. Sigh all the time. Don’t fall in love with anyone or anything. Put an impenetrable wall between yourself and other people. Add a fire-breathing dragon and eight yards of barbed wire. Be suspicious of everyone’s motives. Hold grudges long after you’ve forgotten what for. Fall in love with everyone and everything. Run after the next best thing like it’s a bus you’re perpetually late for. Throw your heart into every other stranger’s hands and be genuinely surprised to be hurt. Refuse to learn. Refuse to ever learn.”

— Glass Butterfly: How To Ruin Your Life

Season of Becoming

"There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness and this is neither. This season is about becoming."

Shauna Niequist

Color

"Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways."
-Oscar Wilde

Tides

  "The tides are in our veins."

-Robinson Jeffers

found here

Not a Project

"To create something like a poem, means that the outside world of an artist and the internal drives within her blend and blur."

found here 

     -Dorothea Lasky, Poetry is Not a Project

Take me to your trees...

"Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers."

 — Margaret Atwood, Good Bones

Conventional Prejudices

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly."

— Albert Einstein 

Vulnerability

"Vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage."
— Brene Brown

Soul vs. Ego

“Souls love. That’s what souls do. Egos don’t, but souls do. Become a soul, look around, and you’ll be amazed-all the beings around you are souls. Be one, see one."
— Ram Dass 

Open Doors

"If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you.  I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be." —Joseph Campbell

Show Don't Tell

"People may not tell you how they feel about you, but they always show you. Pay attention."

▼

  Keri Hilson   

Humor

"You can tell how smart people are by what they laugh at." - Tina Fey

Inside Out

"The way we experience the world around us is a direct reflection of the world within us. If our thoughts and energy are not supporting our life, then our life will not feel supported."

-Gabby Bernstein

Research

“Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.” 

 

-Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Lightly

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days…Lightly, lightly—it’s the best advice ever given me. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling.”

- Aldous Huxley 

Ocean Moves

“But remember that you have to move on, somehow. You just pick your head up and stare at something beautiful like the sky or the ocean, and you move the hell on.”

- James Patterson 

Understood

“There’s nothing more intimate in life than simply being understood… And understanding someone else. "
— Brad Meltzer, The Inner Circle

And So They Did

"She quietly expected great things to happen to her, and no doubt that’s one of the reasons why they did."

— Zelda Fitzgerald

Good Vibration

"Some things you’re not letting happen right now because the timing isn’t perfect for you. Some you’re not letting happen because you are very aware of where you are. But all things, as they are happening, are happening in perfect order. And if you will relax and begin saying, ‘Everything in its perfect time. Everything is unfolding. And I’m enjoying where I am now, in relationship to where I’m going. Content where I am, and eager for more,” that is the perfect vibrational stance.’"

▼

  

Abraham Hicks  

The War of Art

"Resistance is directly proportional to love. If you’re feeling massive Resistance, the good news is, it means there’s tremendous love there too. If you didn’t love the project that is terrifying you, you wouldn’t feel anything. The opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s indifference.

The more Resistance you experience, the more important your unmanifested art/project/enterprise is to you—and the more gratification you will feel when you finally do it." 

-Stephen Pressfield, The War of Art

Art

"One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art." -Oscar Wilde

And

What is your favorite word?”
“And. It is so hopeful. — An interview with Margaret Atwood 

Twinkly

"… it’s impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren’t feeling twinkly yourself."  — Roald Dahl, Danny the Champion of the World