Writing is like...

"Writing...is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo."

-Don Marquis

Born Again

"He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Wrong Right

"Sometimes when things turn out wrong, it's because they would have turned out worse if they had gone right."

-Mark Amend

Willingness in Fear

"Fear is the biggest obstacle to our creativity. I don't believe it's possible to live a life free from fear, but courage is not the absence of fear; it's the willingness to act in the presence of fear."

-David Duchemin

Elsewhere the Sky

"Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky."

-Willa Cather

A Journey is a Person

"A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us."

-John Steinbeck

Sister Life Ghost Ship Salute

"I'll never know and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore."

-Cheryl Strayed

So Be Kind in the Vineyard

"We are not in a race against each other to see who is the wealthiest or the most talented or the most beautiful or even the most blessed. The race we are really in is the race against sin, and surely envy is one of the most universal of those. Furthermore, envy is a mistake that just keeps on giving...Coveting, pouting, or tearing others down does not elevate your standing, nor does demeaning someone else improve your self-image. So be kind, and be grateful that God is kind. It is a happy way to live."

-Jeffrey R. Holland, The Laborers in the Vineyard
curated by The Small Seed

Social Anxiety

"Ideal conversation is an exchange of thought, not an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory."

-Emily Post (the one and only)

A Blessed Warm Fog

"It's not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog."

-Joseph Conrad

Simple Truth

"You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear."

-Neil Gaiman

More Ocean Quotes

"Even when the ocean is at its most tumultuous, if you learn to drop down 20 or 30 feet under the water, there's just gentle calmness, undulation, and stillness. And it's always present."

-Jon Kabat-Zinn

A man shared this quote, so ya....

"To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurable man's superior. Has she not greater intuition, is she not more self-sacrificing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? Without her, man could not be. If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with woman. Who can make a more effective appeal to the heart than woman?"

-Mahatma Gandi

Time and Photographs

"I have a tenuous relationship with time. I’m always looking to be lost in it, to fight it, to move freely in it. To push and pull. Save it. Erase it. Who knows what’s equitable to ask of time. It never answers my letters. It just goes on. And so I travel looking for lost bits, hoping to know what it’s like to be more than a temporal being...

I, as most of us do now, thoughtlessly use my camera to tuck the detritus of my days into my pockets. I also do photography, but I consider those two different things. The former I find pointless and rather wish I didn’t do it. A photo isn’t a memory any more than the scraps of paper and mundane talismans I keep in a little drawer in my dresser are. At best they are short hand notes, jotted down and crumpled in a pocket, maybe looked at later, maybe not.

Something far more inscrutable determines that which we remember and that which we do not. Even a photograph can become meaningless over time. Where was that? Who are those people? Why some things bob happily on the surface of our memories, form bright electric paths that spark blue through our brains, and why others sink down into the silt, forgotten, a neurological black out, I’ll never know.

These photos are artifacts I was able to create by traveling, but they are not my memories. My memories are simple. Heart sickness for my love. Overwhelming wonder at the fact that things really can be as beautiful as you always imagined. Trying to suspend reality, trying to make believe that mystical creatures and spirits inhabited the forest. Wanting someone else’s eyes to see all that I was seeing. Never wanting to leave. All I dream of is being back ..., but next time with my husband. If he was there with me, it may as well be home. If you ever can, do go.

Beth Kirby of Local Milk

Sonnet 34

You are the daughter of the sea, oregano's first cousin.
Swimmer, your body is pure as the water;
cook, your blood is quick as the soil.
Everything you do is full of flowers, rich with the earth.

Your eyes go out toward the , and the waves rise;
your hands go out to the earth and the seeds swell;
you know the deep essence of water and the earth,
conjoined in you like a formula for clay.

Naiad: cut your body into turquoise pieces,
they will bloom resurrected in the kitchen.
This is how you become everything that lives.

And so at last, you sleep, in the circle of my arms
that push back the shadows so that you can rest--
vegetables, seaweed, herbs: the foam of your dreams 

Pablo Neruda

Uncomfortable

"The days you are most uncomfortable are the days you learn the most about yourself."

-Mary L. Bean

Artist

"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a strangers looks at it, it moves again."

-Faulkner

The Others

"To the fatherless, to the wounded by fathers, to those haunted by whatever father was or is: there are other origins. The night sky, stitched as it is with stars carries pieces of us all. And all the oceans. And each of our hands, making meaning from nothing."

-Lidia Yuknavitch

Slave to your Prejudices

"Equality is more than a matter of mathematics and geometry. Equality is a philosophical and psychological matter...And I tell you, we can't save the should of America without in the the process saving our white brothers. And they aren't free. When you enslave an individual, you enslave yourself. I mean all white brothers are slaves to that fear - salves to their prejudices."

-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Brown Chapel Selma, AL

Apple Carts

"Why not upset the apple cart? If you don't, the apples will rot anyway."

-Frank A. Clark

The Big Questions

"Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial."

-George Saunders

Numb

"Sometimes I worry that I'll slide back into the mindless rotisserie of work and projects that guided me in my old house...that I'll grow numb to the way nature can leave me awestruck. I worry that I'll fall asleep at the switch, only to wake up years later and find that I can't remember what I did last week or the month before that, nor do I recognize the old lady staring back at me in the mirror."

-Dee Williams

Awe

"When experiencing awe, you, may not, egocentrically speaking, feel like you are at the centre of the world anymore. By shifting attention toward larger entities and diminishing the emphasis on the individual self, we reasoned that awe would trigger tendencies to engage in pro-social behaviors that may be costly for you but that benefit and help others feel smaller and less self-important."

"...awe expands people's perception of time, alters decision-making, and enhances well-being."

-Paul Piff, PhD

Salt Lines

"All of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea- whether it is to sail or to watch it - we are going back from whence we came."

-JFK

Faith

“...the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. ” 
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.” 
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

The Game is Worthwhile

"The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end."

-Michel Foucault

Islands and Seas

"We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding."

-Rudyard Kipling

Nature Prayer

"I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?

-Mary Oliver

Anesthetic

"There is an anesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anesthetic. what is the best way of countering the sluggish habituation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways."

- Richard Dawkins

Potent Prayer

"Prayer is not an old woman's idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action."

-Mahatma Gandhi

Rapt in Awe

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." -

 Albert Einstein