Don't Turn Away from the Art of Life

"We enter the bookstore, see the many volumes arrayed there, and think: so much to read, so little time. But books do not take time; they give time, they expand our resources of both heart and mind. It may sound paradoxical, but they are, in the last analysis, scientific, for they trace the far flung route by which we come to understand our world and ourselves. They take our measure. And we are never through discovering who we are."

Arnold Weinstein, NY Times opinion, Don't Turn Away from the Art of Life

All Better Now

"And when my prayers to God were met with indifference, I picked up a pen, I wrote my own deliverance."

-Emily Wing Smith, All Better Now

Your Time, Your Priorities

"Instead of saying 'I don't have time' try saying 'it's not a priority,' and see how that feels. Often, that's a perfectly adequate explanation. I have time to iron my sheets, I just don't want to. But other things are harder. Try it: 'I'm not going to edit your resume, sweetie, because it's not a priority.' 'I don't go to the doctor because my health is not a priority.' If these phrases don't sit well, that's the point. Changing our language reminds us that time is a choice. If we don't like how we're spending an hour, we can choose differently."

-Wall Street Journal

shrink or expand

some people
when they hear
your story.
contract.
others
upon hearing
your story,
expand.
and
this is how
you
know.

-nayyirah waheed

Wins, Loses, and Burnout

"The nurse is in that room day in and day out. You give a piece of yourself to that child. But intimacy has its dangers. You have to be able to set it aside. You can't come in on your days off. You have to be able to go home at the end of the day and have a glass of wine, or go rock climbing, or visit with friends. If you can't go home and rebuild, you'll burn out. You won't be able to handle the losses if your just surviving off the wins. Because the losses are severe. you were allowed into that child's life at their most intimate time, and you were trusted. And that is a gift. And even in death, you learned something from that child that made you a better person and a better nurse."

-Humans of New York

A Twinkie Consciousness

"You can't expect to live a vibrant life when you live on twinkie consciousness."

-Kriss Carr

Peonies

...and there it is again–

        beauty the brave, the exemplary,

blazing open.
    Do you love this world?
      Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
       Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
   and softly,
      and exclaiming of their dearness,
       fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
    their eagerness
      to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
        nothing, forever?

-“Peonies” from Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems

Upward

"I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward."

-Charlotte Bronte

Everyday Rituals

"Quality of life is determined by how well we treat our everyday rituals."

-Amy Aswell

Hope Muscle Memory

"Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a habit that becomes spiritual muscle memory. It's a renewable resource for moving through lie as it is, not as we wish it to be."

-Krista Tippett

But this Hour

"Happiness, not in another place, but this place...not for another hour, but this hour."

-Walt Whitman

We Must be Hatched

"It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad."

-CS Lewis

How Alive and I Willing to Be?

"The business of being a writer is ultimately about asking yourself, how alive am I willing to be?"

-Anne Lamott

Women and Thoughts

"Taught from infancy that beauty is a woman's scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming around its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison."

-Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me 

and I wake in the night at the least sound 

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, 

I go and lie down where the wood drake 

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. 

I come into the peace of wild things 

who do not tax their lives with forethought 

of grief. I come into the presence of still water. 

And I feel above me the day-blind stars 

waiting with their light. For a time 

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

-Wendell Berry