Ease in Skin

"There is nothing more rare, nor more beautiful, than a woman being unapologetically herself; comfortable in her perfect imperfection. To me, that is the true essence of beauty."

Steve Maraboli

Openness

"It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar."

-Anais Nin

Water and Mountains

"This ocean is terrific
specifically pacific
magnificent in
all the ways
the mountains are...
yet different."

Dallas Clayton

Always Trees

"O the pleasure with trees!
The orchard- the forest- the oak, cedar, pine, pekan-tree,
The honey-locust, black-walnut,
cottonwood, and magnolia.

Walt Whitman, Poem of Joys

Allow Sight

"So love who you want to love, and write what you want to write, and work where you want to work, and live where you want to live. Do the things you are meant to do. And allow yourself to be seen the entire way, even in the beginning when you're fumbling around, naive and inexperienced just trying not to face plant. 

You must allow yourself to be seen.

Doubt and resistance will come. In fact, that's a sign that you are doing something right. Don't fight the darkness... just don't live there. Don't be bullied back into a small life. That was not for you. That will never be for you. You are brave and you are trying and that is incredible. 

I think we are here on earth to learn how to relax into ourselves. I think we're here to learn how to come home. So remind yourself that you are safe amidst the chaos."

Kristin Lohr

Tightrope or Clean Teeth

"When we make a change, it's so easy to interpret our unsettledness as unhappiness, and our unhappiness as a result of having made the wrong decision. Our mental and emotional states fluctuate madly when we make big changes in our lives, and some days we could tightrope across Manhattan, and other days we are too weary to clean our teeth. This is normal. This is natural. This is change."

Jeanette Winterson

We are volcanoes

“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all maps change. There are new mountains.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Opposition in all things

"The deeper the cut of sadness, the greater there is room for joy–I think they are very much related. It’s important to understand that you have the capacity always to accommodate for immense sorrow and immense joy, which is not just the pay off–it’s part of the whole experience."

– Sufjan Stevens

The Smallest Reasons

"If you start living for the smallest reasons, that’s when you know you’re really living. The smell of rain after a thunderstorm, the shades of pavements when it’s autumn, the harvest season and the unspoken competition to pick the freshest tomatoes, the mediocre midnights and the color of the sunsets, the smell of bakeshops early in the morning, the frosty breeze of the fast-approaching winter, the warmth of oven when baking Christmas cookies, the thickness of paper when flipping through magazine pages, the smell of new books and new clothes and new things. When you start looking at things, really really looking, you’ll start living. Because then you’ll understand how it is to really be a human in this world full of people."

– and that is what we consider magic  (via cageofstars)

We are ghost towns

“There is a deep sense in which we are all ghost towns. We are all haunted by the memory of those we love, those with whom we feel we have unfinished business. While they may no longer be with us, a faint aroma of their presence remains, a presence that haunts us until we make our peace with them and let them go. The problem, however, is that we tend to spend a great deal of energy in attempting to avoid the truth. We construct an image of ourselves that seeks to shield us from a confrontation with our ghosts. Hence we often encounter them only late at night, in the corridors of our dreams.” 

― Peter Rollins, The Idolatry of God: Breaking Our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction

Pain as fuel

"...and what I've learned about pain is, it is:

-not to be numbed
-and it is not to be ignored
-and it is not to be wasted

and I've going to use every bit of this pain as fuel."

and that's how you know you can be redeemed.

-Glennon Doyle Melton

Pain is not a hot potato

"When I feel someone's been unkind, I know that all that just happened is they felt the hot loneliness. But they don't know how to be still with it. So they just treat it like a hot potato and pass it on to the next person.

But pain is not a hot potato. Pain is a traveling professor. And it just goes and nocks on everyone's door, and the smartest people I know are the people that say come in, and don't leave until you've taught me what I need to know."

-Glennon Doyle Melton