Sea Glass

Now I long for simplicity. It’s all I want.

I do not think this makes me old. I think it makes me pummeled, like sea glass.

Sea glass is pretty.

-Megan Goates, To Our Survival

Story Biopsy

"A story is a kind of biopsy of human life."

-Lorrie Moore

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

A Sunday Kind of Love

"I want to be with someone, who dreams of doing everything in life, and nothing, on a rainy Sunday afternoon."

Atticus

Intuition

"Intuition is not a single way of knowing - it's our ability to hold space for uncertainty and our willingness to trust the many ways we've developed knowledge and insight, including instinct, experience, faith, and reason."

-Brene Brown

March

"And then her heart changed, or at least she understood it; and the winter passed, and the sun shone upon her."

JRR Tolkien

Hungry Heart

"If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart."

Margaret Atwood

Dirt Blooms

"When a flower doesn't bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower."

Alexander Den Heijer

Pay Attention to

"Pay attention to what you pay attention to."

-Amy Krouse Rosenthal

Nature for Body + Soul

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul."

John Muir

That Vulnerable Moment

"The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself - that's the moment you may be starting to get it right."

Neil Gaiman, University of the Arts commencement speech

Vibe

"Ain't what you do - it's the way that you do it."

Ella Fitzgerald

The Journey - Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
What you had to do, and began,
Though the voices around you
Kept shouting
their bad advice,
Though the whole house
Began to tremble
And you felt the old tug
At your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
Each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
Though the wind pried
With its stiff fingers
At the very foundations,
Though their melancholy
Was terrible.
It was already late
Enough, and a wilde night,
And the road full of fallen
Branches and stones.
But little by little,
As you left their voices behind,
The starts began to burn
Through the sheets of clouds,
And there was a new voice,
Which you slowly Recognized as you won,
That kept you company
As you Strode deeper and deeper
Into the world,
Determined to do
The only thing you could do,
Determined to save
The only life you could save.

Mary Oliver

Great Hopes

"My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return."

-Maya Angelou