You are the water

❝

Stop trying to be a bridge
when you
are the water
rushing beneath it."

— Kelsey Danielle

Hands

❝

When I sit near you, my hands suddenly become alien things and I don’t know where to put them or what they usually do, like this is the first time I’ve ever had hands and maybe they go in my pockets and maybe they don’t."

— Iain S. Thomas, I Wrote This For You

Life After Death

❝

Each time you open a book and read it,
A tree smiles knowing there’s life after death."

— Unknown

A Diary of Colors

My second grade teacher liked to ask us,
“How do you feel today, on a scale of one to ten?”
Ten always meant I’m super, thank you
and one was always not today, Mrs. MacAuley, not today.
But I never liked numbers, they would always
twist and rebel against my mind so I chose
to speak in colors instead.

January third - I am the color
of mint chocolate chip ice cream
but I’ve eaten all the chocolate chips.
I am calm.

February seventh - I am a bruise of
blues and violets today. I think it would
be best if I sat by the window.
These are unhappy colors.

April eleventh - I am turquoise, I am magenta,
I am every color in the rainbow.

April thirtieth - I am gray, I am silent.

May first - I am orange, the color of melting
creamsicles on a beach in July.

June twelfth - I am as yellow as the school bus
that will bring me home to summer. I am free.

Twelve years later, I still use colors.
The winter makes me feel cobalt blue, the ocean
turns me a seafoam green. Violets and purples
leave me uneasy and scarlet is a fever of fury.
Some nights I drown in shades of navy, denim,
and cornflower but other nights I meditate in forests of
harlequin and shamrock.

But you,
you leave me a blinding white followed by a soft yellow:
the color of sunlight after a period of darkness.

— Kelsey Danielle, “A Diary of Colors” 

Meaningless scenes stitched together

“And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can't go back to being normal; you can't go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.”

― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

Viral

Romance isn’t measured by how viral your proposal goes. The internet age may try to sell you something different, but don’t ever forget that viral is closely associated with sickness – so don’t ever make being viral your goal.

Your goal is always to make your Christ-focus contagious – to just one person.

-a holy experience

Secret Love

"Isn’t it strange? There are so many people out there who secretly love someone. And there are so many people out there who have no idea that someone secretly loves them."

— Letters to Crushes #513739  

Sunrise Sunset

"Everyone should smile. Life really isn’t that serious. We make it hard. The sun rises. The sun sets. We just tend to complicate the process."

— Arian Foster 

On Sadness

"Sometimes we get sad about things and we don’t like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes, we are sad but we really don’t know why we are sad, so we say we aren’t sad but we really are."

— Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Fat

"Is fat really the worst thing a human being can be? Is fat worse than vindictive, jealous, shallow, vain, boring, evil, or cruel? Not to me."

— J. K. Rowling

Message in the Mess

"Those with a grateful mindset tend to see the message in the mess. And even though life may knock them down, the grateful find reasons, if even small ones, to get up."

— Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

Weight of my eyes

"In your glance away
feel the weight of my eyes to
your distraction"

-Tyler Knott Gregson

Shining Armour for Protection

"What is attractive in you is not you. It is your absolutely radiant body. That is the shining armor around you for protection and attraction both. And its strength depends on how deeply you consume prana and how many times during the day you try to breathe absolutely mechanically [consciously]."

-Yogi Bhajan

Let's just call it sunrise...

Come the white morning
I'll cross the earth on my face,

let the barrel of light tip over one more time

and let's just call it sunrise.
I don't know anything

about blowing a child out
like a balloon, or what comes after-

that dream like a waterfall sealed in a flask
close to God's hip

-John Rybicki from "Tender Range"

Trust Them

"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them." 
-Ernest Hemingway

Ya - what he said

"To hell with being ashamed of what you liked. "

- Invisible Man

Able to Breathe

"Only a shipwrecked person who has just escaped drowning could understand the psychology of someone who breaks out in laughter just because he is able to breathe."


-Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

Staring at the Sky

…you can look at something, close your eyes, and see it again and still know nothing – like staring at the sky to figure out the distances between stars.

     -Ann Beattie, Jacklighting

The Red Thread

“An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstances. The thread may stretch or tangle, but it will never break.”

-Ancient Chinese Proverb 

Power Boat

"We’re all sinking in the same boat here. We’re all bored and desperate and waiting for something to happen. Waiting for life to get better. Waiting for things to change. Waiting for that one person to finally notice us. We’re all waiting. But we also need to realize that we all have the power to make those changes for ourselves."

— Susanne Colasanti, Waiting For You 

Book Validation

"Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper."

— David Quammen

Start Going

"I think that one of these days you’re going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you’ve got to start going there."

— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (

Only in the Bones

“I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones." 
— Franz Kafka 

The Violence of Articulation by Meg Fee

"I just keep thinking about that dinner table. The smooth green of the glass. The accumulation of dirty dishes and empty bottles. How startlingly sober I felt as I sat there. How his body was turned in, facing another woman. How in the end there were only four of us and how very much I felt apart. How when this other girl told a joke he laughed in a way that he only ever, upon occasion, laughed for me. And how when that happened I sort of caught my breath and thought, oh, well, there’s that.

---------------------------------------------

The violence of articulation. I had a teacher in school who used that phrase and I’ll never forget it. The violence. Of. Articulation. How nearly impossible it is to say some things out loud. How catapulting them out of the mouth is part pyrotechnics, part gymnastics, and one hell of a leap of faith. And how some words, no matter how they are said, leave cuts and stains and scratch the mouth.

But I’ve been choking on I-don’t-knows for nearly a month now, so you pick your battles.

Why is it easier to say the cruel things? Why do those words slip out, slick as oil, so tremendously seductive and so incredibly damaging? It’s so hard to speak from a place of generosity. To say, I am sad and I am hurt, and this can’t go on, but I am nonetheless in awe of you. To say you deserve my respect—my kindness, even as I am so completely and maddeningly frustrated with you—hurt by you.

Because the thing is, it’s not just about the words and the difficulty of getting them out—it’s about figuring out where truth and generosity meet. It’s about speaking from the largest part of yourself—that part that continuously reaches for a bigger life, that says I want more and if you can’t give it to me, I forgive you that—not your fault, but time to go. That part willing to risk a little bit of lonely. That part that makes a practice of faith and thinks well hell if I’m not lucky that I get to feel this, hard as it is. That part that goes to the edge of the cliff again and again and again.

---------------------------------------------------------------

He wasn’t the right guy. For me. He wasn’t the right guy, for me. And he certainly never looked at me like I was the right girl for him. And I am a girl who wants to be looked at like that."

-Meg Feemegfee.com

Daily Bread

"Books are both our luxuries and our daily bread."

— Henry Stevens

Fighting

"I’ll fight for you, but I will not compete for you."

— Unknown

On Waiting

"We’re all sinking in the same boat here. We’re all bored and desperate and waiting for something to happen. Waiting for life to get better. Waiting for things to change. Waiting for that one person to finally notice us. We’re all waiting. But we also need to realize that we all have the power to make those changes for ourselves."

— Susanne Colasanti, Waiting For You

Someone to Hold Me

"Stories: the only thing we've got, the arbiters of this human process of rocketing between hope and despair, and it's why every person is vitally important. It's why it doesn't matter if you're a mess, or put together, or even a success according to arbitrary standards; what matters is that you are conscious of the world around you, in all of its terrible beauty."

-Emily Rapp, Someone to Hold Me

How You Survived

"I don't want to hear about the mess because we al know what that looks like. I want to know how you survived."

- Amanda de Cadenet of The Conversation