brave

"kind people are brave people. brave is not something you should wait to feel. brave is a decision. it is a decision that compassion is more important than fear, than fitting in, than following the crowd.” 

glennon doyle melton

be a tree

"for me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. i revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. and even more i revere them when they stand alone. they are like lonely persons. not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like beethoven and nietzsche. in their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. when a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. and every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

trees are sanctuaries. whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. they do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

a tree says: a kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, i am life from eternal life. the attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. i was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

a tree says: my strength is trust. Iiknow nothing about my fathers, i know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. i live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and i care for nothing else. i trust that god is in me. i trust that my labor is holy. out of this trust i live.

when we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: be still! be still! look at me! life is not easy, life is not difficult. those are childish thoughts. let god speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. you are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. but every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. home is neither here nor there. home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

a longing to wander tears my heart when i hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. if one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. it is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. it is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. it leads home. every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

so the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. they are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. but when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. he wants to be nothing except what he is. that is home. that is happiness."

herman hesse

 a peach

"i know already that i will return to this day whenever i want to. i can bid it alive. preserve it. there is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. the river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. you can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in new york, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the bronx on the strength of your own desire. there is no way to find a word to fit around this feeling. words resist it. words give it a pattern it does not own. words put it in time. they freeze what cannot be stopped. try to describe the taste of a peach. try to describe it. feel the rush of sweetness: we make love."

colum mccann

i am

"to live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how i would like to live. to feel the joy of life. to separate oneself from the burden, the angst, the anguish that we all encounter every day. to say i am alive, i am wonderful, i am. i am. that is something to aspire to. when i am a person, that is how i will live my life."

garth stein

upward

"happiness is the consequence of personal effort. you fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. you have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. and once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.”

elizabeth gilbert

madness

"the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

jack kerouac

goodness

“the truth is that there are no good men or bad men. it is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. there are good deeds, and bad deeds. men are just men - it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. the truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone - the noblest man alive or the most wicked - has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. the truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward god.”

gregory david roberts 

throb

“ten times a day something happens to me like this - some strengthening throb of amazement - some good sweet empathic ping and swell. this is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing i know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.”

mary oliver

tribe

“we all say we hate being misunderstood and how we desperately want to find people who understand us. but it is not lack of compatible people that keeps us lonely. there is no shortage of people on your journey. the real, secret obstacle that we have against finding authentic, genuine relationships with people is our subconscious fear of growth. if we stick around in the bin of broken toys playing the queen or the king, at least we get to feel some sense of accomplishment at being the most evolved person we know. to find our tribe means finding people we can learn from, people who are better at some things than we are, people who have something to teach. we say we want it, but how many of us fear being a beginner more than loneliness and much more than being in the wrong crowd? there is a strange comfort, a sense of safety, to suffering and loneliness. to be happy, to find our family, we must be willing to let that go.”

vironika tugaleva

wonder

"my soul doesn't care a whit about reward or failure. my soul is not guided by dreams of praise or fears of criticism. my soul doesn't even have language for such notions. my soul, when i tend to it, is a far more expansive and fascinating source of guidance than my ego will ever be, because my soul desires only one thing: wonder. and since creativity is my most efficient pathway to wonder, i take refuge there, and it feeds my soul."

elizabeth gilbert

home

"we sleep to time's hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of god. and then, when we wake to the deep shores of time uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it's time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it's time to break our necks for home."

annie dillard

compassion

"we are all broken by something. we have all hurt someone and have been hurt. we all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. as thomas merton said, we are bodies of broken bones. i guess i'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. we all have our reasons. sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. but our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion."

bryan stevenson

forest

"we usually need to leave the old without any promise of the new, need to spend time as forest dwellers, just surviving. our journey to our old, new home is cyclical, and we must see that we shall never move in once & for all."

marion woodman

god

"it is true. i am god. but you are also god. we are the same, you & i. we are images of light. we are god."

miguel ruiz

person

"to live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how i would like to live. to feel the joy of life. to separate oneself from the burden, the angst, the anguish that we all encounter every day. to say i am alive, i am wonderful, i am. i am. that is something to aspire to. when i am a person, that is how i will live my life."

garth stein