Words to Grow By.

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places."

~Ernest Hemingway

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Words to Grow By.

"Keeping your body healthy is an expression of gratitude to the whole cosmos--the trees, the clouds, everything."

~Thich Nhat Hanh

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Words to Grow By.

"We can always choose to perceive things differently.  You can focus on what's wrong in your life, or you can focus on what's right."

~Marianne Williamson

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Words to Grow By.

"No matter how qualified or deserving we are, we will never reach a better life until we can imagine it for ourselves and allow ourselves to have it."~Richard Bach

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Words to Grow By.

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

~Raymond Carver, "Late Fragment"

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Words to Grow By.

"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are.  I don't believe in circumstances.  The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and, if they can't find them, make them."

~George Bernard Shaw

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Words to Grow By.

"But maybe as I get older, I begin to see beauty where I least expected it before..."

~Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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Words to Grow By.

Every one of us is called upon, probably many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job or a limb or a loved one, a graduation, bringing a new baby home: it's impossible to think at first how this will all be possible. Eventually, what moves it all forward is the subterranean ebb and flow of being alive among the living.

In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a singular glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full , dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, i have taught myself joy , over and over again.

It is not such a wide gulf to cross, then, from survival to poetry. We hold fast to the old passions of endurance that buckle and creak beneath us, dovetailed, tight as a good wooden boat to carry us onward. And onward full tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. to be hopeful, to embrace on possibility after another -- that is surely the basic instinct. Baser even than hate, the thing with teeth, which can be stilled with a tone of voice or stunned by beauty. If the whole world of the living has to turn on the single point of remaining alive, that pointed endurance is the poetry of hope. The thing with feathers.

What a stroke of luck. What a singular brute feat of outrageous fortune: to be born citizenship in the animal kingdom. We love we lose, go back to the start and do it right over again. For every heavy forebrain solemnly cataloging the facts of a harsh landscape, there's a rush of intuition behind it crying out:

High Tide ! Time to move out the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.

~Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson

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Words to Grow By.

Yesterday, as I desperately needed to finish a research paper for graduate school and wanted to clean out my over-stuffed closet, I found myself doing anything BUT those two things. Then I remembered something I had read recently by SARK:

"You can unlearn your procrastination just as you learned it. I notice how we inundate ourselves with huge goals and then berate ourselves when they don't occur. Remember that procrastination is rooted in over-functioning and low self-esteem. What a doomed combination! Procrastinators are also tremendous perfectionists and relentless rehearsers. They rehearse over and over in their mind how they're going to do it perfectly--then when they do nothing, it doesn't disturb their perfect vision!

To release procrastination is to fly through your very own dream sky. Once I learned how to let go of procrastinating behaviors, my creativity soared to new places that seemed unreachable before. Letting go happens in layers and increments and is definitely a process. I'm looking forward to the new places I'll travel if I continue to let go...."

~From Living Juicy

Words to Grow By.

"The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive.  You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.  Such knowledge is truly a gift...It is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned."

~from JK Rowling's 2008 Harvard Commencement Address, as seen in the May issue of Real Simple magazine