Words to Grow By

"Listen to the MUSTN'TS, child,

Listen to the DON'TS,

Listen to the SHOULDN'TS,

The IMPOSSIBLES, the WON'TS,

Listen to the NEVER HAVES,

Then listen close to me--

Anything can happen, child,

Anything can be."

~Shel Silverstein

{Photo credit: jared}

Vegan Kickstart: Day 12

"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. I hold that the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man."

~Gandhi

Words to Grow By.

"Act as though and it shall be. The seed you sow today will not produce crop until tomorrow. For this reason, your identity does not lie in your current results. This is not who you are. Your current results are who you were."~James A. Ray

{Photo credit: ~ggvic~}

Words to Grow By.

Don't fear your best friends, because a best friend would never try to do you wrong.
And don't fear your worst friends, because a worst friend is just a
best friend that's done you wrong.
And don't fear the night time, because the monsters know you're devine.
And don't fear the sunshine, because everything is better in the summertime.

But it's never too late to start the day over, it's never to late, to pick up the phone.
You know it's never too late to lay your head down on my shoulders,
it's never too late to come on home.

Don't fear the water, because you can swim inside you within your skin.
And don't fear your father, because a father's just a boy without a friend.
And don't fear to walk slow, don't be a horserace, be a marathon.
And don't fear the long road, because on the long road you got a long time to sing a simple song.

But it's never too late to start the day over,
it's never too late, pick up the phone.
You know it's never too late to lay your head down on my shoulders,
it's never too late just come on home.
Don't fear your teachers, because if you listen you can hear music in a school bell.
And don't fear your preacher, if you can't find heaven in a prison cell.
And don't fear your own self, paying money to justify your worth.
And don't fear your family, because you chose them along time before your birth.
But it's never too late to start the day over, it's never too late, pick up the phone.
You know it's never too late to lay your head down on my shoulders,
it's never too late just come on home.

Hold to your children, hold to your children, hold to your children, let them know.

~Michael Franti & Spearhead, "Never Too Late"

{Photo credit: Nick Merzetti}

Words to Grow By.

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

~Ernest Hemingway

{Photo credit: vial3tt3r}

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

{Photo credit: lululemon}

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

{Photo credit: abductit}

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

{Photo credit: Pink Sherbert Photography}

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"

{Photo credit: pninaN}

Words to Grow By.

"The easiest way to care less about how much you weigh, how much you lose, and how much you get to eat while you're losing it is to care more about something else.

...You can come to care less about focusing on your body by developing a wide range of interests. I think of this as becoming a "life gourmet". I love being around people like this. They have fascinating information about all sorts of topics, and if you ask them if they'd like to go to the opera or to the bowling alley, they'll likely say yes and have a great time. You become a life gourmet by expanding the parameters of what's comfortable for you."

~from Fit From Within by Victoria Moran

{Photo credit: juliagriggshavey}

Words to Grow By.

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

~Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

{Photo credit: mukikamu}

Words to Grow By.

"You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander.  We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible.  So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand.  Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean.  This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away.  I think that is a wonderful kind of person to be."

~Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

{Photo credit: Ramonah}

Words to Grow By.

The Summer Day

By: Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

{Photo Credit: *nina*}

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

{Photo credit: ha!photography}

Words to Grow By.

"I believe that those of us who practice yoga have been sent to yoga by our pain.  We embarked on this path because we had a hunch that there must be a better way.  We have grown tired of our perfectionism, our unhappy relationships with our bodies, our inability to love completely or be loved completely, our endless resentments and sorrows, our sense that we could become greater than we are but that we are somehow blocked.  Many of us have had considerable good fortune.  We were blessed with the nice smile, the right education, the right opportunities. We may have loving partners, good work, healthy families.  Yet we've found that arranging our externals in just the right way doesn't bring us the happiness we hoped it would.  The resting place always seems to be just over the next hill.  And we have grown tired.  We come to yoga in the grip of avidya (spiritual ignorance).  We come to yoga having forgotten where we come from and who we are.  On our mats, we find the truth.  We are of God and there are no problems.  We are the solution."  

~Rolf Gates and Katrina Kenison, Meditations from the Mat: Daily Reflections on the Path of Yoga  (Page 149)

{Photo credit: jengae}

Words to Grow By.

"For what it's worth: it's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again."~The Curious Case of Benjamin Button 

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