And inescapably, the sadness returned to the pit of my heart and the emptiness lingered in the pit of my stomach and because I didn’t know how to relinquish such feeling, they became something I learned to live with, like chronic pain you’ve heard there is no treatment for. I had completely forgotten who I was and my early beginnings at forming a relationship with my soul, with nature and with the possibility of God.
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Love of My Life /
"Pretty sure you were the love of my life." -A.L.
"Why do you say that?"
"I can never stop thinking about you." -A.L.
How, Then, Shall We Live? /
"Clearly our wounds need our attention. But when we concentrate exclusively upon our hurt, we learn to see the brokenness, losses, or injuries we have been given as the most important things in our lives. We cultivate an attention to these wounds in such a way that, over time, they come to occupy the most important place in our heart. Our wound lives in the center of our thoughts. In this way, we actually come to love our suffering." —Wayne Muller
Read More362//365 /
"The Church says: the body is a sin. Science says: the body is a machine. Advertising says: The body is a business. The Body says: I am a fiesta." —Eduardo Galeano
Read MoreFall in Love Twice /
"I realized recently, that I've been steadily re-falling in love with him over the last six months that he's been here. That's a weird feeling: thinking you know and love someone so unconditionally and wholly but realizing there's so much more to this person that you couldn't possibly fall in love with before he was able to stand half a foot in front of you and put his arms around you while whispering "God, you're beautiful and shit, do I love you so much." I've been fortunate enough to fall in love with him twice. Did you know that was possible? I sure as shit didn't. It's an unearthly and dreamlike experience."
Read More317//365 /
“Our hearts beat so loud the neighbours think we’re fucking when I’m just trying to find the nerve to touch your face.” —Andrea Gibson
Read More312//365 /
""I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry. It's all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die."
Read MoreThrowing Your Entire Body /
"Never be the grown woman without direction. Never be the person with no goals or aspirations. Never float aimlessly through life. If you don’t have the answers, pretend to have the answers. And if you don’t know what inspires you, pretend everything inspires you. But that’s difficult, isn’t it? If you’ve never been inspired, how would you know how to feign it? It’s like attempting, in vain, to speak a language you’ve never learned. It’s like making love with your clothes on or swimming in the ocean with a life-jacket. Until you’ve ever really experienced passion and knowing the feeling of loving something so much more than yourself, throwing your entire body into it without discretion is an impossible task."
Read MoreYou Know How to Dig /
"All that shit you uncover is proof that you know how to dig and that the earth lets you and accepts you. I love sitting on the bank and letting you show off all the treasures and all the fossils you bring up." —Anca Stefan
Read More299//365 /
"Having a soft heart in a cruel world is courage, not weakness." —Katherine Henson
Read More297//365 /
"Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it." —David Foster Wallace
Read MoreFrom a Friend /
Down the Barrel of 32 /
Ice Cream /
You probably don't remember tasting ice cream for the first time. You were too young. You were too spoiled with experience but you're far from providential if you never know what it is to lack, to be without; if you can't recall your world without ice cream.
Read More287//365 /
"Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence." —The Little Prince
Read MorePost-Civilization /
“It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then...and then -- ah -- we open our eyes and the day is before us and ... we become ourselves.”—Jerry Spinelli
Read MoreSuicide is War /
Suicide is war. And perhaps not with a foreign or nameless enemy but with oneself. It’s an internal struggle of incomparable breadth. You lose enough battles and you lose the war. Bloodshed abounds. My father was at war with himself for years, if not decades and ultimately, he lost but it was something he could not heave himself out of or walk peacefully away from, waving a white flag. He was slated to fight until the day he died. That was his fate and he handled it as gracefully as he knew how. I have never blamed him for leaving. As quickly as I learned he had died I had forgiven him. Leaving early and on his terms was a non-negotiable clause in the fine print of his life. Somewhere, deep down in the pit of my gut I had always known it.
Read MoreEver-Changing /
" I am a woman, an American, an Australian, an introvert, an animal advocate, passionate soul, a loyal friend, a giver, a writer, a wife, an ex-wife, a girlfriend, a dweller, a small-towner-living-in-a-big-city, a fish out of water, an artist, an ex-self-mutilator, an empathy-filled spirit for all suffering beings, a photographer, a granddaughter, a gardener, a creator, a destroyer, an observer, a seeker, a lover, a grudge-holder, a forgiver, a re-inventor, a decorator, a reader, an appreciator of all beautiful things, a regretter, a graphic designer, a survivor, an ever-evolving human being. I am resilient. I am called to identify with countless labels and descriptors. I am called to try my hand at numerous undertakings."
Read MoreThat Very Redemption /
"Maybe the primary and most rational reasons we’ve found such contentment in each other is because, once finally emancipated from past strife and having gained the necessary perspective, we needed that very redemption to do so."
Read More221//365 /
"Come with every wound and every woman you’ve ever loved; every lie you’ve ever told and whatever it is that keeps you up at night. Every mouth you’ve punched in, all the blood you’ve ever tasted. Come with every enemy you’ve ever made and all the family you’ve ever buried and every dirty thing you’ve ever done; every drink that’s burnt your throat and every morning you’ve woken with nothing and no one. Come with all your loss, your regrets, sins, memories, black outs, secrets. I’ve never seen anything more beautiful than you." —Warsan Shire
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