Gifts

The most significant gifts are often the ones most easily overlooked. Small, everyday blessings: woods, health, music, laughter, memories, books, family, friends, second chances, warm fireplaces, and all the footprints scattered through our days.
(Sue Monk Kidd, Firstlight, p. 113)
5 December 2015

Pearls Of Wisdom

... it should not affect us too much when other people don't accept our pearls of wisdom. What may be a gem for us could be a mere pebble for another.

(Day By Day, 26 November)

30 November 2015

Voting Rights

There is continued evidence that people's right to vote is under attack or being denied.

Here's what Senator Edward Kennedy had to say about voting. (In my case the women denied the right to vote were my grandmothers and my mother and her sisters.)

Our great-grandmothers marched, were arrested, and suffered heroically in jail to obtain the vote for women. People walked the dusty back roads of the South, and sometimes died, to ensure African-Americans the right to vote. We should be humbled by that. We have progressed to where we are because we stand on all their shoulders, and we must never forget it. Voting says thank you.

(Edward Kennedy, U.S. Senator in Words That Matter by the Editors of The Oprah Magazine, p. 61)
28 November 2015

Relating

Productive activity is characterized by the rhythmic change of activity and repose.

Productive work, love and thought are possible only if a person can be, when necessary, quiet and alone with himself.

To be able to listen to oneself is a prerequisite for the ability to listen to others, to be at home with oneself is the necessary condition for relating oneself to others.

(Eric Fromm in The Art Of The Possible by Alexandra Stoddard, p. 88)

27 November 2015

Life Journey

On ... [your life] journey,

• some people will fall behind you, and you will feel guilty for leaving them.
• Some people will fall in front of you, causing you to stumble.
• Still others will fall right next to you, scaring you half to death.

Always keep in mind, if you stop on the journey to worry or doubt or fear, you will create a major obstacle.

• Others will then fall over you.

(Iyanla Vanzant, Faith In The Valley, p. 143)
26 November 2015

Letters

Letters 

Letters take time to write, usually more time than talk. They require a certain level of artfulness and thoughtfulness in expression. Then they remain, to be reread, perhaps to be stored away for another day of reading, or even to be encountered at some distant time by a future, unknown eavesdropper.

All of these aspects of the letter invite soulfulness:

• rereading is a form of reflective meditation; 
• keeping letters honors memory and not only daily living; and 
• speaking to a reader not yet present in this life respects the soul's eternal nature.

(Thomas Moore, Soul Mates, p. 125)

19 November 2015

Conflict

Conflict in close relationships is not only inevitable, it's essential. Intimacy connects people who are inevitably different -- as the saying goes, if two people agree about everything, one of them is superfluous. Conflict is the mechanism by which we set boundaries around these differences, so that each party feels safe with the other.
(Martha Beck, life coach, in Words That Matter by the Editors of The Oprah Magazine, p. 53)
18 November 2015