liveonearth | Entries tagged with inspiration

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.
~ Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

Crossposts: https://liveonearth.livejournal.com/1455583.html

The river and everything I remembered
about it became a possession to me,
a personal, private possession, as nothing
else in my life ever had. Now it ran
nowhere but in my head, but there
it ran as though immortally....
In me it still is, and will be until I die,
green, rocky, deep, fast, slow, and
beautiful beyond reality.
--James Dickey in Deliverance

Crossposts: https://liveonearth.livejournal.com/1454811.html

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

---Leonard Cohen (Anthem)

Crossposts: https://liveonearth.livejournal.com/1449990.html

"Upon suffering beyond suffering; the Red Nation shall rise again and it shall be a blessing for a sick world. A world filled with broken promises, selfishness and separations. A world longing for light again. I see a time of seven generations when all the colors of mankind will will gather under the sacred Tree of Life and the whole earth will become one circle again. In that day there will be those among the Lakota who will carry knowledge and understanding of unity among all living things, and the young white ones will come to those of my people and ask for this wisdom. I salute the light within your eyes where the whole universe dwells. For when you are at that center within you and I am that place within me, we shall be as one."
--Crazy Horse

Crossposts: https://liveonearth.livejournal.com/1439963.html

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life.
It turns what we have into enough, and more.
It turns denial into acceptance,
chaos to order, confusion to clarity.
It can turn a meal into a feast,
a house into a home,
a stranger into a friend.

-- Melody Beattie

Crossposts: https://liveonearth.livejournal.com/1438211.html

"Do not wait
for leaders;
do it alone,
person to person."
--Mother Teresa

Crossposts: https://liveonearth.livejournal.com/1436642.html

Hello, sun in my face.

Hello, you who make the morning

and spread it over the fields

and into the faces of the tulips

and the nodding morning glories,

and into the windows of, even, the

miserable and crotchety–

best preacher that ever was,

dear star, that just happens

to be where you are in the universe

to keep us from ever-darkness,

to ease us with warm touching,

to hold us in the great hands of light–

good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day

in happiness, in kindness.

- Mary Oliver

Crossposts: https://liveonearth.livejournal.com/1431866.html

SOMETIMES

Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,

breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,

who could cross
a shimmering bed of leaves
without a sound,

you come
to a place
whose only task

is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,

conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests
to stop what
you are doing
right now,
and

to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,

questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,

questions
that have patiently
waited for you,

questions
that have no right
to go away.

~ David Whyte

Crossposts: http://liveonearth.livejournal.com/1429029.html

It's so much darker
when a light goes out
than it would have been
if it had never shone.
--John Steinbeck

Crossposts: http://liveonearth.livejournal.com/1425889.html

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget that perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s where the light gets in.
—Leonard Cohen

https://www.thenation.com/article/optimism-uncertainty/

Because unpredictable change is the way of things.

No matter what our attempts to inform,
it is our ability to inspire
that will turn the tides."
--Jan Phillips

( Standing before a fork in the road there is not a right answer. )

Don't ask what the world needs.
Ask yourself what makes you come alive
and then go do that.
Because what the world needs
is people who have come alive.
--Howard Thurman, civil rights leader

The sophistication of truth
Posted by Seth Godin on September 30, 2014
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2014/09/the-sophistication-of-truth.html

A common form of complexity is the sophistication of fear.

Long words when short ones will do. Fancy clothes to keep the riffraff out and to give us a costume to hide behind. Most of all, the sneer of, "you don't understand" or, "you don't know the people I know..."

"It's complicated," we say, even when it isn't.

We invent these facades because they provide safety. Safety from the unknown, from being questioned, from being called out as a fraud. These facades lead to bad writing, lousy communication and a refuge from the things we fear.

I'm more interested in the sophistication required to deliver the truth.

Simplicity.

Awareness.

Beauty.

These take fearlessness. This is, "here it is, I made this, I know you can understand it, does it work for you?"

Our work doesn't have to be obtuse to be important or brave.

Seth Godin is a writer, a speaker and an agent of change.

SOURCE
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2014/09/the-sophistication-of-truth.html

( Wait. )

To practice any art,
no matter how well or badly,
is a way to make your soul grow.
So do it.
--Kurt Vonnegut

The same stream of life
that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world
and dances in rhythmic measures.
It is the same life
that shoots in joy
through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves
of leaves and flowers.
― Rabindranath Tagore

When the sun shines,
it shines without any discrimination;
it shines on every point of the country,
every nook and corner.
We should be like that.
--the Dalai Lama

Idle words are characterless and die upon utterance. Evil words rankle for a while, make contentions, and then die. But the hopeful, kind, cheering word sinks into a man’s heart and goes on bearing fruit forever. How many beautiful written words—words in book and song and story—are still inspiring men and making the world fragrant with their beauty! It is just so with the words you write, not on paper, but on the hearts of men. I wish there were room to mention here the testimonies of great men to the power of some hopeful, encouraging word they had spoken to them in youth and in the days of struggle. But every autobiography records this thing. Booker T. Washington tells how the encouragement of General Armstrong saved the future for him. I know a young man who is to-day filling a large and useful place in the world, who was kept to his high purpose in a time of discouragement by just an encouraging word from a man he greatly admired. That man’s word will live and grow in the increasing influence of the younger man. This world is full of men bearing in their minds deathless words of inspiration heard in youth from lips now still forever. Speak hopeful words every chance you get. Always send your young friends from you bearing a word that they will take into the years and fulfill for you.
--from The Enlargement of Life (1903) by Frederick Henry Lynch

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INTERESTING TIMES

are better than no times at all.

Entries tagged with inspiration

QotD: Life Will Break You

QotD: Dickey on the River

QotD: A Crack in Everything

QotD: Lakota Namaste

QotD: Gratitude Unlocks Fullness

QotD: Act

Poem: Why I Wake Early

Poem OTD: Tiny Frightening Requests

QotD: Because There Was Light Before

QotD: Where the light gets in

A Howard Zinn essay worth reading: The Optimism of Uncertainty

QotD: Inspire Them

Poem: Leap of Faith by Wendy L. Brown

QotD: What the World Needs

Can't it just be simple?

Poem: Wait by Galway Kinnell

QotD: Make Your Soul Grow

QotD: Life

QotD: Shine like the Sun

Speak Hopeful Words