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
Quotes
A New Year’s Wish
May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.
–Neil Gaiman
Be Soft
My parents have been dead a long time. Or not so long. It depends on my mood, how long it seems. My mom died in April 2007, my dad in January 1993. I often wonder what advice they would give me now, about being childless, being disabled and in chronic pain and often frustrated and depressed. Then, by chance, today I came across a quote that spells out what I know in my heart they would both say to me so perfectly, it gave me chills. In fact, I can hear my mom’s voice…
a new morning
Every morning you wake up to something that in all eternity never was before and never will be again. (Fredrick Buechner)
what do you see?
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
Henry David Thoreau
theology and science
I don’t trust a theologian who dismisses the beauty of science or a scientist who doesn’t believe in the power of mystery.
–Bene Brown
staring fear in the face
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.” You must do the thing you think you cannot do. (Eleanor Roosevelt)
Things Will Happen
Here is the world.
Beautiful and terrible things will happen.
Don’t be afraid.
–Frederick Buechner
Ordinary Things
It isn’t the great big pleasures that count the most; it’s making a great deal out of the little ones
–Jean Webster
Christmas 2014
“Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes
Wherein our Savior’s birth is celebrated
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,
The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
No fairy takes nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.”
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Chronic Grace 