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In every community, there is work to be done.

In every nation, there are wounds to heal.

In every heart, there is the power to do it.

Marianne Williamson

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

Kurt Vonnegut

One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth the doing is what we do for others.

Lewis Carroll

There are only two mantras, yum and yuck, mine is yum.

Tom Robbins

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing

And rightdoing there is a field.

I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass

The world is too full to talk about

Rumi

Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.’

Kurt Vonnegut

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

Ernest Hemmingway

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.

Mary Elizabeth Frye

Someday, somewhere – anywhere, unfailingly, you’ll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or the bitterest hour of your life.

Pablo Neruda

A child can teach an adult three things: to be happy for no reason, to always be busy with something, and to know how to demand with all his might that which he desires.

Paulo Coelho

Some days are meant to be counted, others are meant to be weighed.

Elizabeth Gilbert

If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.

Fred Rogers

I’m not young enough to know everything.

J.M. Barrie

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.

E.E. Cummings

Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.

Mother Teresa

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart) i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear

no fate(for you are my fate, my sweet) i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world, my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

E.E. Cummings

When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it.

Paulo Coelho

A learning experience is one of those things that says, ‘You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.’

Douglas Adams

‘Sometimes,’ said Pooh, ‘the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.’

A.A. Milne

The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.

Ayn Rand

Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Lewis Carroll

And so it goes..

Kurt Vonnegut

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our sense to grow sharper.

W.B. Yeats

We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

E.E. Cummings

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyways and see it through no matter what.

Harper Lee

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Martin Luther King Jr.

You used to be much more.. “muchier.” You’ve lost your muchness.

Lewis Carroll

Remember that everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something and has lost something.

H. Jackson Brown Jr.

A ship is always safe at the shore – but that is NOT what it is built for.

Albert Einstein

Think what a better world it would be if we all – the whole world – had cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess. And it is still true, no matter how old you are when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

Robert Fulghum

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the movement. There is no why.

Kurt Vonnegut

In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.

Fred Rogers

What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.

Hermann Hesse

Who knows how to make love stay?

Tell love you are going to the Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half. It will stay.

Tell love you want a memento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.

Tom Robbins

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Zora Neale Hurston

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side…”Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out-handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Margery Williams

If you put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, it feels like an hour. If you talk with a beautiful woman for an hour, it feels like a minute. That's relativity.

Albert Einstein

Things change. And friends leave. And life doesn’t stop for anybody.

Stephen Chbosky

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.

Fred Rogers

The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.

Chuck Palahniuk

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Maya Angelou

If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together, there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we're apart, I’ll always be with you.

A.A. Milne

Everything on earth is being continuously transformed because the earth is alive . . . and it has a soul. We are part of that soul, so we rarely recognize that it is working for us.

Paulo Coelho

If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.

Leo Tolstoy

“Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn’t. You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted.

“A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle.”

So which side wins, I ask?

He smiles at me, the crinkled eyes, the crooked teeth.

“Love wins. Love always wins.”

Mitch Albom

What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you're searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don't find the time for finding?

Hermann Hesse

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on.

Robert Frost

You should never hesitate to trade your cow for a handful of magic beans.

Tom Robbins

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Apple

Anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero to me.

Fred Rogers

These are the things I learned (in Kindergarten):

Share everything
Play fair
Don’t hit people
Put things back where you found them.
CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
Say you’re SORRY when you HURT somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life – learn some and drink some and draw some and paint some and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
Take a nap every afternoon.
When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
Goldfish and hamster and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.
And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.

Robert Fulghum

Logic will you get from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.

Albert Einstein

You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.

Oscar Wilde

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

Mahatma Gandhi

The best way out is always through.

Robert Frost

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

Eleanor Roosevelt

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

C.S. Lewis

It is not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

Mark Twain

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.

Maya Angelou

If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.

Martin Luther King Jr.

If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.

J.K. Rowling

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

Andre Gide

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.

Mother Teresa

The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Douglas Adams

Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.

A.A. Milne

And in the end it is not the years in your life that count, it’s the life in your years.

Abraham Lincoln

‘If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders – What would you tell him?’

‘I.. I don’t know. What.. could he do? What would you tell him?’

‘To shrug.’

Ayn Rand

Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.

Elizabeth Gilbert

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

E.E. Cummings

If growing up means it would be beneath my dignity to climb a tree, I’ll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!

J.M. Barrie

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.

Kahlil Gibran

You are good. But it is not enough just to be good. You must be good for something. You must contribute good to the world. The world must be a better place for your presence. And the good that is in your must be spread to others…

Gordon B. Hinckley

You get in life what you have the courage to ask for.

Nancy D. Solomon

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

Lewis Carroll

Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.

Rumi

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.

Jonathan Sanfran Foer

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

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

Leo Tolstoy

It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.

Walt Disney Company

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.

Rumi

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

Kurt Vonnegut

Shall we make a new rule of lfie from tonight: always try to be a little kinder than is necessary?

J.M. Barrie

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large – I contain multitudes.

Walt Whitman

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

Sylvia Plath

We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.

Winston Churchill

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

Ernest Hemmingway

I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.

Harper Lee

You see things. You keep quiet about them. And you understand.

Stephen Chbosky

When you throw a stone into the water, it finds that quickest way to the bottom of the water. It is the same when Siddhartha has an aim, a goal. Siddhartha does nothing; he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he goes through the affairs of the world like the stone through the water, without doing anything, without bestirring himself; he is drawn and lets himself fall. He is drawn by his goal, for he does not allow anything to enter his mind which opposes his goal. That is what Siddhartha learned from the Samanas. It is what fools call magic and what they think is caused by demons. Nothing is caused by demons; there are no demons. Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goal, if he can think, wait and fast.

Hermann Hesse

When we first begin fighting for our dream, we have no experience and make many mistakes. The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.

Paulo Coelho

We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.

Robert Fulghum

We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

Chuck Palahniuk

You can never have too much sky. You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad. Here there is too much sadness and not enough sky. Butterflies too are few and so are flowers and most things that are beautiful. Still, we take what we can get and make the best of it.

Zora Neale Hurston

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"

Jack Kerouac

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

Ray Bradbury

We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.

Mark Vonnegut

Your heart is alive. Keep listening to what it has to say.

Paulo Coelho

“Where’s home for you?” a stranger asks a fellow traveler on a plane.

“Wherever she is”

Unknown

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost

There is good news about gravity. It’s easing up. The moon is moving away from the earth at the rate of two inches a year. This means that every year you weigh about one potato chip less than you weighed the year before. It’s true. And that means that the older you get, the softer you will hit the ground. Five hundred billions years from now, you could fall out of a really tall tree and never hit the ground at all. You would float and fly. Now that’s something to look forward to. It’s comforting to know there’s hope for the future. Things are going to get better on some fronts, at least. I thought you’d like to know.

Robert Fulghum

You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was made to be wooed and won over by youth.

Winston Churchill

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

Zora Neale Hurston

Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is that quiet voice at the end of the day saying ‘I will try again tomorrow’

Mary Anne Radmacher

We do not remember days; we remember moments.

Cesare Pavese

Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air – explode softly – and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth – boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn’t go cheap, either – not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination.

Robert Fulghum

Each man had only one genuine vocation — to find the way to himself.

Hermann Hesse

One must be something in order to do something.

John Wolfgang von Goethe

Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.

Albert Camus

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

Theodore Roosevelt

The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.

Henry Miller

We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

We were together. I forget the rest.

Walt Whitman

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling

You get what anybody gets – you get a lifetime.

Neil Gaiman

Lives, like money, are spent. What are you buying with yours?

Roy H. Williams

Love and trust, in the space between what’s said and what’s heard in our life, can make all the difference in the world.

Fred Rogers

The child is in me still and sometimes not so still.

Fred Rogers

If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience.

Robert Fulghum

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.

Albert Einstein

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley

The most interesting information come from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.

Mark Twain

Your religion is what you do when the sermon is over.

H. Jackson Brown Jr.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

Maya Angelou

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweet streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Sometimes, there’s just no way to hold back the river.

Paulo Coelho

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

John Wolfgang von Goethe

At the center of the Universe is a loving heart that continues to beat and that wants the best for every person. Anything that we can do to help foster the intellect and spirit and emotional growth of our fellow human beings, that is our job. Those of us who have this particular vision must continue against all odds. Life is for service.

Fred Rogers

The grass is not, in fact, always greener on the other side of the fence. No, not at all. Fences have nothing to do with it. The grass is greenest where it is watered. When crossing over fences, carry water with you and tend the grass wherever you may be.

Robert Fulghum

Imagination is everything. It sis the preview of life’s coming attractions.

Albert Einstein

Be silly. Be honest. Be kind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.

A.A. Milne

Life’s not a paragraph

And death I think is no parenthesis

E.E. Cummings

We’re all mad here.

Lewis Carroll

There are too many of us and we are all too far apart.

Kurt Vonnegut

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

T.S. Eliot

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.

Martin Luther

You may never have proof of your importance but you are more important than you think. There are always those who couldn’t do without you. The rub is that you don’t always know who.

Robert Fulghum

The alchemist picked up a book that someone in the caravan had brought. Leafing through the pages, he found a story about Narcissus.

The alchemist knew the legend of Narcissus, a youth who knelt daily beside a lake to contemplate his own beauty. He was so fascinated by himself that, one morning, he fell into the lake and drowned. At the spot where he fell, a flower was born, which was called the narcissus.

But this was not how the author of the book ended the story.

He said that when Narcissus died, the goddesses of the forest appeared and found the lake, which had been fresh water, transformed into a lake of salty tears.

“Why do you weep?” the goddesses asked.

“I weep for Narcissus,” the lake replied.

“Ah, it is no surprise that you weep for Narcissus,” they said, “for though we always pursued him in the forest, you alone could contemplate his beauty close at hand.”

“But… was Narcissus beautiful?” the lake asked.

“Who better than you to know that?” the goddesses said in wonder. “After all, it was by your banks that he knelt each day to contemplate himself!”

The lake was silent for some time. Finally, it said:

“I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that Narcissus was beautiful. I weep because, each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see, in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected.”

“What a lovely story,” the alchemist thought.

Paulo Coelho

We accept the love we think we deserve.

Stephen Chbosky

Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.”

Kurt Vonnegut

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon . . .
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us to be careful be realistic
remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true.
I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty every day.
And if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live
or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.

Oriah