“It is impossible to know, in the moment, how a small act of goodness will reverberate through time. The notion is empowering and it is frightening -because it means that we’re all capable of changing the world, and responsible for finding those opportunities to protect, feed, grow, and guide love.”
–Bishop Michael Curry, Love is the Way: Holding on to Hope in Troubling Times (co-authored by Sara Grace)
“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.”
“This means that despite how open, peaceful, and loving you attempt to be, people can only meet you, as deeply as they’ve met themselves.
This is the heart of clarity.”
“To be nobody – but -yourself– in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else–means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
-e. e. cummings, “A Poet’s Advice to Students” in E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany (1958), edited by George James Firmage, p. 13 (Source).
“Some people want to watch the world burn; but, the truly cynical bring a bag of marshmallows and a pointed stick.”
-Masercot, “Think-Things that Follow No Pattern,” Potatoes and the Promise of More Potatoes
They called it trash, and it was. Humanity’s selfishness was strewn about the world; molding, stinking, soaking in.
“Don’t bother,” they said.
“Save yourself.”
“Self…”
Amongst the walls of yelling filth she closed her ears, strained her eyes.
There! A flutter of love beneath that greed.
There! Some tattered trust nearly blown away.
And there! Hardly a scrap of deepest hope, wedged between bigotry and vice.
Tiptoeing past an open pit of malice and an oozing patch of some sort of thoughtlessness, she made it home. Inside the stained and leaning walls, against the howling narcissistic winds-
She sewed.
Quilted for Carrot Ranch’s Weekly Prompt.
“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”
-Mahatma Gandhi
Swiped from Damon Ashworth Psychology: “25 Ideas That Could Change Your Life“
“…There are two entirely opposite attitudes possible in facing the problems of one’s life. One, to try and change the external world, the other, to try and change oneself. Although both attitudes are potential in everyone, most of us have become one-sided, biased toward the preferred attitude in most of our dealings…”
-Marion Milner (pseudonym Joanna Field), A Life of One’s Own, Preface.
Chel Owens 