I decided to randomly open a book box that my parents delivered back to my apartment a few months ago….almost instantaneous dopamine boost when I realized that “All Along You Were Blooming” and “How Far You Have Come” could be added to complete this MHN poetry book stack on my nightstand!!
I don‘t know that I saw “Peace is a Practice” in that box, but I do know that I have it somewhere and will eventually add it back to this stack as well!!
Happy International Women‘s Day to all you literary ladies out and around the world!!
Your role as a bibliophile babe in the world makes it a better place to be today and all the rest of the 364 days left in the year!!
🤓📚💜
Yesterday was such a great book mail day that I forgot to share that my blue box came!!
💙📚📦
Inquiring minds would like to know as I finish preparing to attend Ash Wednesday service tonight!
What will you be giving up, adding to, or otherwise changing about your life over the next 40 days?!?
Being that my box came late this month I‘m surprised it took all day to unbox it after getting it from my mail room earlier this afternoon….
Before I know it it‘s gonna be March and we‘re gonna be picking the next round!!
😆
But it‘s my birthday on Sunday so I‘m thinking it actually ended up arriving right on time!!
Let us hope life affords me enough time to not only buy & collect these books, but also read them sometime soon!!
💙📚🔖📦
It definitely feels big and messy right now, and I certainly haven‘t done it perfectly lately but I am trying to remember that it is also glorious, full of love and faith, truth and beauty, kindness and hope.
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature, the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
My January book box has arrived + 2 scored from a BOTM sales/swap Facebook group!
💙📚😁
Your ancestors sent you here to change things, to disrupt things, to bring forward another way, another vision, a new light, a new way. You've been given an incredible opportunity. Let your voice be heard, let your wisdom be known. Become aware of your gift, whatever it is. Let it be said that you knew your assignment. Let it be said that you completed your assignment, and that you lived boldly and without regret.
"Whatever you are physically... male or female, strong or weak, ill or healthy--all those things matter less than what your heart contains. If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior.
All those other things, they are the glass that contains the lamp, but you are the light inside."
Using this as a place holder because I know I‘ll want to reference this quote for someone I know who loves bees!!
🐝🐝🐝 🐝🐝
"Hope begins in the dark,
the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing,
the dawn will come.
You wait and watch and work:
you don‘t give up.
It‘s like driving at night.
You can only see as far as your headlights,
but you can make the whole trip that way.
You don‘t have to see where you‘re going,
you don‘t have to see your destination,
or everything you will pass along the way.
You just have to keep going."
“Listen to your own voice, your own soul; too many people listen to the noise of the world instead of themselves.”
Following the shepherd.
There is so much falling right now, and so much more rising. But here‘s the good news: it gets easier the more we do it. Our brain requires itself to problem solve, and it doesn‘t just change us; it changes us so that we can be part of changing the world around us.
While I don‘t believe everything happens for a reason, I do believe that everything comes with an invitation. When we learn to rise, we get to show others how to rise, too.
A vibe for what 2024 was like on the last day of the year.
All of life is in the interim, and if we‘re honest and tender with ourselves, if the armor is off and the castle has crumpled, we feel the ache of the meantime. Our permanent records are a mess of marks and offenses, and we are laid bare to the ache of what‘s coming.
When it comes right down to it, of course, it‘s always been in the interim. We‘ve always been in the middle space, the yearning and the groaning.
It seeps in like smoke or vapor even when we‘ve barred the door against any last minute changes, and it moves us to different countries and different emotional territories and different ways of living. Life with God is a daring dream, full of flashes and last minute exits and generally all the things we‘ve said we‘ll never do. And with the surprises comes great hope.
Everything is interim. Everything is a path or preparation for the next thing, and we never know what the next thing is. Life is like that, of course, twisty and surprising. But life with God is like that exponentially. We can dig in, make plans, write in stone, pretend we‘re not listening, but the voice of God has a way of being heard.
We won‘t arrive. But we can become. And that‘s the most hopeful thing I can think of.
Life with God at its core is about giving your life up to something bigger and more powerful. It‘s about saying at every turn that God knows better than we know, and that His spirit will lead us in ways that we couldn‘t have predicted.
"Things I wish to never lose:
my passion, my dreams, my childish spirit;
the little things that keep me going,
my curiosity to keep wondering and questioning,
my ability to get up again even when I wish not to,
the art within my soul,
the power to love against all the hatred around,
and most of all my capability to adapt, accept, change
and my will to learn and heal...”
Tagged book is mine!! Happy Thanksgiving, Littens!!
We tell Gods story as we live and discover our own. We know that God is a storyteller. And I don‘t know if there‘s anything better in the world than when we lay ourselves wide open and let His story become our story, when we screw up our fist and our courage and start to tell the truest, best stories we know, which are always God‘s stories.
Every life tells a story, through words and actions and choices, through our homes and our children, through our clothes and dishes and perfume. We each play a character in a grand drama, and every stage direction matters. We tell our stories, and we let God‘s story be told through our stories, we hide and we seek, and we lose ourselves in the best possible way, and find things around us and inside ourselves that we never expected.
The riskiest things always yield the best, most beautiful things.
What gives me hope is the belief that God will be faithful, because he has been faithful before, to me and the people around me. I need the reminders. Just because I have forgotten how to see doesn‘t mean it isn‘t there. His goodness is there. His promises have been kept. All I need to do is see.
Because once you start seeing the faithfulness and the hope, you see it everywhere, like pennies. And little by little, here and there, you realize that all of life is littered with bright copper coins, that all of life is woven with bits and stories of God‘s goodness.
Each one of our lives is shot through, threaded in and out with God‘s provision, his grace, his protection, but on the average day, we notice it about as much as we really notice gravity.
"The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
Staying committed to this while I figure out where else my time and energy should go as a result of current events going on in the world over the last week.
💜
When you travel, and when you read, you are not actually alone, but rather surrounded by other worlds entirely, the footsteps and phrases of whole other lives keeping you company as you go.
Friendship is about risk. Love is about risk. If we can control it and manage it and manufacture it, then it‘s something else, but if it‘s really love, really friendship, it‘s a little scary around the edges.
We have to give something up in order to get friendship like that. We have to give up our need to be perceived as perfect. We have to give up our ability to control what people think of us. We have to overcome the fear that when they see the depths of who we are, they‘ll leave. But what we give up is nothing in comparison to what this kind of friendship gives to us.
True friendship is a sacred, important thing, and it happens when we drop down into that deeper level of who we are, when we cross over into the broken, fragile parts of ourselves.
