#20

In my part of Africa, death is never far away. With most Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message memento mori, you too shall die. In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of stage, waiting for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal.

Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The drama of life there is amplified by its constant proximity to death. That's what infuses it with tension. It is the essence of its tragedy too. People love harder there. Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life's alibi in the face of death.

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa, Peter Godwin

#19

#18

"my mama said there's only two things in life that are constant, and that's change, and change."

-Lyfe Jennings, Never Never Land

#17

May the wind always be at your back and the sun upon your face; and may the wings of destiny carry you aloft to dance with the stars.

-George Jung, Blow

#16

When you become light and you radiate, there is no darkness. A candle has one future, to spread the light. How does the candle spread the light? By burning itself, the candle spreads light and consequently knows the future. If you burn yourself, you will radiate and will spread light. The job of the human being is to radiate through the finite self the infinite light.

-Yogi B

#15

Where is the limit of a person? How can you be limited? A person is limited according to his attachment. It doesn't matter what you have or what you don't have; it matters only how easily you can let go.

-Yogi Bhajan

#14

Once there was a boy named Charlie, who had a nice life - but it wasn’t perfect. He had to spend too much of his time doing things he didn’t want to do. So one day he packed up all his time in a suitcase, locked it up and set off to find a better way to spend it. Charlie traveled the world looking for the perfect thing to make him happy. In the meantime, unbeknownst to him, his itsy-bitsy seconds and silky, smooth hours and raggedy days ticked away, so that when Charlie stopped traveling and realized what he truly wanted out of life, it was almost too late. Almost.

Daren and Daniel Simkin, The Traveler

#13

I am sending you

postcards from a place

where I am not.

We’re not tourists, we’re travelers

a tourist is someone who

thinks about going home the

moment they arrive

whereas a traveler

might not come

back at all.

-Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

(introduced to me by my faux friend Ian)

#12

Yellow Boat 1910, Odilon Redon

Dearest boy, my Adam. I dreamed a dream, you and I facing each other in a tiny yellow boat. On green water, under blue sky, my and my son, and a tiny yellow boat. And we laugh, and the boat rocks, and the ripples spread from the boat, to pond, to sea, to sky, and nothing can stop them, and nothing ever will.

-Joan of Arcadia

#11

Ok...

I leave my one and only grain of spiritual sand to universal scales of humanity, All humanity. Forever is finding a solution to a solution. Tsunamis, Hurricanes, Following the trails of the African slave ships. War, War, and more War. Floods, Columbine, Global Warming, Earthquakes. Another somebody's done me wrong, son. Virginia Tech, there's not a hole but to Heck. We're still, did you place your one grain of spiritual sand forever?

Confusion need a solution. Blend and stir, stir and blend the pot of humanity. Sift the ingredients of acknowledgment, apology, amendment, atonement. We gonna work with the four A's here. Forever part,

Common good is forever

God's memory is forever....

-"Forever Begins" Lonnie "pops" Lynn

#10

We watched the towers collapse. We watched America choose war. The peace in our own hearts shattered.

How to pick up the pieces?

What to do with the pieces?

I was desperate to retrieve the poetry I had lost.

Standing on a rocky point in Maine, looking east toward the horizon at dusk, I faced the ocean. "Give me one wild word." It was all I asked of the sea.

The tide was out. The mudflats exposed. A gull picked up a large white clam, hovered high above the rocks, then dropped it. The clam broke open, and the gull swooped down to eat the fleshy animal inside.

"Give me one wild word to follow..."

-Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World

#9

By measuring sound vibrations, scientists know that the caterpillar in the cocoon is shrieking. Screaming in pain as its body changes form from the caterpillar -- a lowly creature, in most senses -- to the beloved and beautiful butterfly. The butterfly is used in many traditions as a symbol of transformation and especially transmutation through death. Yet, in our highly romanticized versions, we do not acknowledge the transformation as a painful process. Painful, but not fatal.

-Deborah Morris Coryell, "Good Grief: Healing Through the Shadow of Loss"

#8

And when these words are found, let it be known that God's penmanship has been signed with a language called love. That's why my breath is felt by the deaf, and why my words are heard and confined to the ears of the blind. I too, dream in color and in rhyme. So I guess I'm one of a kind in a full house, 'cause whenever I open my heart, my soul, or my mouth, a touch of God reigns out.

-J. Ivy, "Never Let Me Down"

#7

"I took a step forward, and it was my first time in Queens. I walked through Long Island City, Woodside, Elmhurst, and Jackson Heights. I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me."

-Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

#6

"I origami the situation from what is considered unsuitable to something beautiful. The outcome is legendary, and nothing less"

-"Nothing Less", Living Legends

#5

"You know, some things don't matter that much, Lily. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person's heart- now, that matters. The whole problem with people is-"

"They don't know what matters and what doesn't," I said, filling in her sentence and feeling proud of myself for doing so.

"I was gonna say. The problem is they know what matters, but they don't choose it. You know how hard that it, Lily? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters."

-Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

#4

"They were dead; I could no longer deny it. What a thing to acknowledge in your heart! To lose a brother is to lose someone with whom you can share the experience of growing old, who is supposed to bring you a sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, creatures to people the tree of your life and give it new branches. To lose your father is to lose the one whose guidance and help you seek, who supports you like a tree trunk supports its branches. To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you." Life of Pi, Yann Martel (again, I know, but I am currently reading it!)

#3

"Where does it start? Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. Heel touches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot. The big tow pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight of the body shifts again. The legs reverse position. It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world, this walking that wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak." -Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

#2

"We do indeed weave our spirits into the events and relationships of our lives. Life is as simple as that." -Anatomy of the Spirit

#1

"These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God

must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has

been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart." -Life of Pi