“In order to help loved ones, you may need to let go of trying to rescue them. It may twist your heart up and frustrate you to no end to stand by while they fumble the ball, to contend with the awful truth that love cannon conquer all, that you can’t do it for them, and sometimes the best you can do is hold their hand while they suffer. Love isn’t like pulling someone from a burning car or saving him or her from drowning. The drama of a loved one’s need is much more complex than that and demands that you weigh right action from wrong action, support from sabotage. There is love that enables and love that disables, and only a tortuous judgement call determines which is which.
(Gregg Levoy, Callings)
Category: Quotes 2 Inspire
Fall Out of the Nest!
“To be fully alive, fully human, completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”
~Pema Chodron
The Simplicity of Destiny
“Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”
Mothers Day Proclamation 1870
This original Mothers Day Proclamation from 1870 in Boston is particularly poignant for mothers of sons.
Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God –
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.
The Lanyard
From former poet laureate of the United State, Billy Collins.
Hands down, the best Mothers Day poem ever. (Hold on to your tissues!)
“The Lanyard”
“The Lanyard”
The other day as I was ricocheting slowly
off the pale blue walls of this room,
bouncing from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past —
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sickroom,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift–not the archaic truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.
Billy Collins
On the Fleeting Gift of Parenthood
Grab your tissues and take this quote after viewing the link below~
“It kills you to see them grow up.
But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.“
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Click here: Katrina Kenison on the Gift of an Ordinary Day.
Long-Awaited Snow
Winter came down to our home one night
Quietly pirouetting in on silvery-toed slippers of snow,
And we were children once again.
(Bill Morgan, jr.)
