Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Healing

“Hearts are breakable,” Isabelle said. “And I think even when you heal, you’re never what you were before”.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Fallen Angels

“do not look for healing
at the feet of those
who broke you”
― Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey

“Time didn’t heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.”
― P.D. James, Innocent Blood

In the east,” she says after a time, her gaze still downcast, “there is a tradition known as kintsukuroi. It is the practice of mending broken ceramic pottery using lacquer dusted with gold and silver and other precious metals. It is meant to symbolize that things can be more beautiful for having been broken.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I ask.
At last she looks at me. Her irises are polished obsidian in the moonlight. “Because I want you to know,” she says, “that there is life after survival.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue

“When we ignore these quintessential dimensions of humanity, we deprive people of ways to heal from trauma and restore their autonomy. Being a patient, rather than a participant in one’s healing process, separates suffering people from their community and alienates them from an inner sense of self.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Adventures · Party Posts · Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Tolkien Edition

“I sit beside the fire and think
Of all that I have seen
Of meadow flowers and butterflies
In summers that have been

Of yellow leaves and gossamer
In autumns that there were
With morning mist and silver sun
And wind upon my hair

I sit beside the fire and think
Of how the world will be
When winter comes without a spring
That I shall ever see

For still there are so many things
That I have never seen
In every wood in every spring
There is a different green

I sit beside the fire and think
Of people long ago
And people that will see a world
That I shall never know

But all the while I sit and think
Of times there were before
I listen for returning feet
And voices at the door”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Animals

“Animals had carried me all my life. I was a crossover–carried along in the generous and instructive slipstream of other species. And I had always navigated my life with them in mind, going between the human and animal worlds–a crossover myself. By including animals in my life I was always engaging with the Other, imagining the animal mind and life. For almost half a century, my bond with animals had shaped my character and revealed the world to me. At every turning point in my life an animal had mirrored or influenced my fate. Mine was not simply a life with other animals, but a life because of animals.

It had been this way since my beginning, born on a forest lookout station in the High Sierras, surrounded by millions of acres of wilderness and many more animals than humans. Since infancy, the first faces I imprinted, the first faces I ever really loved, were animal.”
― Brenda Peterson, Build Me an Ark: A Life with Animals

“Research suggests that the earliest flying reptiles swallowed small pieces of volcanic rock and could breathe out flammable gases like hydrogen produced in their own bodies. It is hypothesized that their ingenious “fire breath” was used as a defense against predatory reptiles.”
― Karen Shanor, Bats Sing, Mice Giggle: The Surprising Science of Animals’ Inner Lives

“Just so you know,’ I explained, remembering my own earlier arrogance, ‘if you’ve ever owned a cat and therefore think you know how to handle a puma, you don’t. It would be like playing with sharks because you once owned a goldfish.”
― Peter Allison, How to Walk a Puma: And Other Things I Learned While Stumbling through South America

“The evening before I departed I stood on the rim of a lagoon on Isla Rabida. Flamingos rode on its dark surface like pink swans, apparently asleep. Small, curved feathers, shed from their breasts, drifted away from them over the water on a light breeze. I did not move for an hour. It was a moment of such peace, every troubled thread in a human spirit might have uncoiled and sorted itself into a graceful order. Other flamingos stood in the shallows with diffident elegance in the falling light, not feeding but only staring off toward the ocean. They seemed a kind of animal I had never quite seen before.”
― Barry Lopez, About This Life

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Relaxation

“We will be more successful in all our endeavors if we can let go of the habit of running all the time, and take little pauses to relax and re-center ourselves. And we’ll also have a lot more joy in living.”-Thich Nhat Hanh

“Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.”-Barbara Kingsolver

“Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.”-Jiddu Krishnamurti

“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.” —Maya Angelou

“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.” —Chinese Proverb

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Stars Above

“In these countless stars, in their clusters and colors and constellations, in the “shooting” showers of blazing dust and ice, we have always found beauty. And in this beauty, the overwhelming size of the universe has seemed less ominous, earth’s own beauty more incredible. If indeed the numbers and distances of the night sky are so large that they become nearly meaningless, then let us find the meaning under our feet.”
― Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light

“Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.”
― Isaac Asimov

“I have looked further into space than ever human being did before me. I have observed stars of which the light, it can be proved, must take two million years to reach the earth.[Having identified Uranus (1781), the first planet discovered since antiquity.]”
― William Herschel

“Few of us have seen the stars as folk saw them then – our cities and towns cast too much light into the night – but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas, uncountable as the trees in a forest or the leaves on a tree.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“Winter is the time for stories, staying fast by the glow of fire. And outside, in the darkness, the stars are brighter than you can possibly imagine.”
― Isabel Greenberg, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Woman’s Suffrage

“The young women of today, free to study, to speak, to write, to choose their occupation, should remember that every inch of this freedom was bought for them at a great price. It is for them to show their gratitude by helping onward the reforms of their own times, by spreading the light of freedom and of truth still wider. The debt that each generation owes to the past it must pay to the future.”-Abigail Scott Duniway, suffragist  1834-1915

”Life is a hard battle anyway. If we caught and sing a little as we fight the  good fight of freedom, it makes it all go easier. I will not allow my life’s light be determined by the darkness around me.”-Soujourner Truth

“If Congress refuse to listen to and grant what women ask, there is but one course left then to pursue. What is there left for women to do but to become the mothers of the future government?”― Victoria Claflin Woodhull

“The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guaranty of your liberty. That vote of yours has cost millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of women. Women have suffered agony of soul which you never can comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it! The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Use it intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully. Progress is calling to you to make no pause. Act!”― Carrie Catt

“So close is the bond between man and woman that you can not raise one without lifting the other. The world can not move ahead without woman’s sharing in the movement, and to help give a right impetus to that movement is woman’s highest privilege.”-Frances Harper

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Fear

“Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.”-Cyril Connolly

“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.”-Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.”-John Steinbeck

“I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t.”-Audre Lorde

“What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse.”-Isabel Allende

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Anniversary Edition

“There is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.”-Homer

“I love being married. It’s so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.”-Rita Rudner

“Happy is the man who finds a true friend, and far happier is he who finds that true friend in his wife.”-Franz Schubert

“The critical period of matrimony is breakfast-time.”-A. P. Herbert

“Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other who never forgets them.”-Ogden Nash

Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.”- Simone Signoret

“People always fall in love with the most perfect aspects of each other’s personalities. Who wouldn’t? Anybody can love the most wonderful parts of another person. But that’s not the clever trick. The really clever trick is this: Can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partner’s faults honestly and say, ‘I can work around that. I can make something out of it.’? Because the good stuff is always going to be there, and it’s always going to pretty and sparkly, but the crap underneath can ruin you.”― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“Love of music, of sunsets and sea; a liking for the same kind of people; political opinions that are not radically divergent; a similar stance as we look at the stars and think of the marvelous strangeness of the universe – these are what build a marriage. And it is never to be taken for granted.”― Madeleine L’Engle, Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Random

“Who judges the judge who judges wrong?”
― Gail Carson Levine, Fairest

“Supposed I don’t want to redeem myself? Why should I fight to uphold the system that cast me out? I shall take pleasure in seeing it smashed.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist

“Being against evil doesn’t make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide… I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you’re fighting.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream

“History was full of the bones of good men who’d followed bad orders in the hope that they could soften the blow. Oh, yes, there were worse things they could do, but most of them began right where they started following bad orders.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“It is better to be taught to think critically than to be told on what to believe.”
― Christopher Paolini, Eldest

“I want my spirituality to rid me of hate, not give me reason for it.”
― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality