Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- October

“There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings, as now in October.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Autumn serenades the breeze into dancing a cha cha cha; the mountains echo in the background. October sky never looked more charming nor the sublime leaves of the trees so graceful.” — Avijeet Das

“After the keen still days of September, the October sun filled the world with mellow warmth…The maple tree in front of the doorstep burned like a gigantic red torch. The oaks along the roadway glowed yellow and bronze. The fields stretched like a carpet of jewels, emerald and topaz and garnet. Everywhere she walked the color shouted and sang around her.” — Elizabeth George Speare, The Witch of Blackbird Pond (I read this book obsessively when I was a preteen. I still own a copy of it!)

“You don’t waste October sunshine. Soon the old autumn sun would bed down in cloud blankets, and there would be weeks of gray before it finally decided to snow.” — Katherine Arden, Small Spaces

“Yet, I can face the winter with calm. I suppose I had forgotten what it was really like. I had been thinking of the winter as a horrid wet, dreary time fit only for professional football. Now I can see other things—crisp and sparkling days, long pleasant evenings, cheery fires. Good work shall be done this winter. Life shall be lived well. The end of the summer is not the end of the world. Here’s to October…” — A.A. Milne, “A Word for Autumn”

“I remember it as October days are always remembered, cloudless, maple-flavored, the air gold and so clean it quivers.” — Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

Adventures · Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Animals

“But perhaps the most important lesson I learned is that there are no walls between humans and the elephants except those that we put up ourselves, and that until we allow not only elephants, but all living creatures their place in the sun, we can never be whole ourselves.”
― Lawrence Anthony, The Elephant Whisperer

 “Never break a promise to an animal. They’re like babies—they won’t understand.” – Tamora Pierce, Wild Magic

 “The household cat is really a tiger that has underwent three counselling programs.” – Valeriu Butulescu

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Games

“Purposeful play builds self-confidence and real-world problem-solving skills.”― Jane McGonigal, Superbetter

“Some of the roots of role-playing games (RPGs) are grounded in clinical and academic role assumption and role-playing exercises.”-Gary Gygax

“Real life this far had taught me that in the adult world, fate was chaotic and uncertain. Guidelines for success were arbitrary. But in the world of D&D, at least there was a rule book… By role-playing, we were in control, and our characters… wandered through places of danger, their destinies, ostensibly, within our grasp.”-Ethan Gilsdorf

“Life is more fun if you play games.”― Roald Dahl, My Uncle Oswald

One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games. – Carl Jung

“Gaming is our cultural bogeyman – we blame it for everything from child obesity to violence to short attention spans. But any explanation that fits every situation ultimately explains nothing.”-Naomi Alderman

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Beauty

“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”-Confucius

“People are like stained – glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”-Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

“The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one’s own even more, one’s own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.”-Katherine Anne Porter

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.”-John Muir

“It’s good to have a reminder that we can love ourselves and be beautiful even though we don’t really fit into certain standards of what beauty may be.”-Alessia Cara

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Mental Health

“Anxiety is a living body,
Poised beside us like a shadow.
It is the last creature standing,
The only beast who loves us
Enough to stay.”
― Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry: Poems

“What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor, and more unashamed conversation.” – Glenn Close

“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary.” – Fred Rogers

“Humanity is so weird. If we’re not laughing, we’re crying or running for our lives because monsters are trying to eat us. And they don’t even have to be real monsters. They could be the ones we make up in our heads. Don’t you think that’s weird?”
― T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

“When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker … but as survivors. Survivors who don’t get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it. Survivors who wake to more work than before because their friends and family are exhausted from helping them fight a battle they may not even understand. I hope to one day see a sea of people all wearing silver ribbons as a sign that they understand the secret battle, and as a celebration of the victories made each day as we individually pull ourselves up out of our foxholes to see our scars heal, and to remember what the sun looks like.”
― Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Finch Quotes

I downloaded Finch a while ago to see if it would help my motivation levels go up and it’s actually been really nice! Here are some of the quotes I’ve saved from the app to help motivate or inspire myself. I hope they can do the same for you!

This last one hit me hard in the gut. I’m still processing it as we speak, but finding this quote definitely helped me through some of the bad stuff that’s happened in the past year or so.

Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Whimsy and Stories

“What’s life without whimsy?”― Dr Sheldon Cooper – The Big Bang Theory

“It was a night when you might expect to stray into a dance of mermaids.”
― LM Montgomery

“Each day has a story to – deserves to be told, because we are made of stories. I mean, scientists say that human beings are made of atoms, but a little bird told me that we are also made of stories.”- Eduardo Galeano

“Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.”- Neil Gaiman

“Humanity’s legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: ‘He/she was born, lived, died.’ Probably that is the template of our stories – a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.”- Doris Lessing

“And it’s a human need to be told stories. The more we’re governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible.”- Alan Rickman


Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Starry Nights

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

“The velvet tapestry of the night curved from horizon to horizon, flecked with thousands of tiny stars. There seemed all the more of them, for as well as filling the sky, they shimmered in an elegant ballet on the waves, the sea itself giving them life.”― Mary-Jean Harris, Aizai the Forgotten

“She said, ‘People are like stars, but it’s stories that turn us into constellations. If we don’t tell our stories, we burn alone in the dark.”― Jessica Khoury, Kalahari

Simple Sundays

Motivation Monday

Here’s some motivational quotes for you all this late Monday night!

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”- Thomas A. Edison

“Changes are inevitable and not always controllable. What can be controlled is how you manage, react to and work through the change process.”― Kelly A. Morgan

“If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.”- H. G. Wells

“Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.”― William James

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don’t do that by sitting around.

Katharine Hepburn


Simple Sundays

Simple Sunday- Curiosity

“It’s sort of a mental attitude about critical thinking and curiosity. It’s about mindset of looking at the world in a playful and curious and creative way.”- Adam Savage

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”-Albert Einstein

“If I see anything vital around me, it is precisely that spirit of adventure, which seems indestructible and is akin to curiosity.”-Marie Curie

“There are two sorts of curiosity – the momentary and the permanent. The momentary is concerned with the odd appearance on the surface of things. The permanent is attracted by the amazing and consecutive life that flows on beneath the surface of things.”-Robert Wilson Lynd

“The new normal is continuous learning, and we look for people who demonstrate lots of different interests and really demonstrate curiosity.”- Julie Sweet