quotations and poetry

Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred.
What we make matters enormously, and it doesn’t matter at all.
We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits.
We are terrified, and we are brave.
Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege.
Only when we are at our most playful can divinity finally get serious with us.
Make space for all these paradoxes to be equally true inside your soul and I promise – you can make anything.
So please calm down now and get back to work, okay?
The treasure that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes.

– Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic

I look up at the stars.  I feel connected: legs to earth, shoulders to sky.  I squint my eyes and see the lines that link stars to make constellations, feel their umbra extend down to me, connecting me with this parcel of land that I stand on. Everything is united: my children, the clouds, God, the moon, the mother of my children, the Ford station wagon that will overheat soon if I do not get back and keep going.  Under this sky I am connected to all I left behind in Tennessee, all the friends and patients who wished me luck….

I remember the acts of human kindness that illumine our world.

– Abraham Verghese, My Own Country

I’d have to stare at them all night to take them in.  It’s tempting.  I plant a kiss on each of their heads.  It will never be enough.  A lifetime of kisses would not fill the space in me that belongs to them.  In the morning, when they come for me before the sun is up, begging me to get up and insisting that they’re starving, I will search again for the feeling I have this moment, this sacred calm to stand against the day’s obligations and terrors that conspire to blow disappearing dust over all that I know to be true right now.

– Laura Nicole Diamond, Shelter Us

Thank you, Kathie, for giving me this beautiful book for my birthday!

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way.

– John Ruskin

Thank you to Hilary for sharing this beautiful passage with me.