We Be Many

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement.
Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.” –Helen Keller
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“Be kind to yourself while blooming. I know sometimes it feels like your soul doesn’t always fit. It’s all a part of the process.” ~ Emery Allen
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“When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laughter broke into a thousand pieces,
and they all went skipping about and that was the beginning of fairies!”
– Peter Pan
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“We need to keep changing the attitude that teaches men to be threatened by the presence and success of women.” ~Barack Obama
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“Every drone strike and every natural disaster and every shooting death is a child. Whatever else defines one’s existence, a person’s first identity was as someone’s child. It is never okay to kill someone’s child.” –Melissa Ressler
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“If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.” ~William Stafford
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“Remember this: We be many and they be few.” ~Arundhati Roy
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“Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”
~Wendell Berry
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“If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.” –Simone Weil
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”When I think how far the onion has traveled
just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise
all small forgotten miracles.”
~Naomi Shihab Nye
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“Stranger! awaken
the guitar more! Delay our tomorrow so our road
may extend and space may widen for us, and we may get rescued
from our story together: you are so much yourself … and I am
so much other than myself right here before you!” ~Mahmoud Darwish
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“I would love to live
like a river flows,
carried by the surprise
of its own unfolding.”
–John O’Donohue
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“It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg.
We must be hatched or go bad.” ~C.S. Lewis
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“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” ~Aldo Leopold
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“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”
–Wendell Berry
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“For [mystics,] contemplation and action are not opposites, but two interdependent forms of a life that is one–a life that rushes out to a passionate communion with the true and beautiful, only that it may draw from this direct experience of Reality a new intensity wherewith to handle the world of things; and remake it, or at least some little bit of it, ‘nearer to the heart’s desire.” –Evelyn Underhill

Gratitude List:
1. Naked Ladies in everybody’s garden. Such a spring-like beauty here at the height of summer. (Some people call them Resurrection Lilies, and that might be a nice name for a contemplative person to use, but I am attached to the racier version of their name.)
2. New fur friends in the house. (How long will it take until they start to come out from under the furniture?)
3. Sunshine caught in the branches of the trees. (It’s beginning to happen already: the tilt, the slant, the hint that autumn is coming.)
4. Chances to catch up without the boys at home, but mostly: Having them back! (Absence makes the heart grow fonder.)
5. Sitting in the doorway to a new year, a new half-century.

May we walk in Beauty!