Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding --Kahlil Gibran (in Left Behind: Surviving Suicide Loss)

When I stand before thee at the day's end, thou shalt see my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healing. --Rabindranath Tagore (in Merry Clayton: Beautiful Scars)

There are eight million Shinto gods
who secretly travel this earth of ours.
These modest beings come to touch us.
They touch us. Then they wander on.
--Jorge Luis Borges (in Thirteen to One: New Stories for an Age of Disaster)

I have found the heart and will never leave this house of light. --Rumi (in The Way of the Heart)

I've always loved the definition for contemplation: "a long, loving look." And when you take a long, loving look anywhere, you feel more bonded with whatever you've looked at. --Naomi Shihab Nye (in Before You Know Kindness: A Poem by Naomi Shihab Nye)

may my heart always be open to little birds who are the secrets of living
--e.e. cummings (in Hummingbirds and the Ecstatic Moment)

I will live for love and the rest will take care of itself.
--Marina Keegan (in Marina Keegan & the Opposite of Loneliness)

To slow down is to be taken into the soul of things.
--Terry Tempest Williams (in Slowing Down)

Once the mind has seen through all fear and all hope, it finds peace within itself, in a state of awareness beyond thought. --Alan Watts (in The Only Real Antidote to Fear)

One planet, one experiment. --E.O. Wllson (in It Couldn't Be Clearer)

You don't flush people,
you flush things.
--Ra Avis (in Poems from a Once-Upon-A-Time Inmate)

The soul is like a wild animal--tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient and yet exceedingly shy. --Parker Palmer (in Ariel Burger: Beyond Words)

We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate one another. -- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (in Picture a Face)

The muscles used to make a smile actually send a biochemical message to our nervous system that it is safe to relax the flight or freeze response. --Tara Brach (in Our Nervous Systems in the Time of COVID)

Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present --Albert Camus (in Wish You Were Here: Postcards from the Future)

A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving. --Lao Tzu (in The World's Last Nomadic Peoples)

Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own. --Naomi Shihab Nye (in Poetry Calls Us To Pause)

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness. --Henry David Thoreau (in The Buy Nothing Project Gift Economies)

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces. --Henry David Thoreau (in Waiting for the Thaw)

If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together. --Lilla Watson (in My Mother Against Apartheid)

What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote. --Edward Abbey (in Once I Took a Week Long Walk in the Sahara)

To turn within is to turn to that which is looking. --Adyashanti (in Awakened Awareness)

It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart. --Rainer Maria Rilke (in Parker Palmer Muses on the Season)

If a stone hits a river, the river will treat it as yet another commotion in its already tumultuous course. Nothing unusual. Nothing unmanageable. If a stone hits a lake, however, the lake will never be the same again. --Elif Shafak (in How to Be Resilient)

We want to make a difference in the world. I would call this a spiritual longing to be whole, interrelated, interconnected.

--Terry Tempest Williams (in She Convinced a Community to Love a 'Bad Omen')

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next. --Ursula Le Guin (in Grace in Uncertainty)

Don't allow your wounds to transform you into someone you are not. --Paulo Coelho (in All Cats Are Black)

not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours. --A.R. Ammons (in Blowing Open the Dusty Windows of Perception)

You can't use an old map to explore a new world.
--Albert Einstein (in Changing the World One Map At A Time)

Weeping, then laughing. The power of love came into me, and I became fierce like a lion, then tender like the evening star. --Rumi (in Oh For Crying Out Loud)

No water, no life. No blue, no green. --Sylvia Earle (in The Nature of Plastics)

Socrates showed us that thinking the truth is not enough. Truth demands to be lived. --Americ Azavedo (in A Conversation with Americ Azavedo: The Truth Demands to Be Live)

Elder really first and foremost should be a verb and not a noun or an adjective, which is to say, it's something that's done. --Stephen Jenkinson (in Eldering in the Age of Consumption)

What if we joined our sorrows, I'm saying. I'm saying: What if that is joy? --Ross Gay (in Joining Our Wildernesses)

Kindness is the light that dissolves all walls between souls, families, and nations. --Paramahansa Yogananda (in All You Need Is Love?)

Restoring rituals of initiation is at the heart of any meaningful cultural change. --Francis Weller (in Rough Initiations)

This is the land's manifestation, not a language (describing his native tongue) --A shepherd in the Thar desert, India (in Speaking River, Speaking Rain)

Be courageous and face this moment in time consciously and with all the discernment and clarity within your power. --James O'Dea (in James O'Dea: Conscious Activism)

You enter life a ship laden with meaning, purpose and gifts
sent to be delivered to a hungry world.
And as much as the world needs your cargo,
you need to give it away.
Everything depends on this. --Greg Kimura (in The World Needs Your Cargo: Kozo Hattori & Sue Cochrane )

Surrender is to give oneself up to the original cause of one's being.
--Ramana Maharishi (in The Defiant Tenderness of Surrender)

Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
--Wislawa Szymborska (in A Few Words on the Soul)

Soul is that unconditioned, mysterious, untamed, undomesticated, unique individual wild core of ourselves which is inextricably connected to the mysteries of wild nature. --Claire Dunn (in Claire Dunn: Nature's Apprentice)

The animals of the planet are in desperate peril. Without free animal life, I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen. --Alice Walker (in The Caribou Guardians)

The witchery of living
is my whole conversation
with you, my darlings.
All I can tell you is what I know. --Mary Oliver (in Mary Oliver & The Witchery of Living)

Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it. --Helen Keller (in One Thousand Cranes)

When memory is transmitted, it makes witnesses. Witnesses are activated people who now are telling other people's stories. --Rabbi Ariel Burger (in Be A Blessing)

Water flows from high in the mountains
Water runs deep in the Earth
Miraculously, water comes to us,
And sustains all life. --Thich Nhat Hanh (in Our Memories of Water)

I love to think of nature as unlimited broadcasting stations, through which God speaks to us every day, every hour. --George Washington Carver (in The Gift of Ecological Humility)

Poetry is life distilled. --Gwendolyn Brooks (in Discovering Poetry En Route to Life)

I speak of change not on the surface but in the depth--change in the sense of renewal. --James Baldwin (in This Land Was Made)