heaven in a wild flower

“I never change, I simply become more myself.”

“I will never be enough for you, until I search inside and find the way, to be enough for me.”

“If things go wrong don’t go with them.”

“It’s not just other people we need to forgive. We also need to forgive ourselves. For all the things we didn’t do. All the things we should have done.”

“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

“Friendship isn’t a big thing. It’s a million little things.”

“I had a weird, empty feeling inside me. Not a bad sort of empty. It was a sort of lack of sensation, like being in pain for a long time and then suddenly realizing that you’re not anymore.”

“Right now I feel absolutely nothing, and I’m not sure what scares me more. The feeling of emptiness or how incredibly intoxicating it is.”

“You can never awaken using the same system that put you to sleep in the first place.”

“You can never completely know anyone, no matter how well you think you do. There will always be some truth about them you don’t ever get to know.”

Worse, thanks to what is called “shifting baseline syndrome,” changes that initially seem extreme come to be accepted as normal over time. The next generation of children, who will never remember how many birds (or butterflies or hedgehogs or manatees) once existed in the wild, will not hear anything eerie in the silence. Once a mass murder is complete, its victims tell no tales. When humans killed the last of the giant “Steller sea cows” several hundred years ago, the memory of these mega-manatees faded away quickly, and now they seem like something fantastical. We know that “in just over 100 years the world lost as much forest as it had in the previous 9,000 years,” but when nobody is left alive who remembers the old forests, the loss is not felt.

“Don’t carry your mistakes around with you. Instead, place them under your feet and use them as stepping stones to rise above them.”

Some days I want to spit me out, the whole mess of me, but mostly I am good and quiet. How much silence buys me mercy, how much silence covers all the lives it takes to make me. In the event of every day and its newness of disaster, find me sunning on the rooftop, please don’t ask anything of me. If I could be anything I would be the wind, if I could be nothing I would be.

“All great and precious things are lonely.”

“Because I am often silent words seep out of my flesh.”

“Fill your life with adventures, not things. Have stories to tell not stuff to show.”