Tag Archives: inspire

Safe

In the second grade there were classroom rules hanging from the ceiling. The only one I can remember now seems like it would be a good rule for life. “Everyone must feel safe.” Safe to be themselves, physically safe, safe to say what they think, just safe. That’s the best rule I can think of. – Rachel Corrie: Let Me Stand Alone

Maybe it is loneliness

When I ride in the dark on stark roads through dry, bald hills, I ache with desperate longing. I don’t know what I am longing for, maybe for some place of my own within these images, some place where I fit, instead of being the one human being still awake, the only thing moving across the hills in arid darkness. Maybe that ache is loneliness. I haven’t found a name for the feeling yet, nor do I know exactly what awakens it in me. But instinct warns me that it is too potent for me, that my soul is on the verge of cracking when I feel it that way. I cannot handle the sheer power of those wild emotions by myself. I have to find some way to share them. That is why I write. It’s instinctive. I just have to – because it is awake like lava in my blood, and sustains me.

Rachel Corrie; Let Me Stand Alone – The Journals of Rachel Corrie

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside by a generous hand. But- and this is the point- who gets excited by a mere penny? But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“Nature is, above all, profligate. Don’t believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek