Quotes from Katrina Kenison

I can only bring peace to my children when I possess it myself.

In stillness, we find our peace. Knowing peace at home, we bring peace into the world.

Stay focused on what is beautiful and abundant even as illness carves more and more of what you love away

slight shifts in imagination can have deeper and more lasting impact on our lives than major efforts at change.

To silence the chatter in my mind so the quiet voice of my soul might be allowed to speak.

clearly, I am going to need a lot more practice—practice in being present, practice in feeling my feelings and in letting them go, practice in loving, in accepting, and especially practice in holding those most dear to me with a lighter touch. At least I have learned this: It all is a practice. I just have to show up and keep on practicing. Breathe. Relax. Feel. Watch. Allow.

rushing headlong into the next thing, we fail to appreciate the blessing of the only thing we can really claim as ours to own, the present moment.

If grief and gratitude are kindred emotions, two sides of a coin, than courage is what it takes to accommodate both at once, to stay focused on what is beautiful and abundant even as illness carves more and more of what you love away. Pg 26

Ever since childhood, I've felt a tension between who I think I should be-- smarter, more confident, more creative, more adventurous, more out going- and who I am: quiet, introspective, sensitive, and solitary. If I could only be better, I think- a better wife, a better mother, a better writer, a better human- then I would feel more sure of myself and more worthy. More deserving of life.

How easy it is to miss the gift of who we are, because we're so busy trying to become somebody else. Maybe all I really need to do- all anyone needs to do- is trust in what we love and continue to do that.

What would happen, I wonder, if I stopped questioning and doubting what I do, stopped judging my own efforts, stopped critiquing the sentences I write, and begin instead to simply trust the process- not just the ups and downs of my work, but everything else as well, the endlessly evolving process of life itself?

I still struggle with the belief that I should be producing something more tangible or useful in the world. 'You should do work that makes a real difference,' scolds the voice in my head.... I worried I was being self- indulgent, spending hour after hour engaged in the slow, halting process of moving from experience to thought to word. What, really, was the point? Why would anyone else care? Why should I? I am coming to believe that there is room in the world for all our stories.

It is not for me to Judge the gifts I have to offer the world, but it is up to me to summon the courage to offer them.

My real task is not to try to reinvent myself or to transcend my life after all, but to inhabit it more fully, to appreciate it, and to thoughtfully tend whats already here. .. embracing and welcoming the person I actually am and quietly making the contribution I have to offer- whether its a manuscript page or an email to my old next-door neighbor. What matters is not the grandness of the gesture, but its source. If I do my work, all of it, with love, then it is worthy.

I was so busy trying to figure out what I should be doing that I couldn't see the truth: All I really needed to do was focus on who I wanted to be. Love is the gift I've had to offer all along, in all its different forms. I just didn't ever quite believe that it-or I- was enough.

A good life is always partly a matter of luck, but it is also a choice we make for ourselves- a choice of deliberation, attention, creativity, limits. A choice predicated on this belief: I am worthy.

The years from here on in will be what I make of them.

As time goes on, I find myself caring less about fitting in, and more about nurturing those relationships that fit who I truly am.

As always after saying goodbye to one one of my boys, I feel a touch of nostalgia for everything that's over. I suppose it shall always be so. But I also know now that it's okay to feel it, to allow my heart its fullness for whats gone as well as its gratitude for all that is good.

Alone-in moments of prayer or meditation, or simply in stillness-we breathe more deeply, see more fully, hear more keenly. We notice more, and in the process, we return to what is sacred.

Life finds its balance. Children grow up. Second chances come along. In the meantime, I could choose to savor this moment. What good would it do to allow annoyance to interfere with gratitude?

At times, my nostalgia for our family life as it used to be--for our own imperfect, cherished, irretrievable past--is nearly overwhelming.

Magic wasn't something I had to go in search of; it was here, within me, all the time. When hearts are open, when love is flowing, magic happens.

Stay focused on what is beautiful and abundant even as illness carves more and more of what you love away