Quotes About Renewal

I'm pretty sure that it is only by experiencing that ocean of sadness in a naked and immediate way that we come to be healed--which is to say, that we come to experience life with a real sense of presence and spaciousness and peace.

When I asked Father Tom where we find God in this present darkness, he said that God is in creation, and to get outdoors as much as you can.

Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up.

Easter is so profound. Christmas was an afterthought in the early Church, the birth not observed for a couple hundred years. But no one could help noticing the resurrection: Rumi said that spring was Christ, "martyred plants rising up from their shrouds." Easter says that love is more powerful than death, bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, bigger even than airport security lines.

if you've worked in good faith for a couple of hours but cannot hear it today, have some lunch.

Every time we choose the good action or response, the decent, the valuable, it builds, incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom, justice.

The beginning of forgiveness is often exhaustion. You're pooped; thank God.

New is life.

She told me not long ago, "I'm not suicidal, but sometimes I wish I was dead." This is the point beyond exhaustion, when you can't see how you'll ever fill up again. And then she does, through what she calls lunch-money faith: nothing dramatic, and just enough.

All it takes is one safe person to listen, to hear, to noodge us to start over and not give up.

As is' is the portal to creation, to new life.

spring, we expand and stretch in all directions. It's green exuberance and giddiness, bright clown colors and

In spring, we expand and stretch in all directions. It's green exuberance and giddiness, bright clown colors and Easter colors, too; the rebirth of the tender growing soul.

know there's solace in making do with what you've got, making things a little bit better. What might have been thrown out went from tattered scraps to something majestic and goofy and honest that holds together, that keeps people's eyes off me and my family, yet lets in the light and sun, like a poem or a song.

An early spring arrived, with skies of faded-workshirt blue.

As Father Ed Dowling said, sometimes heaven is just a new pair of glasses. When we put them on, we see the awful person, sometimes even ourselves, a bit more gently, and we are blessed in return. It seems, on the face of things, like a decent deal.

What seems true is something in that something in life or in our own hearts is always being installed or being repaired or being torn down for the next installation or the mess of the repair or tear down is being cleaned and cleared out.

I also learned that you didn't come onto this earth as a perfectionist or control freak. You weren't born a person of cringe and contraction. You were born as energy, as life, made of the same stuff as stars, blossoms, breezes. You learned contraction to survive, but that was then. You have paid through the nose--paid but good. It is now your turn to reap.

Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.

One learns to accept the fact that no permanent return is possible to an old form of relationship; and, more deeply still, that there is no holding of a relationship to a single form. This is not tragedy but part of the ever-recurrent miracle of life and growth.

Solitude, says the moon shell. Every person, especially every woman, should be alone sometime during the year, some part of each week, and each day.

Purposeful giving is not as apt to deplete one's resources; it belongs to that natural order of giving that seems to renew itself even in the act of depletion. The more one gives, the more one has the give - like milk in the breast.

One is free, like the hermit crab, to change one's shell.

that not what love is—an enlargement of the best and a healing over of the worst?