Bloomstrandilotus - Kviknar Von

After the aching has stopped and the tears have dried up, this is where you begin again. This is where you pick yourself up off the floor, put your heart back in your chest, and dare to put one foot in front of the other.

Kayil York

Change is the art of becoming, a journey from who we were to who we are meant to be.

Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Vulnerability is the essence of connection and connection is the essence of existence.

Leo Christopher

Perhaps loneliness is the real proof that we belong to something greater than ourselves, the way absence is proof of what was once a presence.

Anne Michaels

In the long and difficult effort of spiritual recovery, the Church does not separate the soul from the body. The whole man has fallen away from God; the whole man is to be restored, the whole man is to return. The catastrophe of sin lies precisely in the victory of the flesh -- the animal, the irrational, the lust in us -- over the spiritual and the divine. But the body is glorious, the body is holy, so holy that God Himself "became flesh." Salvation and repentance then are not contempt of the body or neglect of it, but restoration of the body to its real function as the expression and the life of the spirit, as the temple of the priceless human soul. Christian asceticism is a fight, not against the body but for the body. For this reason, the whole man -- body and soul -- repents. The body participates in the prayer of the soul just as the soul prays through and in the body.

--Rev Dr. Alexander Schmemann: Great Lent - Journey to Pascha

“Letting yourself get hurt isn’t brave, love. Brave is protecting others from hurt.”

— Amie Kaufman, This Shattered World