Excerpt from a letter by Jack Kerouac

…The world you see is just a movie in your mind.
Rocks dont see it.
Bless and sit down.
Forgive and forget.
Practice kindness all day to everybody
and you will realize you’re already
in heaven now.
That’s the story.
That’s the message.
Nobody understands it,
nobody listens, they’re
all running around like chickens with heads cut
off. I will try to teach it but it will
be in vain, s’why I’ll
end up in a shack
praying and being
cool and singing
by my woodstove
making pancakes.

*sent to his first wife a decade after their marriage had been annulled

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Martha Beck

There is a forest in your heart, a vast ocean in your mind, a universe in your soul. However trapped or frightened you may feel, you were born to be an explorer.

Excerpt from Walden by Henry David Thoreau

We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

Nora Ephron

Above all, be the heroine of your own life, not the victim.

Go To The Limits of Your Longing by Rainer Maria Rilke

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Maya Angelou

Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.

Rumi

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Maya Angelou

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

Excerpt from High Tide in Tucson by Barbara Kingsolver

Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life….And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another–that is surely the basic instinct…Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.

C.G. Jung

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.