In front of me stands a willow tree by a river, its long green tendrils trailing into the chuckling water. A man sits beneath the tree, back propped against the trunk, gently strumming a lute as he looks out over the water. He feels familiar to me, a...
Take faith, for example. For many people in our world, the opposite of faith is doubt. The goal, then, within this understanding, is to eliminate doubt. But faith and doubt aren't opposites. Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse, that it'...
But to think there was meaning, a scheme to things, well, that was quite beyond her philosophical reach. She feared as she always had, that all that was ever meant was loneliness, hard work, striving to make a difference when no difference could poss...
India, she now knew, would not be content staying in the background, was nobody's wallpaper, insisted in interjecting itself into everyone's life, meddling with it, twisting it, molding it beyond recognition. India, she had found out, was a place of ...
The less obvious hurdle is that of preparing parents emotionally and putting forward realistic images of parenthood and motherhood. There also needs to be some sort of acknowledgement that not everyone should parent - when parenting is a given, it's ...
You'll learn. It takes time to kill the flesh, honey. It's kind of like those candles your father used to put on Mitchell's cake--the ones that relight when you think they're out. You've got to keep huffing and puffing and maybe even use the help of ...
Advising Mrs. Harris was the least I could do," David said smoothly. "After all, she was the one who brought me and my late wife together." That was stretching it a bit, since all Charlotte had done was give Sarah lessons in how to avoid fortune hunt...
And why does Father want me out there? You do know it’s a myth what they say about virgin sacrifices and dragons, yes?” “Of course I know that,” he snapped in such a way that Dagmar knew he believed the myth to be true. “And after them thre...
This meditation is called nontheistic, which doesn't have anything to do with believing in God or not believing in God, but means that nobody but yourself can tell you what to accept and what to reject. The practice of meditation helps us to get to k...
I wouldn’t mind politicians lying to me, stealing from me, or senselessly making life difficult if they didn’t try to claim they were looking out for my best interest. How refreshing it’d be to see a politician honest enough to admit he’s dis...
I told them he'd be able to get you to go out." Rianne folded her winnings and tucked the bills into her blazer pocket. "Look at him." "He's right here, Ri," Carla murmured, shooting Keenan an apologetic look. "We've tried to teach her manners, but.....
We all want somebody to share our life and love with. But if there are an odd number of people on the earth, and there’s a 50% chance there is, then somebody is going to get left out. And that somebody isn’t going to be me, even if I have to kill...
No one ever said your life would be easy. The nature of being human makes life for all of us a challenge. The most important thing to consider here is this. Your life is only as challenging as you think it is. Think of challenge as a teacher and your...
If you walk 100 miles into the life you don't want. Often, you must walk those same 100 miles to get out of that life. This is the answer to why the journey to fulfillment is often so difficult. However, if you can find a shortcut, a new path, you ca...
There were no judgments to be made, yet out of necessity one had to select. Beyond good and evil was all right in theory, but to go on living one had to select: some were kinder than others, some were simply more interested in you, and sometimes the ...
In my experience, when a woman's cruelty is combined with love and devotion, it is almost always without exception an act performed not out of treachery, but as a painful self-sacrifice for the good of her beloved, to obtain for him a future bounty w...
There are a lot of times the heart burrows deeper, goes tunnelling into itself for reasons only the heart itself seems to know.They are times of isolation, of hibernation, sometimes of desolation. There is a bareness that spreads out over the interio...
If we go looking for a friend, we’ll find many locked doors. It can be a lonely and often fruitless search. Sometimes it feels like no matter how hard we knock there’s not a single person to be found for true friendship. But... when we go out to ...
What she did not know, and would never have believed, was that though her soul seemed to have been grown over with an impenetrable layer of mould, some delicate blades of grass, young and tender, were already pushing their way upwards, destined to ta...
Many of us are returning from a long journey during which we were forced to search for things that were of no interest to us. Now we realize that they were false. But this return cannot be made without pain, because we have been away for a long time ...
Our lives can be filled with a series of trials. Some would say “You’re either in one, coming out of one or one is on the way.” During these times a flood of emotions can creep into our lives like a dark unrelenting storm. I’m comforted by wh...
