“When he talks about life under the Khmer Rouge, he uses phrases very unlike him—“true hell,” “more than insane,” “below zero.”
“He has,in short,reached his peak as a hunter,exuberantly altered from the pale,overweight statesman of ten months ago. Africa's way of reducing every problem of existence to dire alternatives-shoot or starve,kill or be killed,shelter or suffer,procreate or count for nothing-has clarified his thinking,purged him of politics and its constant search for compromise.”
Source: Colonel Roosevelt
“My voice has expanded. It's unfurled in directions I didn't know it could go. And, in some ways, it isn't even what I thought it was.”
Source: Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World
“Jerusalem, thought Morrison, was like a deep pool, where time had settle too thickly.”
Source: Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances
“Life is nothing short of a phenomenon. In every sense life is mysterious and unfathomable.”
Source: Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
“To call someone a navel gazer on the mainland is to say that they're narcissistic, self-absorbed in their introspective pursuits. This perspective, I realize, might be the very reason I've come to think of a spiritual life as some sort of luxury. I'm suddenly struck by the irony of a culture that seems to point to personal spiritual quests as somehow selfish when, in the end, those journeys, like the discredited belly button, are ultimately a search for connectivity.”
“Danny begins to walk fast and it strikes me that I don't know where we're ultimately headed. This bothers me. I'm calibrated for destination. It's partly why I've been imagining divinity as some sort of beam-me-up-Scotty experience. But maybe transcendence isn't about leaving. It's about being present. Life is a performance piece. Like dance and song, the art is in the process. Like hula and oli, the process is the prayer.”
Source: Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World
“i think about how - if I want to welcome the inevitable transformations of my life - I'm going to have to fully open myself to spirit-speak, to a seemingly cheesy-Earth-Momma vulnerability. I'm going to have to cede control - not just mentally or physically but also spiritually.”
Source: Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World
“I have come to believe that I am a lesser authority in my own life. I have learned to distrust less-than-rational, nontechnical experiences, my own phenomenal knowledge. Because, to trust the senses - the mortal body - is to risk sounding crazy, especially, it seems. if you're a woman.
She's seeing things.
She's hearing things.
She's so sensitive.
Read: She's irrational.
And this I have internalized. Who am I to trust my body, my senses, my instincts? Who am I to know how to raise my child without consulting parenting books and up-to-date rearing studies? Who am I to try to find God outside of an institutionally approved, fully vetted doctrine? Who am I to think I can pursue impractical dreams? Who am I to be taken seriously? Who am I to think I'm capable or worthy? Who am I to...who am I?”
“Literacy is the way to face your future, make your future and change your future”