That's the Way It Is

“The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything.”

~ Anatole France (1844-1924), born François-Anatole Thibault, he was a French poet, journalist, and novelist.

Exploration

“One of the key things about Blyton, as about any great writer, is to provide you with what in its broadest sense could be termed a secular worldview – that is, a sense of the coexistence of diversity, and of the many forms of life and livelihood and living, and of cultures and ways of thinking and being that are very distant from your own, and overarching them all the feeling that many of these things are exciting and worth exploring and worth absorbing as some part of your own identity.”

-Rukun Advani, writer

The Road Less Taken

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware." Martin Buber

This Is How I Run

"Nature does not hurry,
Yet everything
Is accomplished."
-Lao Tzu

Onwards

Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace. My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road!
Dark river-beds where the eternal thirst flows and weariness follows, and the infinite ache.
~ from “Body of A Woman”, by Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, first published in Chile, 1924

Tend Your Thought Garden

“What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hope

Diane Ackerman, "School Prayer"

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messanger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.

Interconnectedness

"I cannot be me without you
and we cannot be us without them,
and together we have a future."

Philip Carter, Anglican priest, director of the Julian Centre in Adelaide, Australia.

"Common humanity and universal responsibility link us. But much of the time we act as if this is not the case -- we are in denial as individuals and societies."

Margaret Somerville, The Ethical Imagination, 2006.