Hope

When the world says, "Give up,"


Hope whispers, "Try it one more time."

- Author Unknown

Bounces and Bumps

Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life ... this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.

- Salman Rushdie

Last Post

Spats cover
Polluted boots
With a Sam Browne strapped
To a spit and polish belt
Tightened by the sergeant
Holding him there
Completely trapped.

Deathly still
Helmand
Mourning loss
Hobnailed by the flagpole
With a drooping ensign
In a two-minute silence
Like three hours on a cross.

Numb lips
This November
And another year
As the guns die down
In posthumous salute
While the note splits
In the mouth of momentary fear.

The bugle fades
Echoing round

As darkness descends
On Greenwich Mean Time
Across Whitehall
And the sands of an Afghan desert
While Calvary shares the silence.

Crinkled leaves
Float down
On their parachute trip
With legions of poppies
Papered for today
As a tear rolls down
To a stiff upper lip.

Teeth chatter
Feet freeze
With winter ahead
On count-down to Reveille
And the beginning of spring
While sheathed swords
Honour the glorious dead.

- Paul du Plessis

Rise Above

An individual has not started living until he can
rise above the narrow confines
of his individualistic concerns
to the broader concerns
of all humanity.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Making a Stand

Give me a place to stand and I shall move the world.

- Archimedes

Values

When I was in the military
they gave me a medal for killing two men
and a discharge for loving one.

- Epitaph of Leonard P. Matlovich

Little Things

Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.

- Robert Brault

Shift Towards Peace

Rather than talking about peace or forgiveness,
let's talk about trust, dignity, our shared humanity,
and the one hundred thousand other steps it takes
to finally achieve peace and forgiveness. ...

There is no "magic" square metre, or hilltop, or valley,
that if ceded by one side to the other will bring about
peace in the Middle East.

Peace can only come bout after an internal shift --
on both sides.

What we need is respect, and the inner strength
to refuse to hate.

Then we will achieve peace.

- Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish

Make the Exchange

We cannot change the past, but we can change our attitude toward it.

Uproot guilt and plant forgiveness.
Tear out arrogance and seed humility.

Exchange love for hate ---
thereby, making the present comfortable
and the future promising.

- Maya Angelou

Hope

Hope is that thing with feathers that perches in the soul
and sings the tune without the words
and never stops... at all.

- Emily Dickinson

Perseverance

Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

- Jacob A. Riis

Courage

Courage doesn't always roar.

Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying,
"I will try again tomorrow".

- Mary Anne Radmacher

Wearing Your Life

Your life feels different on you once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after -- lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again.
- Louise Erdrich

Give Meaning to Life

Life is meaningless only if we allow it to be. Each of us has the power to give life meaning, to make our time and our bodies and our words into instruments of love and hope.
- Tom Head

Thanksgiving

Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so, let us all be thankful.


- Buddha

Sand and Stone

When someone hurts us,
we should write it down in sand,
where winds of forgiveness can erase it away.

When someone does something good for us,
we must engrave it in stone,
where no wind can ever erase it.

Learn to write your hurts in sand, and to carve your benefits in stone.

- Unknown

Eternal Love

They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it.
Death cannot kill what never dies.
Nor can spirits ever be divided, that love and live in the same divine principle, the root and record of their friendship.
If absence be not death, neither is theirs.
Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still.

- William Penn

Miracles

Photo from Public Domain

I'm not a dreamer, and I'm not saying this will initiate any kind of definitive answer or cure to cancer, but I believe in miracles. I have to.

- Terry Fox

Swahili Proverb

The child of lion is a lion.

- Swahili Proverb

Love

Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another's heart, or its flame burns low.


- Henry Ward Beecher