I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives – those.
Bagby Hot Springs.
Letting go of expectation when it comes to one’s children is close to impossible. The entire premise of our love for them has to do with creating, fostering, and nurturing people who will outlive us. To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.
It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach.
I’d been a girl forever, after all, familiar with and reliant upon the powers my very girlness granted me.
And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.
I could only choose between the bull that would take me back and the bull that would take me forward.
You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.
Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore.
I love music and listen to music all the time, but I didn’t realize how much my body needed music. I needed it more than sex.
Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path. We don’t always do the right thing on our way to rightness.
You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.
Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.
The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.
You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.
Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.
If someone is being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird, you don’t have to take it in. You don’t have to turn it into a big psychodrama about your worth. That behavior so often is not even about you. Don’t own other people’s crap.
That my complicated life could be made so simple was astounding.
So on one hand, because the wilderness was familiar to me, it really helped me be brave. But it still was scary sometimes. I had to say to myself: “Chances are, you’re not going to be mauled by a bear.”
If there’s one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it’s that you can’t fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It’s a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees.