Tara Lemieux shares this quote from Maya Angelou:

“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them. Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud. Do not complain. Make every effort to change things you do not like. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution.

Never whine. Whining lets a brute know that a victim is in the neighborhood.

Be certain that you do not die without having done something wonderful for humanity.”

via On Mother's Day—a Letter to the Daughter I Never Had. (Maya Angelou) | elephant journal.

We are each born with a gift hidden in

a wound, and many years to birth it, each

given a heat to carry and rough seas to calm

it, each seeded with a worthiness, and love after

love through which to accept it, each called to

enter sorrow like an underwater cave, with the

breathless chance to break surface in the same

world with everything aglow. If we make it this

far, we can, on any given day, marvel that clouds

are clouds, and name ourselves. We can use the

gift born of our wound to find an unmarked spot

from which to live. If we settle there, giving our

all without giving ourselves away, the heart

within our heart will flower and the whole

world will eat of its nectar.

A Question to Walk With: Tell the story of your gift and the wound it’s been hiding in, growing in? Given this, what is the one thing your heart needs from the world to open completely? And what is the one thing your opened heart can give to the world?

via Mark Nepo: The Hard Human Spring.

I am enjoying the poetry of Mark Nepo more and more…