At the end of each post, I include a short meditation. This is usually some special excerpt from a work that has stayed with me or changed the way I think and feel about something, or it is an excerpt from the one we’re reading that month. I will keep them collected here for ease of reference, should anyone want or need to come back to them.

December 1, 2025: “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” –James Baldwin

November 14, 2025: “Nothing blooms. Nothing withers. Only the knowledge that there’s a difference between letting go and setting free.” —Paul Tran

November 2, 2025: “Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” -Rainer Maria Rilke

October 1, 2025: “Notice the ordinary; attend to its edges.” -Adam Burgess

September 1, 2025: “I came to realize that while I struggled to be good, I could excel at being courageous.” —Michelle Zauner

July 14, 2025: “Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing.” –Leonardo da Vinci

July 1, 2025: “It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.” —Maggie Nelson

June 30, 2025: “There’s so much room in a person, there should be more of us in here. There shouldn’t be just one.” –Ocean Vuong

June 23, 2025: “To be alive and try to be a decent person, and not turn it into anything big or grand, that’s the hardest thing of all” (251). —Ocean Vuong

June 16, 2025: “That’s what happens when you die—the world gets in.” -Ocean Vuong

June 9, 2025: “Among a pile of salvaged trash, he would come closest to all he ever wanted to be: a consciousness sitting under a lightbulb reading his days away, warm and alone, alone and yet, somehow, still somebody’s son.” –Ocean Vuong

June 1, 2025: “They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.” —Ocean Vuong

May 30, 2025: “There is no denying that our happiness is inextricably bound up with the happiness of others. There is no denying that if society suffers, we ourselves suffer . . . we can reject everything else: religion, ideology, all received wisdom. But we cannot escape the necessity of love and compassion.” –The Dalai Lama

May 1, 2025: “The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.” -bell hooks

April 28, 2025: “Maybe the body is the soul’s metaphor.” —Diane Seuss

April 21, 2025: “Situations can change; people can change. Be the first to seek to bring good. Do not grow accustomed to evil, but defeat it with good.” —Pope Francis

April 14, 2025: “I know you’ve lived it, too. You understand / that you can cross a hundred bridges, / but there is no way to go north again, / by which I mean it’s time to put to bed, / like the row of the giant’s children / in their matching nightcaps, / our allegories of innocence.” –Diane Seuss

April 7, 2025: “It seems wrong / to curl now within the confines / of a poem. You can’t hide / from what you made / inside what you made.” –Diane Seuss

April 1, 2025: “This morning Poetry has conquered—I have relapsed into those abstractions which are my only life—I feel escaped from a new strange and threatening sorrow—And I am thankful for it—There is an awful warmth about my heart like a load of Immortality.” –John Keats

January 29, 2025: “Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” –Marcel Proust

January 21, 2025: “The proof of the little prince’s existence is that he was delightful, that he laughed, and that he wanted a sheep.” –Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

January 6, 2025: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” –Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

January 1, 2025: “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” ―Mary Oliver

December 30, 2024: “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” –bell hooks

December 1, 2024: “What I want to say is / that the past is the past, / and the present is what your life is, / and you are capable / of choosing what that will be . . . ” -Mary Oliver

November 8, 2024: “Ghosts in the water, ghosts in the blood. Everything, once you start to look, is haunted.”  ― Seán Hewitt

November 1, 2024: “What if it was myself, or that lost version of me, a flicker of the past — would I know his face, and would he know mine? All that time I had been haunted by him, and still I hardly knew what that self was, that version of me that existed before the world had said become, and I had answered in its language.” ― Seán Hewitt

October 28, 2024: “Technology is both a tool for helping humans and for destroying them. This is the paradox of our times which we’re compelled to face.” -Frank Herbert

October 21, 2024: “There are still many human emotions I do not fully comprehend – anger, hatred, revenge. But I am not mystified by the desire to be loved – or the need for friendship. These are things I do understand.” – Lt. Cmdr. Data Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Data’s Day.”

October 8, 2024: “Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida.” -Philip K. Dick

September 30, 2024: “If you close your mind in judgments and traffic with desires, your heart will be troubled. If you keep your mind from judging and aren’t led by the senses, your heart will find peace.” -Lao Tzu

September 23, 2024: “I have tried to learn my anger’s usefulness to me, as well as its limitations.” -Claudia Rankine

September 9, 2024: “When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I am not excluding you from joining–I am broadening the joining.” -Audre Lorde

September 1, 2024: “Words work as release–well-oiled doors opening and closing between intention, gesture.” -Claudia Rankine

August 23, 2024: “We can imagine there are many doors leading to happiness. Opening any of those doors, happiness will come to you in many different ways. But, if you are attached to one particular idea of happiness, it’s as though you have closed all the doors except one . . . Remove the idea of happiness you have, and happiness may come right away.” -Thich Nhat Hanh

August 13, 2024: “Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything transforms.” —Antoine Lavoisier

August 1, 2024: “We have to wake up together. And if we wake up together, then we have a chance.” -Thich Nhat Hanh

July 22, 2024: “And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” —Paulo Coelho

July 15, 2024: “I hope one day we’ll all see each other without these stupid labels and instead see each other for who we really are. Starfolk.” -James Brandon

July 10, 2024: “You only have right now to be kind. After that, it’s gone; you’ve lost your chance.” -James Brandon

July 1, 2024: “The truth is, of course, that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.” -David Bowie

June 22, 2024: “I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains / I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains / There’s more than one answer to these questions / Pointing me in a crooked line / And the less I seek my source from some definitive / The closer I am to fine.” -Indigo Girls

June 14, 2024: “You are the way and the wayfarers. And when one of you falls down, he falls for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone. Ay, and he falls for those ahead of him, who though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone.” -Kahlil Gibran

June 7, 2024: “If this is my day of harvest, in what fields have I sowed the seed, and in what unremembered seasons?” -Kahlil Gibran

June 1, 2024: “Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, / We fell them down and turn them into paper, / That we may record our emptiness.” -Kahlil Gibran

May 29, 2024: “For the true warriors of the world, fighting is the last resort to solving a conflict. Every effort is made to avoid bloodshed.” -Joy Harjo

May 22, 2024: “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words / And never stops – at all – ” -Emily Dickinson

May 15, 2024: “Boiling water will soften a potato but harden an egg. You can’t control whether you’re a potato or an egg, but you can decide to play a game where it’s better to be hard or soft.” -James Clear

May 8, 2024: “Everyone wanted the same thing: land, peace, a place to make a home, cook, fall in love, make children and music. Every soul has a distinct song.” -Joy Harjo

May 1, 2024: “When I began to listen to poetry, it’s when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to others. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.” -Joy Harjo

April 28, 2024: “The soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” (NKJV 1 Samuel 18:1)

April 19, 2024: “When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That’s the message he is sending.” -Thich Nhat Hanh

April 9, 2024: “The magic of God is three. We were the magic of God.” -Justin Torres

April 1, 2024: “Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?” – James Baldwin

February 14, 2024: “There is no destination other than towards.” -Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

February 7, 2024: “I want you to speak.” -Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

February 1, 2024: “Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?” -Ocean Vuong

January 29, 2024: “Those who say forgiveness is a sign of weakness haven’t tried it.” -Desmond Tutu

January 19, 2024: “We are guests here on this planet, visitors who have come for a short time, so we need to use our days wisely, to make our world a little better for everyone.” –Dalai Lama

January 9, 2024: “Just as water seeks its own level, the mind will gravitate toward the holy. Muddy water will become clear if allowed to stand undisturbed, and so too will the mind become clear if it is allowed to be still.” -Deng Ming-Dao

January 1, 2024: “If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.” -Dalai Lama XIV

December 25, 2023: “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.” -Charles Dickens

December 18, 2023: “But though Scrooge pressed it down with all his force, he could not hide the light.” -Charles Dickens

December 11, 2023: “Mankind was my business The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business.” -Charles Dickens

December 1, 2023: “No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.” -Charles Dickens

November 29, 2023: “To be careful with people and with words is a rare and beautiful thing.” -Benjamin Alire Sáenz

November 22, 2023: “I believe that justice produces justice, and injustice injustice.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

November 15, 2023: “What does it mean . . . that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring to the world? What is the life that I should live?” -Mary Oliver

November 8, 2023: “I walk in the world to love it.” -Mary Oliver

November 1, 2023: “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” ― N.H. Kleinbaum, Dead Poets Society

October 29, 2023: “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” –Mary Oliver

October 22, 2023: “May you feel safe. May you feel strong. May you be content. May you live free from suffering.” –Adapted from a lovingkindness meditation by Sylvia Boorstein.

October 15, 2023: “I stopped eating meat, fish, and fowl about ten years ago. Part of it has to do with the animals; it’s hard to eat something you’ve seen walking around. I don’t want to eat anything that has a mother.” –Fred Rogers

October 8, 2023: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” -Maya Angelou

October 1, 2023: “Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.” -Iain S. Thomas

September 25, 2023: “For readers, one of life’s most electrifying discoveries is that they are readers–not just capable of doing it, but in love with it. Hopelessly. Head over heels. The first book that does that is never forgotten, and each page seems to bring a fresh revelation, one that burns and exalts: Yes! That’s how it is! Yes! I saw that, too! And, of course, That’s what I think! That’s what I FEEL!” -Stephen King