Crossing Tinker's Knob

by Inglath Cooper

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Soren Kierkegaard

Giving up doesn’t always mean you are weak; sometimes it means that you are strong enough to let go. – Author Unknown

Don’t let yesterday use up too much of today. – Cherokee Indian Proverb

There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief. – Aeschylus

I don’t know if I believe that God deliberately punishes us here on earth when we disobey and do wrong. I guess I’d understand if He did. But I wonder if it’s more that He lets the consequences of our actions play out their natural course. We tip the domino, and the track is set, each piece falling in upon itself until the end result is the only one it could have been.

Helping one another, is part of the religion of sisterhood. ~ Louisa May Alcott

I’ve seen with my own eyes the tragedy that can result from a single seed of hate. That’s all it takes, really, just one. It’s easy to miss at first, a seemingly benign judgmental word, resentment, jealousy. In the same way that the wind blows spores of a dandelion across a green yard, and they begin to pop up everywhere, the same is true of hatred, the seeds multiplying one by one until the landscape it has fallen upon is forever changed.

That real love doesn’t set boundaries or guard with jealousy those at which it is directed. Real love, whatever its origin, is to be shared. Welcomed. Valued.

“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” ― Mother Teresa

“There’s living. And there’s living in the past. I just really want to live. What good would it do for me to spend my time dwelling on something I can’t change?”

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. – Anaïs Nin

Sometimes we want something so desperately that we never consider the possible outcome. Maybe it’s out of desperation that we force the pieces together, even when the joints don’t quite fit, so that in the end there is really no chance for permanence.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. – Henry David Thoreau

even when lives were divided by boundaries as high and imposing as this very mountain, boundaries imposed by the beliefs of others, the people on either side weren’t so different. And even when people looked different on the outside, whether it was in the way they dressed, the color of their skin, or the way in which they spoke, on the inside they were much the same. That for the most part, people had the same needs, the same wants, the same desires. They wanted the best for their loved ones and grieved when life brought them short of that.

We’re promised nothing. Love is a gift.