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Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could be any different. —Oprah Winfrey
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. —Mahatma Gandhi
“forgiveness…is like a door. You can open yourself up to it or close yourself off from it at any time.” Forgiveness can be a powerful tool. It can loosen the knots we often tie ourselves. It can bandage up wounds, large and small. It can heal traumas, visible and invisible. But withholding forgiveness can also cause more harm than good. It can tighten its grip on you and keep you bound to the person who hurt you.
But I challenge you to define forgiveness for yourself. Because forgiveness is for you, and you deserve to be free.
The truth is, my love for her started much later, when the reality of her conception had faded enough for me to see only her, when I realized that she, like me, was a survivor.
moments when a maternal mixture of emotions and hormones hummed through me, signaling that it was normal for me to love her and reminding me over and over again that having her was well worth the emotional cost.
“The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars,”
I thought of you and how you love this beauty, And walking up the long beach all alone I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder As you and I once heard their monotone.
“Be wise as thou art cruel; do not press My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain; Lest sorrow lend me words and words express The manner of my pity-wanting pain.”
“There’s a term in physics, entanglement. It’s when two subatomic particles interact. They can separate, but no matter how far apart they get, they are always connected.” I
comprehension is different from truth.
astronomy confronts us with some of the biggest and most challenging problems about the nature of ourselves.”
Trauma doesn’t punch a clock, but you can set your watch by it. It works overtime most of the time. But it can be smothered like a whisper in a storm.
“The sad and solemn night Has yet her multitude of cheerful fires; The glorious host of light Walk the dark hemisphere till she retires; All through her silent watches, gliding slow, Her constellations come, and climb the heavens, and go.”
“Love is never complicated. The circumstances are but never the love.”
“Give me fresh corn and wheat—give me serene-moving animals, teaching content; Give me nights perfectly quiet, as on high plateaus west of the Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars; Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers, where I can walk undisturb’d…”
“it is most sane and sunly / and more it cannot die / than all the sky which only / is higher than the sky,”
Sometimes our dreams are manifestations of what our heart wants.”
words aren’t always a necessary comfort, that silence can have the same benefit as the simple touch of a hand, that it can be all the support someone needs.
“If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those imposters just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ‘em up with wornout tools…”
anything of value that’s broken is worth fixing.
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools.
Forgiveness, I’ve learned, is like a door. You can open yourself up to it or close yourself off from it at any time. We can’t rewrite history or change the outcome. Life is a series of choices. And we live in and with those choices we make.
