Cindy Knoke

“Sometimes all you need is a big heart and burning desire.”
― Bernard Jan, Look for Me Under the Rainbow

“I read the last three lines of the popular poem about having faith in God:
“…during your trials and testings,
When you saw only one set of footprints,
It was then that I carried you.”
― Tracy Stopler, The Ropes That Bind: Based on a True Story of Child Sexual Abuse

“To acknowledge the existence of the bully and his accompanying risks is not the same as accepting him as a permanent feature of our world. I know that if we accept trauma and fear, it wins.

"Bullies don’t just go away. Their legacies don’t just disappear. The bully must be confronted intentionally, his impact named and addressed. Even so, it seems there’s no clear consensus on how to deal with the bully on our blocks. Do we confront him? Match violence with violence? Do we ignore him, or try to kill him with kindness? I don’t think there’s a silver bullet to handling the bully, no one-size-fits-all strategy. But the right strategy has to be rooted in a context bigger than the immediate one, has to be rooted in more than aiming to end the presence of the bully himself. We must focus on the type of world we want to live in and devise a plan for getting there, as opposed to devising a strategy centered on opposition.”
― DeRay McKesson, On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope

“The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.”
― Derek Walcott , Derek Walcott: Selected Poems