Melissa E

“Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about-quite apart from what I would like it to be about-or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.”
― Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

“When we are born, and as we pass through childhood, adolescence, and the stages of adulthood, we are designed to anticipate a certain quality of welcome, engagement, touch, and reflection. In short, we expect what our deep-time ancestors experienced as their birthright, namely, the container of the village. We are born expecting a rich and sensuous relationship with the earth and communal rituals of celebration, grief, and healing that keep us in connection with the sacred. As T. S. Eliot wrote in The Waste Land “Once upon a time, we knew the world from birth.” This is our inheritance, our birthright, which has been lost and abandoned. The absence of these requirements haunts us, even if we can’t give them a name, and we feel their loss as an ache, a vague sadness that settles over us like a fog. This lack is simultaneously one of the primary sources of our grief and one of the reasons we find it difficult to grieve. On some level, we are waiting for the village to appear so we can fully acknowledge our sorrows.”
― Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

“She was a woman with a broom or a dust-
pan or a washrag or a mixing spoon in her hand. You saw
her cutting piecrust in the morning, humming to it, or you
saw her setting out the baked pies at noon or taking them in,
cool, at dusk. She rang porcelain cups like a Swiss bell ringer
to their place. She glided through the halls as steadily as a
vacuum machine, seeking, finding, and setting to rights. She
made mirrors of every window, to catch the sun. She strolled
but twice through any garden, trowel in hand, and the flowers
raised their quivering fires upon the warm air in her wake.
She slept quietly and turned no more than three times in a
night, as relaxed as a White glove to which, at dawn, a brisk
hand will return. Waking, she touched people like pictures,
to set their frames straight.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine