Loriann Witte

“What you seek is seeking you.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“I stand in my own power now, the questions of permission that I used to choke on for my every meal now dead in a fallen heap, and when they tell me that I will fall, I nod. I will fall, I reply, and

my words are a whisper
my words are a howl

I will fall , I say, and the tumbling will be all my own. The skinned palms and oozing knees are holy wounds, stigmata of my She.

I will catch my own spilled blood, and not a drop will be wasted.”
― Beth Morey, Night Cycles: Poetry for a Dark Night of the Soul

“What we need to do is to eliminate the negative and accentuate the positive. In doing this, we gradually acquire the habit of affirmative thinking.”
― Ernest Holmes, The Philosophy of Jesus: Updated and Gender-Neutral

“It is difficult to overstate the importance of understanding mirror neurons and their function. They may well be central to social learning, imitation, and the cultural transmission of skills and attitudes—perhaps even of the pressed-together sound clusters we call words. By hyperdeveloping the mirror-neuron system, evolution in effect turned culture into the new genome. Armed with culture, humans could adapt to hostile new environments and figure out how to exploit formerly inaccessible or poisonous food sources in just one or two generations—instead of the hundreds or thousands of generations such adaptations would have taken to accomplish through genetic evolution.

Thus culture became a significant new source of evolutionary pressure, which helped select brains that had even better mirror-neuron systems and the imitative learning associated with them. The result was one of the many self-amplifying snowball effects that culminated in Homo sapiens, the ape that looked into its own mind and saw the whole cosmos reflected inside.”
― V.S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human