Ms. Kat

“Loss is the tune of our age, hard to miss and hard to bear. Creatures, places and words disappear, day after day, year on year. But there has always been singing in the dark times-- and wonder is needed now more than ever.”
― Robert Macfarlane, The Lost Spells

“Sadie walked under the gates, one by one by one. At first, she felt nothing, but as she kept moving ahead, she began to feel an opening and a new spaciousness in her chest. She realized what a gate was: it was an indication that you had left one space and were entering another.
She walked through another gate.
It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn't.)
She walked through another gate.
What was a gate, anyway?
A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.
By the time she reached the end of the torii gate pathway, she felt resolved. Both Sides had failed, but it didn't have to be the end. The game was one in a long line of spaces between gates.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“We cannot access tomorrow’s wisdom today, much less yesterday. And when wisdom finally does arrive, it often enters our minds through the pain of a lived experience. If you haven’t lived the experience yet, then you don’t get the wisdom.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

“It all starts with waking up: waking up to what is real and authentic in and around us and what isn’t; waking up to who we are and who we are not; waking up to what our bodies are expressing and what our minds are suppressing; waking up to our wounds and our gifts; waking up to what we have believed in and what we actually value; waking up to what we will no longer tolerate and what we can now accept; waking up to the myths that bind us and the interconnections that define us; waking up to the past as it has been, the present as it is, and the future as it may yet be; waking up, most especially, to the gap between what our essence calls for and what “normal“ has demanded of us.”
― Gabor Maté MD, The Myth of Normal