P Kellach Waddle

“The world has an awful beauty. This is a chaotic place, humanity is a chaotic place, and I am a chaotic place.”
― Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy

“The hard silence between frustrated people always feels cluttered. But holy silence is spacious and inviting. You can drink it down. We offer it to ourselves when we work, rest, meditate, bike, read. When we hike by ourselves, we hear a silence still pristine with crunching leaves and birdsong. Silence can be a system of peace, which is mercy, easily offered to a friend needing quiet, harder when the person is one's own annoying self.”
― Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy

“To be alive at all is to have scars.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“The ancient Chinese had a practice of embellishing the cracked parts of valued possessions with gold leaf, which says: We dishonor it if we pretend that it hadn’t gotten broken. It says: We value this enough to repair it. So it is not denial or a cover-up. It is the opposite, an adornment of the break with gold leaf, which draws the cracks into greater prominence. The gold leaf becomes part of its beauty. Somehow the aesthetic of its having been cracked but still being here, brought back not to baseline but restored, brings increase.”
― Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy