Gardenmail

“Much of her life, Anna had worked in a male-dominated world. She would defend the right of any woman to do the same, but she was realist enough to admit women made things more complicated, more volatile. Not because women were stupid or incompetent but because their presence often made men stupid and incompetent.”
― Nevada Barr, Winter Study

“That such horror can be beautiful is hard to imagine, but it was. Light and sound collided against the firmament like shooting stars and swooping dragons with flaming breath and fiery tails. Perhaps it was the quaking of both earth and sky and the contrast of being more alive and nearer to death than I had ever been. I was living the Book of Revelation, and I could not avert my eyes.”
― Amy Harmon, A Girl Called Samson

“I call that in-between place the threshold now (Threshold, the line of the T splitting two empty spaces). Thresholds are dangerous places, neither here nor there, and walking across one is like stepping off the edge of a cliff in the naive faith that you’ll sprout wings halfway down. You can’t hesitate, or doubt. You can’t fear the in-between.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Dear God, I love this tree. I love the light filtering through the moss and the leaves. I love all your earth songs—the breeze rustling through the grass, the rhythm of crickets, the beating of wings. I love the rain water in the bird bath and the dragonflies that flit over it. I love the air so laden with moisture that the dew rains out of the tree and bathes my face. I love the artistic little prayers that the spiders weave through the woods. I love the way you blend daylight into darkness, how dusk softens the sharp edges of the world. I love the way the moon changes shape every night. I love the slope of your hills—horizons inside and out. I feel that I’m part of it, that it’s part of me. Here, surrounded and permeated by your creation, I feel you. I feel life. I know myself connected. O God, is there anything you’ve made that can’t pour life and healing into me? When I think of the simplicity and extravagance of creation, I want to bend down and write the word yes across the earth so that you can see it.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions