Jane Ha

“Is a prayer a gift, or a petition, or does it matter? The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way. Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.”
― Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

“Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.”
― Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

“I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can’t really call being alive.”
― Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings: Poems

“Being present builds a child’s confidence because it lets the child know that she is worth thinking about. Without this, a child might come to believe that her activity is just a means to gain praise, rather than an end in itself. How can we expect a child to be attentive, if we’ve not been attentive to her? Being present, whether with children, with friends, or even with oneself, is always hard work. But isn’t this attentiveness – the feeling that someone is trying to think about us – something we want more than praise?”
― Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves