Amanda

“Goodbye, by which we say to another— Thanks for offering your life into mine. By Goodbye, we truly mean: Let us be able to say hello again.”
― Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry

“I believed that she felt like a Phenomenal Woman as she delivered each line with an audacity and authenticity I had never seen before. I felt like I knew the kind of pain she had to be holding because it was the same pain I held every single day. Where had her shame gone? How had it not seeped into her cells, and if it had, how did she get it out? And if all of it - the pain, shame, and fear - were still there, where did she find space for this thing I saw in her face and heard in her voice? What was this softness? Where did the joy come from?”
― Tarana Burke, Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement

“She's heard stories of Vietnam vets
who can still feel the tingling of their amputated limbs.
She's wondering how many women are walking around this world
feeling the tingling of their amputated wings,
remembering what it was like to fly, to sing.”
― Andrea Gibson, Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns

“Our practice is based on the insight of non-duality. Both our negative feelings and positive feelings are organic and belong to the same reality. So there is no need to fight; we only need to embrace and take care. Therefore, in the Buddhist tradition, meditation does not mean you transform yourself into a battlefield, with the good fighting the evil. This is very important. You may think you have to combat evil and chase it out of your heart and mind. But this is wrong. The practice is to transform yourself. If you don't have garbage, you can't make compost. And if you have no compost, you have nothing to nourish the flower in you. You need the suffering, the afflictions in you. Since they are organic, you know that you can transform them and make good use of them.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames