Dhruti Shah

“Love for trees pours out of her—the grace of them, their supple experimentation, the constant variety and surprise. These slow, deliberate creatures with their elaborate vocabularies, each distinctive, shaping each other, breeding birds, sinking carbon, purifying water, filtering poisons from the ground, stabilizing the micro-climate. Join enough living things together, through the air and underground, and you wind up with something that has intentions.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“We live in a culture that celebrates activity. We collapse our sense of who we are into what we do for a living. The public performance of busyness is how we demonstrate to one another that we are important. The more people see us as tired, exhausted, over-stretched, the more they think we must be somehow … indispensable. That we matter.”
― Joan Halifax, Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet

“What is important is to come to an understanding together as to what the other person's 'language of love' is: do they feel loved through gestures, words or physical contact? What turns them off? when we learn how our partner best receives love, it enables us to be more confident when we give it and helps create a positive cycle.”
― Julia Samuel, This Too Shall Pass: Stories of Change, Crisis and Hopeful Beginnings

“Children not loved for who they are do not learn how to love themselves. Their growth is an exercise in pleasing others, not in expanding through experience. As adults, they must learn to nurture their own lost child. There's personal anger, but underneath there's often universal rage; and when we are possessed, God help the man who's on the end of that. Deep rage is not about the man; Deep rage is this: Nobody ever saw me. Nobody ever heard me. As long as I can remember, I've had to perform. When I tried to be myself, I was told, That's not what you think, that's not what you ought to do. So, just like my mother and her mother, I put on a false face. My life became a lie. That's deep rage. We have lived our lives behind a mask. Sooner or later —if we are lucky— the mask will be smashed. What a relief to be human instead of the god or goddess my parents imagined me to be or I imagined them.”
― Marion Woodman