“But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”
― Consolations - Revised edition: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
― Consolations - Revised edition: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
“To want to run away is an essence of being human, it transforms any staying through the transfigurations of choice. To think about fleeing from circumstances, from a marriage, a relationship or from a work is part of the conversation itself and helps us understand the true distilled nature of our own reluctance. Strangely, we are perhaps most fully incarnated as humans, when part of us does not want to be here, or doesn’t know how to be here. Presence is only fully understood and realized through fully understanding our reluctance to show up. To understand the part of us that wants nothing to do with the full necessities of work, of relationship, of loss, of doing what is necessary, is to learn humility, to cultivate self-compassion and to sharpen that sense of humor essential to a merciful perspective of both a self and another.”
― Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
― Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
“Beauty is the harvest of presence.”
― Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
― Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
“Only the blindness of habit convinces us that we continue to live in the same place, that we see the same landscape. In truth, no place ever remains the same because light has no mind for repetition; it adores difference. Through its illuminations, it strives to suggest the silent depths that hide in the dark. Light”
― Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
― Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
“Forgiveness is a heartache and difficult to achieve because strangely, it not only refuses to eliminate the original wound, but actually draws us closer to its source. To approach forgiveness is to close in on the nature of the hurt itself, the only remedy being, as we approach its raw centre, to reimagine our relation to it.”
― Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
― Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
Our Shared Shelf
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OUR SHARED SHELF IS CURRENTLY DORMANT AND NOT MANAGED BY EMMA AND HER TEAM. Dear Readers, As part of my work with UN Women, I have started reading ...more
Ezgi’s 2025 Year in Books
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