Jennifer Walter

“Do you have a question that can't be answered? Do the stars frighten you by their heaviness and their endless number?
Does it bother you, that mercy is so difficult to understand?”
― Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

“And what is this? I asked the earth, and it said, "I am not he!" And all things in it confessed the same. I asked the sea and the deeps, and among living animals the things that creep, and they answered, "We are not your God! Seek you higher than us!" I asked the winds that blow: and all the air, with the dwellers therein, said, "Anaximenes was wrong. I am not God!" I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, and the stars: "We are not God whom you seek," said they, To all things that stand around the doors of my flesh I said, "Tell me of my God! Although you are not he, tell me something of him!" With a mighty voice they cried out, "He made us!" My question was the gaze I turned on them; the answer was their beauty.”
― Saint Augustine, Confessions

“Tish is sensitive, and that is her superpower. The opposite of sensitive is not brave. It's not brave to refuse to pay attention, to refuse to notice, to refuse to feel and know and imagine. The opposite of sensitive is insensitive, and that's no badge of honor.

Tish senses. Even as the world tries to speed by her, she is slowly taking it in. Wait, stop. That thing you said... it made me feel something and wonder something. Can we stay there for a moment? I have feelings. I have questions. In most cultures, folks like Tish are identified early, set apart as shamans, medicine people, poets, and clergy. They are considered eccentric but critical to the survival of the group because they are able to hear things others don't hear and see things others don't see and feel things others don't feel. The culture depends on the sensitivity of a few, because nothing can be healed if it's not sensed first. But our society is so hell-bent on expansion, power, and efficiency at all costs that the folks like Tish- like me- are inconvenient. We slow the world down. We're on the bow of the Titanic, pointing, crying out, "Iceberg! Iceberg!" while everyone else is below deck, yelling back, "We just want to keep dancing!"

It is easier to call us broken and dismiss us than to consider that we are responding appropriately to a broken world.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed

“But what of the present? Is it just a moment, glinting briefly between past and future, hardly worth elaborating on? No, it is to be the pulsing, white-hot center of all the subsequent narrative, the unlikely intersection of time and eternity, the moment where God is always to be found.”
― Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews, How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels