Anne Ruijter

“Awakening to faith is not a one-time event, but a continuously unfolding reality. The journey of faith is not a race, but a marathon of love that each person walks at a different pace.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“I don’t mean to say that when a forest is gone you can replace it with a poem. When a forest is gone, you cannot replace it. But with written words you can bear witness, you can hold a memory of the forest for others to experience and celebrate, you can grieve over the loss and rage against the forces that have leveled the forest- and through grief you can fall in love with forests again, and through that falling, you can believe again in the human capacity for love and in the faith that we might learn to protect what we love.”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
― Jamie Anderson

“Her grief was a forest with no trails, and she couldn’t guess how long her heart would walk through it, as her body walked other places.”
― J. Ryan Stradal, The Lager Queen of Minnesota