Rebecca

“But often we have inherited someone else’s view of who we are or who we should be. And sometimes, although we may ourselves hold these values, their dominance in our lives in a particular form does not allow us to live out other aspects of what we love and who we are. The deepest desires of the soul are rarely concerned with the practical details of mortgage payments, pension plans, prior commitments, past honours, or others’ opinions.”
― Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Invitation

“I’m all for these moments of impossible joy – whether they come in the course of an ordinary day or in an extraordinary ecstatic experience. There are some who would have us believe that we have to choose - warning us away from the ecstatic rush of feeling that comes in moments of real magic, admonishing us to focus only on the joy found in ordinary moments. Their warning is understandable. Moments of mystical union can tempt us to spend our life searching for those peak experiences and leave us unable or unwilling to receive the same joy where it is offered in simpler experiences, and the taste of a ripe mango eaten slowly or a moment of quiet stillness.
But I am a greedy woman. I want it all. I want a small daily joy. I want to celebrate the birthdays, the graduations, and the days well lived, and I want to experience the ecstasy, the vision of wholeness that dissolves my boundaries and let me taste the God that lives within and around me. I am a blessed woman, for I have had both.”
― Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Invitation

“And sometimes, I allow myself to imagine that each moment in which we love well by simply being all of who we are and being fully present allows us to give back something essential to the Sacred Mystery that sustains all life.”
― Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Invitation

“It was his smile I love best. His upper canines have never grown in, and the string of holistic dentists my parents had taken him to as a child had failed to notice until it was too late. By the time he was 23, and he got himself to an oral surgeon, they had rotated sideways inside his gums and were injecting himself through the tissue under his nose. The surgeon who removed them told Sean to preserve his baby teeth for as long as possible, then when they rotted out, he be given posts. But they never rotted out. They stayed, stubborn relics of a misplaced childhood, reminding anyone who witnessed his pointless, endless, reckless belligerence, that this man was once a boy.”
― Tara Westover, Educated