Asha

“You can’t ask someone to help you without letting them know you’re different than advertised, that you’ve been thinking and feeling strange things this whole time. That you’re uglier, weaker, more annoying, more basic, less interesting than promised. Without letting on that your feelings are easily hurt, and that you are boring, just like everyone else.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“In my early twenties, I was traveling through a small town in Turkey called Cappadocia, when the divine spark of faith reignited within me like lightning. All it took was my eyes to fall upon a woman who was drowned in her worship of God. I watched her pray in an old seventeenth-century animal barn, as if nothing in the world existed but her divine Lover. She did not robotically repeat words of prayer like a formula; rather, every word she uttered came with a silent “I love you, my beloved Lord.” Her words were like synchronized dancers swimming in unison in the ocean of love that poured out of her. She was the first person I had ever seen in my life that not only prayed but she herself became the prayer.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam

“when institutions conflate racial and gender diversity metrics with diversity of thought in their organizations, they implicitly reinforce the incorrect assumption that genetic characteristics predict something important about the way that a person thinks—the most fundamental assumption underlying racism itself.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“As the mystics say, “Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates. At the first gate, ask yourself, ‘Is it true?’ at the second ask, ‘Is it necessary?’ and at the third gate ask, ‘Is it kind?”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam