Becky

“... I also think it's not so bad if you never feel right in this world. It's still worth hanging around. You just have to look harder to fin the things you love.”
― Kevin Wilson

“At the end of his life, the great picture book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak said on the NPR show Fresh Air, “I cry a lot because I miss people. I cry a lot because they die, and I can’t stop them. They leave me, and I love them more.”
He said, “I’m finding out as I’m aging that I’m in love with the world.”
It has taken me all my life up to now to fall in love with the world, but I’ve started to feel it the last couple of years. To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human and otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry, to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens, and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony, or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.
Sendak ended that interview with the last words he ever said in public: “Live your life. Live your life. Live your life.”
Here is my attempt to do so.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“What if we saw behavior as an expression of needs, not identity? Then, rather than shaming our kids for their shortcomings, making them feel unseen and alone, we could help them access their internal goodness, improving their behavior along the way.”
― Becky Kennedy, Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be

“The trees need our breath, and our breath needs the trees,” she continued. “As scientists we call that symbiosis, and it is a consequence of evolution. But the natural consequences of our connections to each other—that’s God, to me. I believe in it because I can see it with my own eyes. I know it exists. But I also believe in it because I want to believe in it. I want to spend my energy thinking not of how my actions might be frowned upon by a man in the sky, but how my actions affect every living and non-living thing around me. Life is God. My life is tied to yours, and to everyone’s on this planet. How does that not instantly make us more in debt to one another? And also offer us the comfort that we are not alone?”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere