Leslie

“Everything makes itself known on its way out, once and for all.”
― Paul Selig, I Am the Word: A Guide to the Consciousness of Man's Self in a Transitioning Time

“history—what had happened between me and David. Further disregarding the Gilbert Family Standard Communications Rule-book, I actually told her. I told her everything. I told her how much I loved David, but how lonely and heartsick it made me to be with this person who was always disappearing from the room, from the bed, from the planet. “He sounds kind of like your father,” she said. A brave and generous admission. “The problem is,” I said, “I’m not like my mother. I’m not as tough as you, Mom. There’s a constant level of closeness that I really need from the person I love. I wish I could be more like you, then I could have this love story with David. But it just destroys me to not be able to count on that affection when I need it.” Then my mother shocked me. She said, “All those things that you want from your relationship, Liz? I have always wanted those things, too.” In that moment, it was as if my strong mother reached across the table, opened her fist and finally showed me the handful of bullets she’d had to bite over the decades in order to stay happily married (and she is happily married, all considerations weighed) to my father. I had never seen this side of her before, not ever. I had never imagined what she might have wanted, what she might have been missing, what she might have decided not to fight for in the larger scheme of things. Seeing all this, I could feel my worldview start to make a radical shift. If even she wants what I want, then…? Continuing with this unprecedented string of intimacies, my mother said, “You have to understand how little I was raised to expect that I deserved in life, honey. Remember—I come from a different time and place than you do.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“The moment in front of you is a gift from creation. There are shapes, colors, and sounds. There are people and lots of things to do. It’s not that way on Mars, nor on any place we have seen thus far in studies of the universe. But we don’t live our lives with a constant sense of awe and appreciation. That’s why these discussions about cosmology and quantum physics are spiritual. They are taking away your right to make everything personal when it’s not personal.”
― Michael A. Singer, Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament

“I will not stay, not ever again - in a room or conversation or relationship or institution that requires me to abandon myself.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed