Janna > Recent Status Updates

“I just want to get back to myself”
“You’ll never get back to your old self…You have to learn to be this new person…What happened to you was unfathomable, so you have to dig deeper, into love, hope, and purpose…And every day, you’ll get stronger, and a new person will emerge”

“We recognized each other immediately, though we had never met. Perhaps it was the ease with which he leaned into me, the comfortability of it, as if he had always been a part of my world…”

💚

“How?” The Autumn King asked.

”With the strength of the most powerful force in the world…What brings loyalty beyond death? Undimming, despite the years? What remains unwavering in the face of hopelessness?”
…
“I heard what you said…what you waited to admit until I was almost dead, You F*cking Coward!…Now come say it to my face”
…
“Through love all is possible”

“There’s much to say about this second life. This one matters as much as the first. It’s the one that healed me after the first one broke me, the one that pushed me to reach into the dirt with my bare hands to dig up and inspect the grief I had buried…the one that reconnected my body and spirit to Earth. It’s funny how rain on your face, hands covered in soil, and feet curled in grass can heal you”

“Grief (the biggest grief in the world) is like - What? What is it that happens to a person? I’ve always felt it is like a scream living inside me. It’s gotten a bit softer over time, but it’s never gone. I walk around the house or dig in the garden or wander the grocery store or if at my desk and there’s screaming inside my head like an air horn that warns of war” 😭 💔

😭 😭 😭

“My friends are behind me and I will protect them.” 😭 😭 🔥 ❤️ “I am not afraid”

😭 😭 😭

At the part where this book is impossible to put down 😭

I leaped lightly from rock to rock, glorying in the eternal freshness and sufficiency of nature, and in the rugged tenderness with which she nurtures her mountain darlings in the very homes and fountains of storms.

"I am done with great things and big things, great organizations and big successes. And I am for those tiny, invisible, molecular forces which work from individual to individual, creeping in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, but which, if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride."

“Maybe the secret to really healing is to change the end goal…I could let the healing mad me into a healthier version of myself. Instead of focusing on all that was taken from me, maybe I could shift my focus to what this new season could give me.”

“I didn’t know how to force the part of me so bent over and broken to stand back up, replant my roots, and try to be like I was before. This trauma had changed so much about my life. And honestly, I was changed. I felt damaged, broken, and remade, but not for the better.”

“The biggest limitation holding me back after experiencing a lot of [pain] was that I became so focused on what I lost, I couldn’t see what I could gain. I didn’t know how to move forward with myself. I didn’t know how to rebuild my resilience muscles. I didn’t know how to get unstuck from the trauma.”

“This was once a mountain that stood nearly 12,000 ft tall and then had its heart removed. It was once a wasteland of lava… and ash…But hard as I tried, I couldn’t see them in my mind’s eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland…there was only the stillness and silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland…turned into after the healing began”

“It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental.”

“As close as we’d been when we were together, we were closer in our y raveling, telling each other everything at last, words that seemed to us might never have been spoken…saying everything that was beautiful and ugly and true”

“I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild…even in my darkest days - those very days in which I was naming myself - I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my starting had brought me, I knew things I couldn’t have known before”

“I could feel myself disintegrating inside myself like a past bloom flower in the wind. Every time I moved a muscle, another petal of me blew away”

“The breaking of so great a thing
Should make a greater crack”

😭#IYKYK

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer.

“There are more life forms in a handful of forest soil than there are people on the planet, and a mere teaspoonful contains many miles of fungal filaments”

Rereading this for the umpteenth time cuz I can’t get the climactic and iconic scene out of my head: “I heard what you…waited to admit until I was almost dead, you f****** coward…Now come back and say it to my face.”

I think about this scene all the time tbh. It’s probably not healthy. I should probably seek help. But here we are (again)

“My desire to control - it’s an illusion…the most tender places of my heart. The ones that shake with fear because I can’t stand the thought of another awful thing being added to [my] story, keeps saying Please try [to control everything]. Because maybe this time you can hold it all together.’”

so it comes, that urged onward by a mysterious love of wild beauty and adventure, we find ourselves far from the beaten ways of life, toiling through these rugged mountain passes without thinking of a reason for embracing with such ungovernable enthusiasm so much stem privation and hardship.

“There is a fungus in Oregon that is estimated to be 2,400 years old, extends for 2,000 acres, and weighs 660 tons. That makes fungi the largest known living organism in the world”

“Trees not only mount their own defense; they can also use scent compounds to summon help…Because the saliva of each species of insect is different, a tree can match the saliva to the insect and accurately identify which of the bad guys it is up against…a tree can broadcast alarms that summon beneficial predators to devour the pests that are bothering it”