I’ve done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt – Jessamyn West
“I’ve done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt,” and the most harm has been done to myself.
This will be the most honest [...]

Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning
Born of the one light, Eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise every morning
God’s recreation of the new day.
Lyrics by Elanor Farjeon, Sung by Cat Stevens

This is my usual morning schedule:

Awaken sometime between 4 a.m. and 7 a.m.
Start a pot of coffee.
Read a verse from the Tao [...]

During the Middle Ages, probably one of the biggest mistakes was not putting on your armor because you were “just going down to the corner.” – Jack Handy
At times I grow weary of the tests that life throw at me, the constant pokes and challenges from moment to moment that always seem to [...]

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.- Mark Twain

I don’t know about you, but something I have been looking for all my life is acceptance, whether that has been from family, friends, lovers, co-workers, bosses, or more importantly myself.
As I see more and more of my high school friends’ names on Facebook I [...]

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.  ~Honoré de Balzac
This morning will probably be one of my most intimate, and darkest posts ever, because I am about share something I have been working on here lately.
March 3 will mark seven years since I [...]

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature –if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you –know that the morning and spring of your life [...]

Love:  A Suggested Definition – The ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose to be for themselves, without any insistence that they satisfy you. — Wayne Dyer, Your Erroneous Zones
There isn’t a single person out there who could accuse me of being normal, I dare you to [...]

If a man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us!  The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty. — The Buddhist Monk / Poet Kenko
After visiting [...]

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. – Howard Thurman
Sometimes life propels you in the right direction, and sometimes it creates situations that force you to get up off your ass and get moving.  In [...]

A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog’s ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.  ~Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia, 1833
There once was a time [...]