"It's all about relationship" by Ani DiFranco

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"Whether it's a community with an opinion or an individual with a perspective, if it's not happening in relationship to other communities or to other people, it's not whole. It will never come to the truth. It's all about relationship. That's what makes us alive. And in order to make change in the world, you can't stay at home and shout your outrage to the universe. You need to go to where the problem is, address it and form a dialogue. You have to engage it. That's the way everything changes."

Ani DiFranco

"There is no time for anything inessential," by Oliver Sacks

"I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at "NewsHour" every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.

"This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.

"I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death."

Oliver Sacks

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/opinion/oliver-sacks-on-learning-he-has-terminal-cancer.html

"The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion..." by Henri Nouwen

"Planet Neptune"

"When we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is the friend who cares."

Henri Nouwen

Intransigence, by Rich Morey

Its weight becomes a heavy snow,
Dense drifts pushing against our homes,
Invading our streets and hearts:
Constricting.

You could throw your back out shovelling,
Laboring for a narrow path that soon yields
To the next fateful storm; your hopes
Erased among the desolate winds.

And it is in this moment -- despondent,
Thwarted -- that you understand hubris;
The appeal of a black-and-white world;
The comfort of something to cling to.

You can sympathize with surrender;
It's the emptiness you've seen
A hundred times behind terrified eyes.
Darkness looms.

By daybreak, you're back at it.
Heart beating out of your chest,
Straining with all you've got
To refute the enduring lie:

There's simply too much snow,
And not enough shovels.

Rich Morey

Get away from these two types of people:

"Get away from these two types of people: the ones who think you can only go as far as the situation you were born into; and the ones who think you can only go as far as the current situation you are in."

― Dee Dee M. Scott