Gratitude is like a flashlight. If you go out in your yard at night and turn on a flashlight, you suddenly can see what's there. It was always there, but you couldn't see it in the dark.

If you took a blue spruce tree and planted it in the desert, it would obviously perish. How do we forget that we too are living systems, and each of us have unique environments, needs, and conditions within which we flourish or wither?

That which came to me as seed goes to the next as blossom, and that which came to me as blossom, goes on as fruit.

I will not die an unlived life...I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me...I choose to risk my significance.

I will not die an unlived life.

The tears had turned to ink.

In my better moments, I think of apathy as purpose's sleep. In my worse moments, when I'm trying to fix it or get rid of it, I call it feeling lazy, depressed, or useless.

Through fear of knowing who we really are we sidestep our own destiny, which leaves us hungry in a famine of our own making...we end up living numb, passionless lives, disconnected from our soul's true purpose. But when you have the courage to shape your life from the essence of who you are, you ignite, becoming truly alive.

Living on purpose requires us to find what we love fiercely, give it all we've got and then pass it on, as if it were a torch, to those who follow

Forgiveness in no way justifies the actions that caused your wounding, nor does it mean that you have to seek out those who harmed you. It is simply a movement to release and ease your heart of the pain and hatred that binds it. It is the harvested fruit of a season of darkness, followed by a season of growth and of very hard work.

I wonder why it is that we so often imprison ourselves in the opinions of other people. There can be no punishment worse than conspiring in our own diminishment.

Kindness is twice blessed. It blesses the one who gives it with a sense of his or her own capacity to love, and the person who receives it with a sense of the beneficence of the universe.