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The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread, and doing laundry.

Kathleen Norris

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Kathleen Norris
Contemplation
Activities
Bread
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Ordinary
Walking
Baking
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Compatible
Laundry

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There seems to be so much more winter than we need this year.
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We can't give our children the future, strive though we may to make it secure. But we can give them the present.
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To be an American is to move on, as if we could outrun change. To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.
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Each and every one of us has one obligation, during the bewildered days of our pilgrimage here: the saving of his own soul, and secondarily and incidentally thereby affecting for good such other souls as come under our influence.
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I was taught that I had to 'master' subjects. But who can 'master' beauty, or peace, or joy?
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If grace is so wonderful, why do we have such difficulty recognizing and accepting it? Maybe it's because grace is not gentle or made-to-order. It often comes disguised as loss, or failure, or unwelcome change.
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But in order to have an adult faith, most of us have to outgrow and unlearn much of what we were taught about religion.
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Friendship is an art, and very few persons are born with a natural gift for it.
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Laundry, liturgy and women's work all serve to ground us in the world, and they need not grind us down. Our daily tasks, whether we perceive them as drudgery or essential, life-supporting work, do not define who we are as women or as human beings.
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But hope has an astonishing resilience and strength. Its very persistence in our hearts indicates that it is not a tonic for wishful thinkers but the ground on which realists stand.
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I am learning to see loneliness as a seed that, when planted deep enough, can grow into writing that goes back out into the world.
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Any life lived attentively is disillusioning as it forces us to know us as we are.
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Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.
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Before you begin a thing, remind yourself that difficulties and delays quite impossible to foresee are ahead. If you could see them clearly, naturally you could do a great deal to get rid of them but you can't. You can only see one thing clearly and that is your goal. Form a mental vision of that and cling to it through thick and thin.
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I wonder if children don't begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them.
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Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert's grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love.
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In middle age we are apt to reach the horrifying conclusion that all sorrow, all pain, all passionate regret and loss and bitter disillusionment are self-made
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When you come to a place where you have to left or right, go straight ahead.
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They are fruit and transport: ripening melons, prairie schooners journeying under full sail.
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This is a God who is not identified with the help of a dictionary but through a relationship.
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