Something from this weekend:
Living on the edge means recognizing those places and experiences that do not offer me easy answers, those fierce edges of life where things are not as clear-cut as I hope for them to be. There is beauty in the border spaces, those places of ambiguity and mystery.
– Border Spaces, by Christine Valters Paintner
Here is another:
The Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says that “In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted — knowingly or unknowingly — in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.”
– The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative, by Thomas King.
One more:
One time, twice, once in awhile, I get it right. Once in a while, I can make the world I know real on the page. I can make the women and men I love breathe out loud in an empty room, the dreams I dare not speak shape up in the smoky darkness of other people’s imaginations. Writing these stories is the only way I know to make sure of my ongoing decision to live, to set moment to moment a small piece of stubbornness against an ocean of ignorance and obliteration.
– Trash, Dorothy Allison
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Why are you writing this morning? Give yourself 10 minutes to start your week out with words: what are the stories that need telling from last week, from this weekend, from your dreams? You might also write from any response you have to the image above, to one or more of this morning’s quotes: follow your writing wherever it seems to want you to go. Begin this week with your words!
Thank you for the brilliance (sometimes quiet, sometimes loud) of your resilience and your resistance. Thank you for all the ways you grow and stretch, for your willingness to risk growing and stretching. Thank you for your words.
