Life Stuff

Welcome to my collection of Life Stuff. Here, you’ll find – among other things – quotes, book excerpts from my favorite reads, pictures I’ve taken and thoughts/words I’ve heard, both from people in the category of known and unknown. I wanted all the things that have inspired me to live in one place (other than on random scattered post-it notes), here they are:

“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.47
“I think, when it comes down to it, we all just want to matter. I think that’s what life is about. I think that’s what this concept of purpose is about. We want to know that what we do and what we think matters – to someone, to something, to ourselves. We want to know that when we celebrate, when we cry out, when we put ourselves on the line for other people, that they’re going to care. We want to see them look us in the eyes, into every piece of who we are, and we want them to tell us that the person that they see matters to the world. Then on our worst days, when we’re feeling down, or anxious, or unmotivated, or awkward, or unrelatable, those are the days we want to matter even more. Those are the days where we find the people that really matter.”
-LB

“Everything in the world is so still except for humans.”

Random 5-6 year old at coffee shop in Gainesville, Florida
“What does being human mean to the trees?” he asked. “Or to the lake? The mountains? The dog? The shelter? The fire? The moon?”
I closed my eyes.
“Let me ask you this, what do the trees mean to you? Or the lake, or the mountains, or the dog? What does the shelter and the fire and the moon mean to you?”
Another breath.
-Innate excerpt

“When people show you who they are, believe them.”

Maya Angelou
There is no black and white in the world, no, there is only an abundance of gray. There is no absolutism that resides in the home of the human heart, but rather an understanding that the only thing we can have faith in is faith itself – faith to the point that fear scurries to the trenches and awaits the moment when we begin to see the world in black and white yet again. Not all answers can be attained, but awareness can indeed be sought.
-LB

“Sometimes he would put the lamp out and lie on the rug on the floor and watch the edges of color that the sea salt and the sand in the wood made in the flame as they burned. On the floor his eyes were even with the line of the burning wood and he could see the line of the flame when it left the wood and it made him both sad and happy. All wood that burned affected him in this way. But burning driftwood did something to him that he could not define. He thought that it was probably wrong to burn it when he was so fond of it; but he felt no guilt about it.”

-Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream

“Fight to fulfill your destiny, without giving thought to gain or profit, losses or stratagems, victories or defeats. Seek not your own gratification, but that of the Supreme Love who offers nothing beyond a glimmering contact with the Cosmos and thus demands an act of complete devotion–without doubts, without questions, love for love’s sake and nothing else. A love that owes nothing to anyone, that has no obligations, that finds joy in simple existence and the freedom to express itself.”

Paulo Coelho, Hippie
Paraphrase from the Bhagavad Gita
Make it be.