AmyQ.

"I want you to know, and not just intellectually understand, but truly comprehend with your entire heart, that your life here on Earth is so utterly precious, so affectionately beautiful. You can be whoever you want to be, you can smash fear in the eyes and triumph over personal inhibitions, you can live the life you’ve always dreamt about. Life does not happen to you, as if you were a stationary ball in the center of the room, never moving lest some external force or pressure was exerted. You are life and you will make it however full or empty you want it to be. Never mind others’ expectations of you. Never mind life’s formalities and/or societal and familial pressures to follow a tried-and-true way of living. Only you are responsible for you. Now’s the time to take full ownership for the actions or inactions you must take in order to make your life brazenly meaningful."

- Nina Yau of Castles in the Air (via withlovefelicia)

(via nicolepolk)

"Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality–not as we expect it to be but as it is–is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily. That there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense – love.” Frederick Buechner"

"The things we really need come to us only as gifts, and in order to receive them as gifts, we have to be open. In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves, in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves, our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed destiny. We have to be able to relax the psychic and spiritual cramp which knots us in the painful, vulnerable, helpless “I” that is all we know of ourselves."

- Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), p. 204 (via parabola-magazine)

(via nicolepolk)