One Candle Firebird

[L, diary, ephēmeris] 1) BLOG

3/16/2025 12:19:55 AM

Blog Post: A CELLAR OF OLD DRAFTS - #4

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A Rest is Not Defeat

“Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.”

--Parker Palmer--

If the mountains seem too big today,
then climb a hill instead. 
 
If morning brings you sadness,
It’s OK to stay in bed. 
 
If the day ahead feels heavy,
and your plans feel like a curse,
there’s no shame in re-arranging.
Don’t make yourself feel worse.
 
If the shower stings like needles
and a bath feels like you’ll drown,
if you haven’t washed your hair for days,
don’t throw away your crown.
 
A day is not a lifetime.
A rest is not defeat
 
Don’t think of it as failure
Just a quiet kind of retreat.
 
It’s OK to take a moment
from an anxious fractured mind.
The world or not stop turning.
while you get realigned. 
 
The mountain will still be there
when you want to try again.
You can climb it in your own time.
Just love yourself until then!
-- Laura Ding-Edwards --


“…bittersweet is… an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world. Most of all, bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art, the way musicians do, or healing, or innovation, or anything else that nourishes the soul. If we don't transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect. But if we realize all humans know – or will know – loss and suffering, we can turn to each other…the place you suffer, in other words, is the same place you care profoundly – you care enough to act."

--Susan Cain--

Bittersweet; How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole,

"Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard."
--Zadie Smith--

ahh...but as Thomas Mann said,

"Speech is civilization itself.
The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact
-- it is silence which isolates.

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