A Postcard From Beautiful

Hello my Beautiful friends. My latest missive is a little later than intended - desculpe! Thanks to a series of events unfolding - some fortunate, some un, I quite suddenly found myself in Pau France for a week at a writing workshop led by my writing mentor, philosopher-king-poet-guitarist Cary Tennis. If you are a writer, want to be a writer, want to be a better writer, want to be a better writer who finishes things and gets them published, or maybe you haven’t quite given up on that memoir you’ve always wanted to write… then do check him out - his writings, his advice, his workshops.

For today’s post I am sharing a self-help tactic I have been practicing for decades, which is to jot down this line or that from writers and thinkers I admire, to re-read when I need a little motivation.

Today’s jottings are from the fine minds of Anais Nin, Tina Hedin, Sue Grafton, Arthur Miller, John le Carre, Franz Kafka, Thornton Wilder, Santosh Kalwa, Mark Twain, Thich Nhat Hanh, Rumi, Rami Shapiro, Sharon Salzberg, Helen Keller, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, Charles Bukowski, Kenji Miyazawa, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi, Ernest Hemingway, Abraham Maslow, CS Lewis, William Stafford, St. Augustine, Pema Chödrönsaid, Joseph Campbell, Albert Einstein, and Joan Didion.

Their worthy observations are interspersed with pictures from my week in the French Pyrenees plus a few pics from the Peruvian Amazon where my daughter just spent three months doing research.

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Anais said, we don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Everyone suffers at least one bad betrayal in their lifetime. Malcolm X called betrayal the thing that is worse than death. The saddest thing about betrayal is that it never comes from your enemies. Betrayal strips away the superficial to reveal the substance. Betrayal is the only truth that sticks. Betrayal can only happen if you love. And everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way.

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning. To love is to risk loss and its subsequent pain.

We can rise above betrayal by remembering death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility, to ourselves and the gifts we bring to the world.

To go on living, you have to disengage your heart from a place that has become home and turn your view outward toward the unknown.

Beware those who would who stab you and tell the world they're the one who’s bleeding.

Pain is inevitable; we cannot avoid pain, but it does not have to lead to suffering. Pain will surprise you with valuable teachings and inspires you to see the world with new eyes. You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending. The wound is where the light enters you.

Our suffering is not some kind of punishment, it is a reminder that we are not alone. It is what connects us with everyone else. We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it. New beginnings are disguised as painful endings. What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.

Trust starts with truth and ends with truth. Do not defend yourself. Action speaks louder than words, but not nearly as often.

Remember we are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us. We are here to find that in the midst of winter, there can be within us, an invincible summer.

Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. You can weave a parachute out of everything broken. The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

You cannot control what happens; we never really know whether an event is fortune or misfortune, we only know our ever-changing reactions to ever-changing events. Controlling your response - that is where your power is.

As heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power that can move the world. Look fear in the face. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety.If you're going to try, go all the way.

All through history the way of truth and love have always won.

To love is to be vulnerable. Your heart can be broken. You can’t avoid it by locking it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. In that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — your heart will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

Shock, bargaining, anger, depression, forgiveness and acceptance.

The kindest person in the room is usually not only the most empathetic, but also the smartest. Empathy and kindness are evolved states of being.

Love is an action. Love is a spaceship with a hull made of trust.

The truth is like a lion. You don't have to defend it. Let it loose. It will defend itself.

People can and do change. If you can change from who you were at 10 to who you are now, then you can change from who you are now to who you want to be.

Your best option may be to direct your attention to your own recovery. Heal yourself - no one else can heal you. You attract what you are. Self-deception remains the most difficult deception.

Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs. you will need to accept who you are, and just as importantly, learn to be someone better. You do your absolute best to find and hone and wield your divine gifts against the dark. You must trust that you being the best possible you matters somehow.

Sow a thought, reap an action. Sow an action, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny.

When you are busy feeling sorry for yourself, it is impossible to truly be sorry for anyone else. A selfish person has no concept of self-sacrifice or empathy, and yet, these are things that a relationship is founded on.

When looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive.

The small is huge, the tiny is vast, and pain is part and parcel of joy. You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw.

Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you.

No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it. This is one of those foundation truths. It’s a crossroads truth.You can spend the rest of your life hating someone for what they owe you. Or you can let yourself out of that prison and forgive the debt

Forgiving people never makes us blind to who they are or the dangers they may still present to us…on the contrary it clears our hearts to see them as we must, as they actually are.

You may need to be stronger than is comfortable or usual for you, you are determined to go to the greater life that is possible for you, the life that belongs to the world, it’s the life of your destiny. Embrace the unknown.

Trust in the magic of new beginnings and listen to your heart. By trusting in faith over fear, you can take a life-changing leap in love or life.