Each thread of…

Haapy New Year from sacredtouches to everyone who reads this! I wish you joy and peace in 2017. May the Lord bless and keep you now and forever. Love, Natalie

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**Image via Pinterest; text box added by Natalie;
collage by Natalie; speial effects and border done on iPiccy

Alway remember, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. ~From the movie the SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994)

1325. Time is the fire in which we burn. ~Delmore Schwartz

Days are stringed instruments and
every one strikes a different note.
~Kenneth Alexander

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[W]hen you are nine years old, what you remember seems forever; for you remember everything and everything is important and stands big and full and fills up Time and is so solid that you can walk around and around it like a tree and look at it. You are aware that time passes, that there is a movement in time, but that is not what Time is. Time is not a movement, a flowing, a wind then, but it is, rather, a kind of climate in which things are, and when a thing happens it begins to live and keeps on living and stands solid in Time like the tree that you can walk around. And if there is a movement, the movement is not Time itself, any more than a breeze is climate, and all the breeze does is to shake a little the leaves on the tree which is alive and solid. ~Robert Penn Warren

It is an old story, this irresistible and
ceaseless onflow of life and time…
~Hamilton Wright Mabie

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Each thread of the tapestry woven by time is precious, since all the faces that have disappeared from the earth are projected on it by our memory. But even without any face projected there, and without any of my dead reappearing there, it still keeps in my eyes the splendor of being a season of time, mankind’s time, the time in which our destiny will have been experienced and inscribed, among millions of others. ~François Mauriac

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build,   a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. ~Ecclesiastes 3:1-8  ✝

**Image via Pinterest; collage at top by Natalie

1324. A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

To be creative means to be in love with life.
You can be creative only if you love life
enough that you want to enhance its beauty,
you want to bring a little more music to it,
a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.
~Osho

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Have you never wanted to create something? Have you never been so inspired by something at least once that you wished you could replicate in some way the beauty or allure of whatever it was? Is there never a yearning in your soul to leave behind some remembrance of your unique self? Not something that would garner money or medals or statues and the like, just something that would tell family and friends you walked the earth, that you felt joy and suffering, that you loved and were loved, that you were accepted and pushed away, that you knew elegance and crudeness, that you felt anger and delight as well as grief and gladness, that you were compassionate and indifferent, that you knew blessings and defeat, that you encountered kindness and rudeness, that sometime you came face to face with something extraordinary, perhaps even miraculous. If so, it’s because that’s what is found here in this place we call earth, and no, it’s not all good or kind or joyful or loving or pain free and so forth, but I have lived long enough to know that in some small, or middling or grand measure, one inevitably runs the entire gamut of human existence. And I believe that along the way, a voice in each of us calls out for us to create something whilst we are here. Why? Because we are all made in the image of a creative God. Wait, wait, wait before you try to tell me that you are not creative, let me say that I can’t  and won’t believe that not even for one millisecond. My guess is the reason you may feel that way is because at some point in time, maybe when you were very young, someone made you feel like you had no “quote, unquote” “talent” or even worse made fun of something you had created. And these naysayers had the right to decide that you weren’t talented because??? How easily mortals often turn over the keys to the kingdom to those whose credentials are less than Almighty God’s! And finally before any of you reading this launch into the argument that you can’t dance or draw or sing or write or whatever, I would ask of you: can you build a house or car or something else, can you grow things, can you manage a household, can you parent a child, can you teach, can you sew, can you cook…because all those things and more require creativity, Okay, now then, given that and the fact that we humans all have two sides to our brains, a left and a right hemisphere, and that one is the creative half we can be assured that each and everyone of us possesses the ability to create.

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God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
~Ranier Maria Rilke

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. ~Genesis 1:27  ✝

**Images in collage via Pinterest; special effects done by me on iPiccy; image of brain via Pinterest; text added by me