Tag Archives: Words

1196. Every man has his secret sorrows of which the world knows not… ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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I want to weep, she thought.
I want to be comforted.
I’m so tired of being strong.
I want to be foolish and 
frightened for once.
Just for a small while,
that’s all….a day…..an hour.
~George R.R. Martin

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My life is but a weaving
Between my God and me.
I cannot choose the colors
He weaveth steadily.
Oft’ times He weaveth sorrow;
And I in foolish pride
Forget He sees the upper
And I the underside.
Not ’til the loom is silent
And the shuttles cease to fly
Will God unroll the canvas
And reveal the reason why.
The dark threads are as needful
In the weaver’s skillful hand
As the threads of gold and silver
In the pattern He has planned
He knows, He loves, He cares;
Nothing this truth can dim.
He gives the very best to those
Who leave the choice to Him.
~Corrie ten Boom

According to mom, I started walking around the age of 9 months, and a week or so after that she had to take me in for a check up with the doctor. During that visit he gave me one of those routine immunizations in my little derriere. When I got home that day, I went to take a few steps and fell landing right on the area of the injection. It hurt so much that mom said it was a few days before I’d try to walk again. The image above is a photo she took that day as I sat contemplating my sorrow. I’ve mentioned in previous posts that it has been my lot in life to deal with lots of physical pain, and from time to time I have to endure periods when it’s more prolonged and intense than usual. Sadly I can make no more sense of pain and suffering now than I did that day in the photo. Though I am a strong person, as of late there have been lots of tears, lots of doubts, lots of questions, and lots of needs for comfort. So tonight, I’m taking Shakespeare’s advice from MACBETH to see if that helps, “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.”

My soul is weary with sorrow; strengthen me according to Your word. ~Psalm 199:28  ✝

1170. Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. ~Oscar Wilde

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Let me, O let me bathe my soul in colours;
let me swallow the sunset and drink the rainbow.
~Kahlil Gibran

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A colour, no doubt, is a trifle in itself, and only has its full value when it is in contrast or harmony with other colours…. each colour has an expression and a character peculiar to itself, and each is enlivened as it approaches its lightest shade by its mixture with white, just as it is saddened and perishes as it approaches its darkest shade by its mixture with black. ~Auguste Alexandre Philippe Charles Blanc (1813–1882)

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In a sense, one could speak of the secret life of colour. Despite its outward beckoning, like true beauty, colour is immensely hesitant in giving away its secrets. Painters learn to respect the hesitancy of colour and endeavour to refine their skill to become worthy of its revelations. A painter learns the language of colour slowly. As with any language, you struggle for a long time outside the language. There is a willed deliberateness to how you sequence the strange words to make a sentence.Then one day the language lets you in to where the words dance to your thoughts with ease and fluency. Perhaps for the painter there is a day when colour lets him in, when his palette sings with synergy and delight. ~John O’Donohue

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I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me(God) and the earth. ~Genesis 9:13  ✝

**All images taken by me in my yardt; all collages created by me

1159. Words are such small things, like confetti in the brain, and yet they are color and clarify everything; they stain the mind or warp the feelings. ~Diane Ackerman

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Ecstasy is what everyone craves —
not love or sex, but hot-blooded, soaring intensity,
in which being alive is a joy and a thrill.
That enravishment doesn’t give meaning to life,
and yet without it life seems meaningless.
~Diane Ackerman

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In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,
In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,
I will honor all life —
wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell—on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.
~Excerpted verses from a poem
by Diane Ackerman

Whoever pursues righteousness and love finds life, prosperity, and honor. ~Proverbs 21:21  ✝

**All images (my enravishments) were taken by me in my yard.

1140. I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony. ~Gustave Flaubert

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You can listen to silence, Reuven.
I’ve begun to realize that you can
listen to silence and learn from it.
It has a quality and a dimension all its own.
It talks to me sometimes.
I feel myself alive in it.
It talks. And I can hear it.
…
You have to want to listen to it,
and then you can hear it.
It has a strange, beautiful texture.
It doesn’t always talk.
Sometimes – sometimes it cries,
and you can hear the pain of the world in it.
It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to.
~From THE CHOSEN by Chaim Potok

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Be still and listen to the rhythm of your beating heart.

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Be still and feel the in and out movement of your breath.

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Be still and find the peace at the center of your being.

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Be still and seek the presence of your inner child.

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Be still and remember childhood’s simple pleasures.

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Be still and recall the unadulterated innocence of a child

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Be still and let joy now bubble up from gratitude for the gift of life.

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And finally in the silence of your thankfulness be still and listen so that you hear the Lord calling you by name.

Be still, and know that I am God… ~Excerpt from Psalm 46:10  ✝

**Images found on Pinterest and Pixabay

1127. I consider myself kind of a reporter – one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write. ~Mary Oliver

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I love the line of Flaubert
about observing things very intensely.
I think our duty as writers
begins not with our own feelings,
but with the powers of observing.
~Mary Oliver

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I worried a lot.
Will the garden grow,
will the rivers flow
in the right direction,
will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not,
how shall I correct it?
Was I right,
was I wrong,
will I be forgiven,
can I do better?
Will I ever be able to sing,
even the sparrows
can do it and
I am, well, hopeless.
Is my eyesight fading
or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get
rheumatism, lockjaw, dementia?
Finally I saw that worrying
had come to nothing.
And gave it up.
And took my old body
and went out
into the morning,
and sang.
~Mary Oliver

Cast all your anxiety on him (God) because He cares for you. ~1 Peter 5:7  ✝

1000. Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. ~Robert Frost

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Everything

I want to make poems that say right out, plainly,
what I mean, that don’t go looking for the
laces of elaboration, puffed sleeves. I want to
keep close and use often words like
heavy, heart, joy, soon, and to cherish
the question mark and her bold sister
the dash. I want to write with quiet hands. I
want to write while crossing the fields that are
fresh with daisies and everlasting and the
ordinary grass. I want to make poems while thinking of
the bread of heaven and the
cup of astonishment; let them be
songs in which nothing is neglected,
not a hope, not a promise. I want to make poems
that look into the earth and the heavens
and see the unseeable. I want them to honor
both the heart of faith, and the light of the world;
the gladness that says, without any words, everything.
~Mary Oliver

He (Jesus) will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of His birth. ~Luke 1:14  ✝

**Image via Pinterest

970. In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature. ~Wallace Stevens

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Words can sometimes, in moments of
grace, attain the quality of deeds.
~Elie Wiesel

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Words are singularly the most powerful force available to humanity. We can choose to use this force constructively with words of encouragement, or destructively using words of despair. Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate and to humble. ~Yehuda Berg

And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. ~Colossians 3:17   ✝

**Images via Pinterest; collage created by Natalie

935. Silence is a sounding thing, to one who listens hungrily. ~Gwendolyn Bennett

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The primary virtue is: hold your tongue;
who knows how to keep quiet is close to God.
~Cato, translated from Latin

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Praying
It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t
try to make them elaborate,
this isn’t a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
~Mary Oliver

…a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak… ~Ecclesiastes 3:7  ✝

**Image of blue iris via Pinterest

http://https://youtu.be/ZiKz3ki7uG8

900. We must learn what it means to listen to inner longings other than the appetite for more, longings that quietly assert that enough is enough. Paul L. Escamilla

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 It is enough for me by day
To walk the same bright earth with him;
Enough that over us by night
The same great roof of stars is dim.

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I do not hope to bind the wind
Or set a fetter on the sea —
It is enough to feel his love
Blow by like music over me.
~Sara Teasdale

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When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses. There are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think. The “sublime” object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to enough and the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be. ~Adapted excerpt from Julia Kristeva

Are God’s consolations not enough for you, words spoken gently to you? ~Job 15: 11  ✝

**Images via Pinterest; collages created by Natalie

896. Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. ~Victor Hugo

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Music by itself carries us beyond
words and thoughts into the realm of feeling.
~Jane E. Vennard

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It has been officially autumn for a couple of weeks now, but the temperature and unchanging leaves tell a different story. Theirs is a tale of summer, a summer not yet wanting to relinquish its throne. While begrudging that fact as I sat in a church meeting yesterday, a man quietly entered the room, sat down at a piano behind me, started playing a familiar tune, and as if by magic changed everything for the better. For almost immediately after he began playing, autumn’s glory flowed down his arms and oozed from his fingertips onto the piano’s keys. As he played on, the tinkling sounds of the musical notes emulated more and more the spectacle of autumn’s falling leaves. Enthralled I turned so I could watch him play and noticed he was not reading sheet music. Instead he was playing solely from memory and out of his heart. Thus as Vennard suggests, music  does remove the limitations of words and speaks to us of things bigger and grander than the mere scope of language can, so much so that it is indeed able to carry us into and from the “realm of feeling.” Not only that but when we quiet our bodies and minds and listen carefully, we are also able to discern, in the silence of music’s pauses, the holy footfalls of Yahweh’s abiding Presence in Creation.

Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth, burst into jubilant song music. ~Psalm 98:4  ✝

**Image via Pinterest

http://https://youtu.be/TZ0cPnOilHs