Quotes about Resilience

The world can't give that serenity, he said. The world can't give us peace. We can only find it in our hearts. I hate that, I said. I know. But the good news is that by the same token, the world can't take it away.

Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day at numbness, silence.

My understanding of incarnation is that we are not served by getting away from the grubbiness of suffering. Sometimes we feel that we are barely pulling ourselves forward through a tight tunnel on badly scraped-up elbows. But we do come out the other side, exhausted and changed.

To heal, it seems we have to stand in the middle of the horror, at the foot of the cross, and wait out another's suffering where that person can see us.

How are we going to get through this craziness?" I asked. There was silence for a moment. "Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe," he said.

Hallelujah that in spite of it all, there is love, there is singing, nature, laughing, mercy.

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.

Haters want us to hate them because hate is incapacitating. When we hate we can't operate from our real selves, which is our strength.

I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer.

You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

Dealing with your rage and grief will give you life. That is both the good news and the bad news: The solution is at hand. Wherever the great dilemma exists is where the great growth is, too. —Anne Lamott

But as Rumi said, "Through love all pain will turn to medicine," not most pain, or for other people; and the pain and failures grew me, helped slowly restore me to the person I was born to be. I had to learn that life was not going to be filling if I tried to scrunch myself into somebody else's idea of me, i.e., someone sophisticated enough to prefer dark chocolate. I like milk chocolate, like M&M's: so sue me. But I no longer have to stuff myself to the gills.