Friday, November 5, 2010

final tidbits...

i finally finished the book, scarred by struggle,
transformed by hope
. seems every time i sat down
to read, something happened. but last nite, i just
about bolted my door so i could finish!

wanted to share some final tidbits from it......

'we become what we are, but we do not do it,
in most cases, in any kind of linear progression.
we go from one struggle to another, becoming as
we go. the hard thing to come to understand in life
is that it is the becoming that counts, not the
achievements, not the roles in which we manage
to mantle ourselves. but becoming is our most
byzantine task. giving ourselves over to be sculpted
can take a lifetime of shifts and gyrations,
of aimless orbits and dizzying spins, of near
despair and of dogged, intransigent, tenacious hope.'


'hope is not a matter of waiting for things outside
us to get better. it is about getting better inside
about what is going on inside. it is about becoming
open to the god of newness.'


'we always think of hope as grounded in the future.
that's wrong, i think. hope is fulfilled in the
future but it depends on our ability to remember that
we have survived everything in life to this point -
and have emerged in even better form than we were
when those troubles began. so why not this latest
situation too?'

mmmmmmmmm........
i do like this woman.
thought those were good for a lot of people i know
right now so thought i'd share........

2 comments:

Merry ME said...

Hope is not a matter of waiting for things outside us to get better.

That might be the best definition of the word I've every heard. I guess I always think of "hope" as a noun - a thing one has. But it's really more of a verb - an action word. It's not just standing by and waiting - it's doing what needs to be done while the waiting is occurring.

What yummy food for thought this finally cool (almost cold) Florida morning!

Pamela Jones said...

Good point, Mary, and I like that not waiting for outside things to get better thing.