"This discipline and rough treatment are a furnace to extract the silver from the dross. This testing purifies the gold by boiling the scum away."
Rumi
PS: Here's to boiling our scum away!
"Sometimes miracles can be very small indeed. Sometimes as small as a pretty pin inside a broken box."
Marley Rides
"When we give thanks in all things, we see hardships and adversities in the context of the purpose of life... We are meant to learn and grow through opposition, through meeting our challenges, and through teaching others to do the same... the Lord will not only consecrate our afflictions for our gain, but He will use them to bless the lives of countless others."
It is of no consequence of what parents a woman is born as long as she be a woman of merit.
A wretched soul, bruised with adversity,
We bid be quiet when we hear it cry;
But were we burdened with like weight of pain,
As much or more we should ourselves complain.
Adversity is the source of our deepest growth and greatest blessings; embrace it, dare to seek it.
“In times of great stress or adversity, it's always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive. ”
If I feel depressed I will sing.
If I feel sad I will laugh.
If I feel ill I will double my labor.
If I feel fear I will plunge ahead.
If I feel inferior I will wear new garments.
If I feel uncertain I will raise my voice.
If I feel poverty I will think of wealth to come.
If I feel incompetent I will think of past success.
If I feel insignificant I will remember my goals.
Today I will be the master of my emotions.
“In times of great stress or adversity, it's always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive. ”
The Dance
I have sent you my invitation, the note inscribed on the palm of my hand by the fire of living.
Don't jump up and shout, "Yes, this is what I want! Let's do it!"
Just stand up quietly and dance with me.
Show me how you follow your deepest desires, spiraling down into the ache within the ache, and I will show you how I reach inward and open outward to feel the kiss of the Mystery, sweet lips on my own, every day.
Don't tell me you want to hold the whole world in your heart.
Show me how you turn away from making another wrong without abandoning yourself when you are hurt and afraid of being unloved.
Tell me a story of who you are, and see who I am in the stories I am living.
And together we will remember that each of us always has a choice.
Don't tell me how wonderful things will be...someday.
Show me you can risk being completely at peace, truly okay with the way things are right now in this moment, and again in the next and the next and the next...
I have heard enough warrior stories of heroic daring.
Tell me how you crumble when you hit the wall, the place you cannot go beyond by the strength of your own will.
What carries you to the other side of that wall, to the fragile beauty of your own humanness?
And after we have shown each other how we have set and kept the learn, healthy boundaries that help us live side by side with each other, let us risk remembering that we never stop silently loving those we once loved out loud.
Take me to the places on the earth that teach you how to dance, the places where you can risk letting the world break your heart, and I will take you to the places where the earth beneath my feet and the stars overhead make my heart whole again and again.
Show me how you take care of business without letting business determine who you are.
When the children are fed but still the voices within and around us shout that soul's desires have too high a price, let us remind each other that it is never about the money.
Show me how you offer to your people and the world the stories and the songs you want our children's children to remember, and I will show you how I struggle, not to change the world, but to love it.
Sit beside me in long moments of shared solitude, knowing both our absolute aloneness and our undeniable belonging.
Dance with me in the silence and in the sound of small daily words, holding neither against me at the end of the day.
And when the sound of all the declarations of our sincerest intentions have died away on the wind, dance with me in the infinite pause before the next great inhale of the breath that is breathing us all into being, not filling the emptiness from the outside or from within.
Don't say, "Yes!"
Just take my hand and dance with me.
Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.
“Adversity is like a strong wind…it doesn’t just hold us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward, we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be."
If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold ever more wonders.
People are like stained glass windows: they sparkle and shine when the sun's out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is light within.
They attack the one man with their hate and their shower of weapons. But he is like some rock which stretches into the vast sea and which, exposed to the fury of the winds and beaten against by the waves, endures all the violence.
Slowly, slowly, however, collectively we are changing, and the new theology speaks of "creation-centered spirituality." For many of us this means a return to the goddess—or the feminine aspect of the Godhead—fostering a love and appreciation of our planet and its creatures, and a new ecology. If any stone is the House of God, by extension, then Earth itself is mother to meaning, to consciousness itself. It makes me think of Shakespeare's words: Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head, And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in tress, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything. As You Like It, Act II Scene i, lines 12-17
Be courteous with all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appelation.
When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger, put him to poverty, place obstacles in the paths of his deeds, so as to stimulate his mind, harden his nature, and improve wherever he is incompetent.
“The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.”
Cling tooth and nail to the following rule: Not to give in to adversity, never to trust prosperity, and always to take full note of fortune's habit of behaving just as she pleases, treating her as if she were actually going to do everything it is in her power to do. Whatever you have been expecting for some time comes as less of a shock.
Shoulda, coulda, and woulda won't get it done. In attacking adversity, only a positive attitude, alertness, and regrouping to basics can launch a comeback.
Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it.
Now I began to realize what adversity really meant. I felt ashamed to meet anyone. Some of those persons who had courted our society when we were flourishing in business, now that adversity had overtaken us, would pass us by without recognition. I began to learn the hollowness of so-called "society."
All personal achievement starts in the mind of the individual. Your personal achievement starts in your mind. the first step is to know exactly what your problem, goal or desire is. If you're not clear about this, then write it down, and rewrite it until the words express precisely what you are after. Every disadvantage has an equivalent advantage - if you'll take the trouble to find it. Learn to do that and you'll kick the stuffing out of adversity every time.
