loss

The fearful have lost faith while the fearless allow faith to lead the way.

We keep moving. And as we do, the things around us, well, they disappear.

Everything we come across becomes a part of us. It doesn't matter how small or insignificant it is_or how devastating. One story here, one story there, that__ what I see when I look back at my life. An accumulation of everything I went through.

Sometimes when we are drowning in our own loss we lash out--anger is momentarily easier to cope with.

The leaves of the trees will stroke your cheeks, The wind will blow through your chest and cleanse your soul, The magical sounds of the earth, animals and the elements will hug your ears, The positive vibrations of the earth will fall asleep next to your heart and the breathtaking beauty of the earth will ease your mind. If you allow it, the earth, in itself, will heal you.

The catchers delight in the moment so frozen but soon discover that the nightingale expires, its clear flutelike song diminishes to silence, the trapped moment grows withered and without life.

I sit here with you now with one sure answer. Love is the most potent bond, the most elaborate trap, the most irresistible object, and the most lethal weapon. I am everything with it, and nothing without it.

After a dazed moment, Specialist Kit Murphy put his arms loosely around her, and Josie Schaeffer clung to him, knowing this man was not her husband, that her husband was never coming back, but for now she was as close to him as she could get and she would not let him go.

Maybe is wasn't love so much as a fear of losing everything I'd accomplished. I was afraid to let go.

I'm not going anywhere," she told me that night. But until we are old ladies--a cypress age, a Sawtooth age--I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.

A lifetime, one might say, of loss, but we here recognize something much different, more nuanced, more full of shadows. A lifetime of hope. And anyone who's done both - hoped and lost - knows that in many ways, hoping is worse....As I grew into early adulthood and observed a larger pattern of hope and loss and hope and loss and hope and loss, and the concurrent resilience thereof, I came to a begrudging conclusion: neither of these things - hope and loss - can exist without the other, and yet at every turn it is necessary to believe that at some point one will ultimately conquer. And that will be our legacy.

Why talk about something you can't do anything about?

When you are at a loss of words then go with your feelings. If you feel nothing you must rely on your thinking. If your thinking is not clear then lean on the spirit. With Spirit you cannot go wrong!

On any basic figure of the Africans landed alive in the Americas, one would have to make several extensions- starting with a calculation to cover mortality in transshipment. The Atlantic crossing, or __iddle Passage,_ as it was called by European slavers, was notorious for the number of deaths incurred, averaging in the vicinity of 15-20 per cent. There were also numerous deaths in Africa between time of capture and time of embarkation, especially in cases where captives had to travel hundreds of miles to the coast. Most important of all (given that warfare was the principal means of obtaining captives) it is necessary to make some estimate of the number of people killed and injured so as to extract the millions who were taken alive and sound. The resultant figure would be many times the millions landed alive outside of Africa, and it is that figure which represents the number of Africans directly removed from the population and labor force of Africa because of the establishment of slave production by Europeans. Pg. 96

It had been so long since she had felt anything.

She had learnt a painful lesson, she thought _ that as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.

We follow our scripts like actors in a very large, very long production. And even with no audience, none of us gives a hint that it isn't real.

Allow yourself some happiness, so that I can be a part of it.