Now the sweet season of introspection, quiet, peaceful snowscapes, good books, long nights, welcoming fires, warm hearths, cozy afternoons, wanderings, deepening, dreaming, awakening…
We celebrate this longest night with a glad heart, knowing that with each subsequent day, the sun will grace us with ever more moments of light. Each day more light.
May our lives, our very souls know this too; each day more light!
O Winter ruler of the inverted year… I crown thee king of intimate delights, fireside enjoyments, home-born happiness, and all the comforts that the lowly roof of undisturbed retirement, and the hours of long uninterrupted evening, know.”
-William Cowper
“Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius.”
“it matters what voices you listen to, it matters what books you read, it matters what you buy, what you do with your money if you have it and how you interact with those who don’t have it, it matters who you surround yourself with and why, it matters where you put your life labor, it matters where you put your love labor, it matters where you put your creative labor and what you create and why, it matters what you let into your life and what you are willing to live with, it matters what your relationship to the planet is or isn’t, it matters how you respond to danger at the door…even if it’s at your neighbor’s door.”
“There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”
-Victor Hugo
“My dream is of a place and time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth.”
-Abraham Lincoln
“Yesterday is but today’s memory, and tomorrow is today’s dream.”
-Khalil Gabran
“Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.”
“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”
-Audre Lorde
“I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.”
-Theodore Roosevelt
“I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.”
-Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
“Equality is not a concept. It’s not something we should be striving for. It’s a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who’s confronted with it. We need equality. Kinda now.”
-Joss Whedon
“A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.”
-Gloria Steinem
“If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.”
– John F. Kennedy
“To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man’s injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man’s superior. Has she not greater intuition, is she not more self-sacrificing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? Without her, man could not be. If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with woman. Who can make a more effective appeal to the heart than woman?”
[To the Women of India (Young India, Oct. 4, 1930)]”
-Mahatma Gandhi
“If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.”
“If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself, if you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.”
“Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.”
