“I beleive in the power of words. With words you can save people, and with words you can kill people. Words are the best and the worst weapons of human beings.”

- Paul Rusesabagina, the inspiration behind the film “Hotel Rwanda”, explaining his ability to repeatedly convince oppressors not to kill him or the more than 1,000 people he sheltered during Rwanda’s 100-day genocide in 1994.

Let’s dare to be ourselves, for we do that better than anyone else can.

- Shirley Briggs

indigo liquid
aimed at a page through a point
traces on fingers

When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

-Khalil Gibran

You say I don’t talk, don’t share,
feelings frozen over, in hibernation,
hermetic as the laden ice-covered branches
cutting you off from the core of who I am.

But the cold and slippery truth is
if I melt these icicles and
stand before you, naked and trembling,
I no longer could pretend to be your ideal,
conform to your projection of perfection,
and your rejection is more than I could bear.

I would become so very weightless and inconsequential
that you could blow me away
simply by the sigh of your indifference
like a snowflake in the wind and bitter cold,
disoriented and adrift in engulfing whiteness,
lost, like a million others.

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.

-Abraham Lincoln

Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.

-Robert Benchley

Rorschach in the sky
silver patterns—just look up
for inspiration

As I was driving home, a flock of blackbirds fell out of the sky. It was a diving swarm, a single ball of coordinated black spots bouncing against the gray clouds. They didn’t need to speak to know in which direction to go; they didn’t bump into each other even at their frenzied speed. Rather, they flowed like a torrential stream, pooling at choice points in the sky. They moved as one, a larger consciousness, a group of wandering nomads who already knew that they would arrive together at their ultimate destination, the journey together being more important than the endpoint.

I was open but not searching. They stole my breath away, and in an instant, I was plummeting through the skies with them, swooping, my heart in my throat, a smile in my eyes. They welcomed my spirit into their flock. I was soaring. We settled on the field. I was home.