Dawna Markova

How can I bring forth the gifts and talents that are hidden in me and others? What do I truly love and value about life? What are the environments and rhythms that bring out the best in me?

It's never too late to become what you might have been.

—George Eliot

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice. You are the only one who can put it together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of no account.

—John Gardner

The antidote to exhaustion may not be rest. It may be wholeheartedness. You are so exhausted because all of the things you are doing are just busyness. There's a central core of wholeheartedness totally missing from what you're doing.

—Brother David Steindl-Rast

The antidote to exhaustion may not be rest. It may be wholeheartedness. You are so exhausted because all of the things you are doing are just busyness. There's a central core of wholeheartedness totally missing from what you're doing.

—Brother David Steindl-Rast

Self care is never a selfish act—it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I was put on earth to offer to others. Any time we can listen to our true self, and give it the care it requires, we do so not only for ourselves, but for the many others whose lives we touch.

—Parker Palmer

are now at a point in time when the ability to receive, utilize, store, transform and transmit data—the lowest cognitive form—has expanded literally beyond comprehension. Understanding and wisdom are largely forgotten as we struggle under an avalanche of data and information.

—Dee Hock, Birth of the Chaordic Age

May you find the courage you need to ask yourself the questions that will free your mind and strengthen your soul.

Traveling from the known to the unknown requires crossing an abyss of emptiness. We first experience disorientation and confusion. Then, if we are willing to cross in wonder, we enter an expansive and untamed country that has its own rhythm. Time melts. Thoughts become stories, music, poems, images, ideas. This is the intelligence of the heart—a vast range of receptive and connective abilities: intuition, wisdom, meaning making. It is aesthetic, qualitative, creative, sensitive, innovative.

We make our lives bigger or smaller, more expansive or more limited, according to the interpretation of life that is our story.

—Christina Baldwin