secondmercedes in Austin is doing 43 things including…

Share 50 poems, quotes or passages that speak to my heart!

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secondmercedes has written 29 entries about this goal

And finally, my 50th passage that speaks to my heart by Emily Brontë 1 week ago

“I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.” ~Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights


This passage from WH has influenced me from the moment I read it. I remember vividly laying in a hammock in Seattle, Washington during the summer. The warm morning sun was shining down on me and I was reading WH for the first time (such a glorious experience in and of itself). I read thi passage and paused. Then I read it again. And again, taking in every precious, miraculous word until I had it committed to my memory and the words flowed through me. Ever since that moment, when I read this passage I am thrown completely and utterly into a deep state of thought. Thoughts on movement, on change, on moving forward with my dreams and my ideas. Thank you, Emily Brontë for inspiring me in this way. You are one of my many heroes.



Number 48 & 49 1 week ago

I draw so much from EE Cummings work. I could probably list a zillion of my favorites but these are two that have stuck with me beyond the reading. I often recite them in my head. I can’t forget to mention “since feeling is first” which I have already listed in a previous post. That one I’ve memorized quite completely. Anyway, onto the incredible EE Cummings…

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)


And this is my other favorite by EE Cummings, my hero and inspiration.

somewhere i have never travelled

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands



Number 47 - The Dance by Oriah Mountain Dreamer 1 week ago

The Dance
by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

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,
spiralling 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, everyday.

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 . . . some day.
Show me you can risk being completely at peace,
truly OK 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 clear,
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 has 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.



number 42, 43, 44, 45, 46 3 months ago

42 You can’t do anything by doing nothing. ~Unknown

43 Your toughest opponent is in the mirror. ~Unknown

44 “Embrace your process, embrace the grittiness of effort along with the euphoria of ease.” ~Janet K

45 The will to win is not nearly so important as the will to prepare to win. ~Unknown

46 Only those risking to go far will ever know how far they can go.



number 41 - James Baldwin 4 months ago

“Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.” James Baldwin



number 40 - from the end of a poem I wrote 4 months ago

“and we beat them all
while wearing pretty dresses.”



39- Shel Silverstein 5 months ago

I know there were a few others by him that I really love but this, of course, one of his classic stand-outs is a given.
Where the Sidewalk Ends

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

Shel Silverstein



38 - Rumi Poem 5 months ago

At every instant and from every side, resounds the call of Love:
We are going to sky, who wants to come with us?
We have gone to heaven, we have been the friends of the angels,
And now we will go back there, for there is our country.
We are higher than heaven, more noble than the angels:
Why not go beyond them? Our goal is the Supreme Majesty.
What has the fine pearl to do with the world of dust?
Why have you come down here? Take your baggage back. What is this place?
Luck is with us, to us is the sacrifice!...
Like the birds of the sea, men come from the ocean—the ocean of the soul.
Like the birds of the sea, men come from the ocean—the ocean of the soul.
How could this bird, born from that sea, make his dwelling here?
No, we are the pearls from the bosom of the sea, it is there that we dwell:
Otherwise how could the wave succeed to the wave that comes from the soul?
The wave named ‘Am I not your Lord’ has come, it has broken the vessel of the body;
And when the vessel is broken, the vision comes back, and the union with Him.

Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch, ‘Rumi and Sufism’ trans. Simone Fattal
Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 1977, 1987.



36 & 37 - From one of my idols, Hillary Clinton 5 months ago

“Last week I decided that even if life is absurd why couldn’t I spend it absurdly happy?” ~Hillary Clinton in an excerpt from a letter to a friend written in the 1960s.

“Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it. And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time. That has always been the history of progress in America” ~Hillary Clinton, June 7, 2008 Washington DC



35 - quote - from me 5 months ago

“To rise above feels so fine once you’ve fallen and hit the slippery grime. We can’t avoid these spoils, so why not feel good in the toil, to try again - not giving in - having faith that we’ll one day pass this all by, we can stand up - dirty - and move on again” ~Me



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