Crystal Agyemang

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life, you will have been all of these. ~George Washington Carver

We get used to the way things are. Humans are great like that. We can adapt to anything making things fit that we never dreamed before we could. Stitching together remnants and bits and pieces, fabricating a patchwork to make it function and convince ourselves that the tatters aren’t there and that THIS TIME the seams won’t split when we exhale greatly. We can tell ourselves anything and convince us of it. There is a place where we drew an invisible line in the sand, just past where the barriers and taught-to-us limitations live, where a resonance occurs. A full body, whole-life realization to the reality that I just don’t fit in this place anymore. Its tight. I need more air. That’s when you have the wind knocked out of your soul, and everything changes. Void of reason all there is in this moment is feeling when you lay there gasping with it. Why, is the first thought. Why is this even happening? Like being caught up in a storm you reel with the reality of it. It’s a realization of this patchwork that you are over mending to make fit, is not where your spirit, your beating heart wants to be. It literally tears the numbness of “just being” from you and infuses you with the fiery heat of everything you have ever wanted flashing before your eyes and filling your soul like a great flood. And then the realization that you can get there from here. You can get there from the remnants of this path. It is never too late to find what was in you all along. The overwhelming shock to the system of how much you truly, deep down deserve. Now it comes down to cutting the threads that hold us to what no longer serves us. Some strings we keep; wound around a finger to remind us of where we were or we hold gently in our fingers keeping those with us that are part of what is yet to be. The rest, we let fall on the cutting room floor. Sometimes the walls feel like they’re closing in around us and we can’t move, trapped in the small world that feels too tight, even though it once felt made for us, flexing, stretching and pulling at our way of thinking and being. This is expansion. Without expanding into these spaces, you would never know what new longings you have, how far you have come or how much you have grown and where your heart wants to go. You would never tear the old patchwork fabric and you would never notice the threadbare seams. Sometimes it hurts. But in the end, it’s showing you where you want to be, and where the longing in your heart lives; well past the line in the sand. ~Ara

"Child, they will never stop telling you to act your age, they do it to me often. And my reply has always been the same: I will act the age my soul sees fit. If you take issue with that, then I suggest you turn away and take your leave, because I’m not going to betray my heart and sacrifice myself on the fires of your expectation." ~Ara

"Be unique. Be who-you-really-are. Be creative. Come from your heart. Be love…”

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turn then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. ~C.S. Lewis

When you forgive, you don’t change the past … you change the future!

What you thought before has led to every choice you have made, and this adds up to you at this moment. If you want to change who you are physically, mentally, and spiritually, you will have to change what you think. ~Dr. Patrick Gentempo

A pearl is a beautiful thing that is produced by an injured life. It is the tear [that results] from the injury of the oyster. The treasure of our being in this world is also produced by an injured life. If we had not been wounded, if we had not been injured, then we will not produce the pearl. ~Stephan Hoeller