so much happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.

With sadness there is something to rub against, 

a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records…..
Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,

you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known. 

So Much Happiness | Naomi Shihab Nye

the gorgeous photo is by: rion on flickr

i'm finding my peace. and forgiving myself for those things i've never done.



willy tea taylor 
"cattleman" 


read here. 


(it's been a while since a string of words drew all the breath from my body. but last night, upon reading this, that's exactly what happened. i haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.)

i don't ask you to love me always like this, 
but i ask you to remember. 
somewhere inside me 
there'll always be the person 
i am tonight.

f. scott fitzgerald

to live in this world, you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal:
to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

mary oliver

these were the words i took away after seeing the final installment of the harry potter journey

words are, in my not so humble opinion,
our most inexhaustible source of magic. 

harry potter and the deathly hallows








dear j. k. rowling, 


thank you for illuminating the world. and showing us we already have all the tools to change it. 


sincerely,


your faithful reader--one whose only act of schoolgirl rebellion was to sit in the back of eighth-grade american history with the sorcerer's stone on her lap, just below her desk, hoping no one would catch her