Darrell J. Pursiful

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Rowling Writes to Grieving Teen

This is what a classy celebrity does.

Fifteen-year-old Cassidy Stay lost both parents and four siblings to a gunman in Texas last month. Cassidy was shot in the head and survived the gunshot wound only because she played dead. Authorities have called her survival a miracle.

Cassidy had seen the unimaginable, but was still thinking about happiness. At a memorial for her family, Cassidy gave a speech in front of media saying she believed her family was “in much a better place.”

Quoting the words of Dumbledore, the wise headmaster of Hogwarts, she said “Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”

The same day Cassidy gave her speech, a Facebook page called “We want JK Rowling to meet Cassidy Stay” formed and quickly gained traction.

While the group page acknowledges that Cassidy is not a follower of the page, the creator claims to know a friend of Cassidy’s who “confirmed that JK Rowling did, in fact, write her a personalized letter from ‘Dumbledore’ (hand-written with purple ink). She was also sent a wand, an acceptance letter to Hogwarts with a school supply list, along with the 3rd book with JK’s autograph” the group post said.

May you find peace, Cassidy Shay. God bless.

Sunday Inspiration: Teachers

The best teachers are the ones who show you were to look but don’t tell you what to see.
—Alexandra K. Trenfor

The Wonder of Chocolate

Thanks to Jesus Diaz for sharing this amazing video of cacao farmers in Côte d’Ivoire actually tasting chocolate for the first time!

Jesus adds:

Watching them marvel about this sweet food that comes from the beans they harvest is amazing to me. First, because it’s a joy to see their faces. Then, because it’s a stark reminder of how amazingly lucky we are.

For us westerners chocolate is just one more thing. It’s inconsequential. We like to eat it, sometimes we get delighted by it for a minute. But more often than not it’s just one more snack to stuff our fat faces with. We don’t think about it and the incredible effort and resources that are required to make it. We take it for granted along with the other billion foods and the other billion other technologies and privileges we didn’t fight for.

I’m not posting this to be preachy. This comes from a place of true wonder, to remind myself about my own comfortable numbness and the hundred things that I take for granted every day. One day something fatal will happen and then you will realize how much time you wasted whining about this or that rather than enjoying the infinite amount of awesome (yes, everything is awesome!) stuff that exists around you.

Indeed.

Sunday Inspiration: Books

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.
—Carl Sagan

Sunday Inspiration: Solitude

I think it’s very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person.
—Oscar Wilde

Sunday Inspiration: Taking Chances

Some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.
—J. K. Rowling

Sunday Inspiration: Stories

The stories we love best do live in us forever.
—J. K. Rowling

Sunday Inspiration: Progress

If you can’t fly, then run,
if you can’t run, then walk,
if you can’t walk, then crawl,
but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.
—Martin Luther King Jr.

Sunday Inspiration: Joy

Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.
—Karl Barth

Sunday Inspiration: Friendship

Friendship…is born at the moment when one man says to another, “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…”
—C. S. Lewis