Home » Inspiration (Page 61)
Category Archives: Inspiration
Sunday Inspiration: Letting Go
As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.
—Nelson Mandela
Sunday Inspiration: Truth and Love
The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
—William Sloane Coffin Jr.
Sunday Inspiration: Books
A book is a dream that you hold in your hands.
—Neil Gaiman
Something You Can Do for Liberia’s Ebola Crisis
Care for One Hundred is a response to the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa, especially Liberia. On August 13, 2014, the World Health Organization identified Liberia as the new epicenter of the crisis. That means that Liberia is the nation where the most new cases of Ebola are showing up.
Given the depressed Liberian economy, most Liberians subsist on one meal a day. We have calculated that for less than $0.35 a day we can provide one good meal of rice and beans. Provisions also will include oil and seasoning. For $1,000 USD we can Care for One Hundred for one month.
Sunday Inspiration: Duty
Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act.
—Albert Einstein
Sunday Inspiration: Gratitude
Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.
—William Arthur Ward
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
Darrell J. Pursiful 