A butterfly does not wonder how it can stop being a caterpillar. It simply feels some feeling from within that tells it: isolate yourself in this cocoon and grow within it. It trusts that feeling. When it comes out, it is radiant and beautiful. All the little bug did was follow its nature. You are no different.
Your true power is not in your difference, but in your consistency of being different. The world will always adjust to consistency, yet struggle with change.
The outside world can only trigger or block your experience of your true nature. Each time something beautiful takes your breath away, that’s you experiencing yourself. Each time you fall in love with someone, that’s you experiencing yourself. Each time a child’s smile gives you unspeakable joy, that’s you experiencing yourself. Your true nature is beautiful. Life is the art of rediscovering yourself, again and again, in different forms, celebrating, rejoicing, welcoming. You are beautiful. You are life itself.
Memoir writing draws on all aspects of who we are, body, mind and soul. We are challenged to dig deep, to remember, and once again inhabit the skin of who we were and what we have learned. Writing memoir is an act of testimony, witnessing, healing. When you write a memoir, you draw upon layers of your consciousness and discover your true nature, your essential self, and are transformed the process.” Linda Joy Meyer
I’ve read about this in books, imagined it in my mind countless times since I’ve been here, but to actually witness it is something entirely different. I thought I was prepared, but nothing—no amount of book learning or supposed life experience or bravado—can make you invulnerable to the sight of a vampire drinking blood.
All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move toward rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold,or do not hold, is looked on as matter of indifference. They can me granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.
I'm silenced by his right hand cupping my chin and ear, his left hand flattening against my ribs as he gently pushes me back against the wall. I can feel the brick pressing into my naked upper back, cold and rough. His kiss is slow, tender...firm. His lips are warm, tongue smooth and flat, filling my mouth...I can't even feel my own tongue...taking my breath away with his.
Hatred wants to annihilate, but it annihilates by destroying, by making our awareness dull, by suppressing, by dividing. True Nature does not really annihilate, because something is not wiping out something else--there is no duality. The kind of annihilation that True Nature makes possible is more of a recognition, a precise understanding that Being reveals in us. We have no inner agitation in our attitude; we see and understand whatever impediment is arising, but we do not give it energy in the form of reaction, and thus it becomes still on its own and does not appear. We experience this as a dissolving or a melting, but what is actually happening is that the energy fueling the obstacle disappears, the obstacle loses its dynamism, and it simply stops arising.
What? Don't you want a girl who can talk dirty to you?"His look only hardens. "No, Lucy. I'm serious. I won't tolerate that from you." He doesn't look away and I feel that heat in the pit of my stomach, spreading down again. "Well...I've heard you curse before..." I swallow loudly, but keep his gaze."I'm a man.