hi, I'm sorry if this sounds super vague, but do you have anything that could give me some comfort? my mother is in the hospital and I'm unsure of how to navigate my feelings and I feel like some comforting texts might be a great start? if it's too much, you don't have to :) thanks for reading anyway have a great day/night! 💘🥰
hi, i’m so so sorry that you and your mom are going through such a difficult time and i hope things look up. sending you all the love in the world. <3 here and here are some posts with some words on hope, and a few more words that comfort me:
“We talk so much of light, please let me speak on behalf of the good dark. Let us talk more of how dark the beginning of a day is.”
Maggie Smith, from “How Dark the Beginning”
“What we love, shapely and pure, / is not to be held, / but to be believed in.”
Mary Oliver, from Evidence; “Swans”
Callista Buchen, “Taking Care”
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things
Lloyd Schwartz, “Leaves”
Kahlil Gibran, “On Joy and Sorrow”
“…I have known with certainty that the worst things, and even despair, are only a kind of abundance and an onslaught of existence that one decision of the heart could turn into its opposite. Where things become truly difficult and unbearable, we find ourselves in a place already very close to its transformation.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to Anita Forrer, February 14, 1920 as featured in The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation
Valarie Kaur, Sikh activist, civil rights attorney, and author
“To touch someone is to risk pain, to risk rejection, be it your own or that of another. […] It is a bridge you walk together, swaying above an abyss of fear. To hold each other’s hands is to have balance. Yet it also means having their weight with you, should there be a sudden fall.”
D. E. Chaudron, excerpt of Your Body, An Altar
Learning to Die: An Interview with Jenny Offill
“...whatever the name of the catastrophe, it is never / the opposite of love.”
Mary Oliver, from Dream Work: Poems; “Shadows”
Aracelis Girmay, “Elegy”
“When we will ourselves to stillness, we find we are flawed and cleaved inherently. A rip is a wound that might undo you, but also a space where light comes through.”
Molly McCully Brown; Places I’ve Taken My Body; ‘Poetry, Patience, and Prayer’
Ellen Bass, “The Thing Is”, Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems
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“If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
