All of this is powerful, but the part that really resonates with me is Help me to forgive but retain the wisdom that pain has taught me. It reminds me of the words by Ovid, Someday this pain will be useful to you. And why should we expect any less of pain? After all, isn’t the only benefit of pain the knowledge we glean from it? In the moment, it shatters us, but what matters is what we create from the shards. Someone somewhere is going to read this and roll their eyes, but let them. Pain teaches us how to be in pain—how to survive it, to make it through to the other side.
In the moment, it [pain] shatters us, but what matters is what we create from the shards.
Every day, someone in the world makes it through something they thought would be unendurable; wear those moments in your life like armor. And I’m not just talking about physical pain. I’ve had three kidney stones, and not one of them was more painful than the unrequited loves I’ve held close at night while crying silently into my pillow.
Every day, someone in the world makes it through something they thought would be unendurable; wear those moments in your life like armor.
What I want for you, what I want for myself, what I want for all of us, is to quit suppressing the truths that pain teaches us. Pain will be there no matter what, and if we allow it to make us stronger, it might hurt a little less the next time. Take care, my friends.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It’s everything in between we live for.
I am late to the Ann Patchett party, but luckily there were plenty of hors d’oeuvres and champagne flutes left to go around. She writes with such clarity, such emotional precision, that there can be no question of veracity—you know you’re getting the truth as she sees it, no matter how hard it is to swallow.
To amend a quote by Vivek Shraya, the beauty of love is that it ends. Whether that’s in death, or any other form of separation, love (being the bond of affection shared between people living in the mortal plane) is finite. And thank God it is. We are only here for a short time, so let us fill our days with love, with connection, and with joy.
We are only here for a short time, so let us fill our days with love, with connection, and with joy.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
Isn’t that what divinity should be? The embodiment of truth.
The world is never not ready to kick you in the teeth, my friends. Wear your truth like armor and they can never use it against you. You are brave. You are resilient. You are the end result of eons of grand design leading to the person looking back at you in the mirror. Own it. Rise. Roar.
You are the end result of eons of grand design leading to the person looking back at you in the mirror.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
There are two reasons I wanted to tell this story, the story of how I learned to surrender. First, because it’s mine. It doesn’t belong to the tabloids or my mom or the men I’ve married or the people who’ve loved or hated my movies or even my children. My story is mine alone; I’m the only one who was there for all of it, and I decided to claim the power to tell it on my own terms. The second reason is that even though it’s mine, maybe some part of this story is yours, too. I’ve had extraordinary luck in this life: both bad and good. Putting it all down in writing makes me realize how crazy a lot of it has been, how improbable. But we all suffer, and we all triumph, and we all get to choose how we hold both.
God, I love Demi Moore. I’m quite the sucker for celebrity memoirs, but Inside Out was so meta. She really guts herself on the page and shows you who she is and what’s she’s been through and how it has all transformed her into the person she’s become. Not the movie star or the tabloid queen or that woman who was married to Bruce Willis and then Ashton Kutcher. No, within the pages of her memoir, you get to see the real Demi, warts and all. It is quite the journey.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
In this moment, you’re still breathing. In this moment, you’ve survived. In this moment, you’re finding a way to step onto higher ground.
This is a book I find myself re-reading from time to time to give myself a spiritual tune-up. Life is often difficult, messy, and downright disagreeable, but it is important for us to remember this truth: everything we need to keep moving forward is already inside us. We have made it through every single one of our worst days and we are stronger for it. This does not mean that we should ignore our circumstances, or blithely move through our days like a bunch of Live, Laugh, Love simpletons. It simply means that we possess, on a molecular level, the tools for survival. We are not weak beings. By being here in this moment, we have already won.
This does not mean that we should ignore our circumstances, or blithely move through our days like a bunch of Live, Laugh, Love simpletons. It simply means that we possess, on a molecular level, the tools for survival. We are not weak beings.
Just keep breathin’ and breathin’ and breathin’ and breathin’.
Ariana Grande
You cannot earn breath. It is free. So take in a big breath, steel yourself, and know that you are a freaking warrior. Even if you have to stay home today. Even if you don’t get out of bed. Are you alive? Then you’re winning. Until next time, my darlings.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
Allow me to first offer my sincere apology to all of you, my devoted readers, for making you wait so long for Part 2. This part is going to be a lot different from the first one because I’ll be sharing and discussing my favorite passages from Nadia’s book. Are you ready for it? Let’s go.
God planted so many of us in the corners, yet the center-pivot irrigation of the church’s teachings about sex and sexuality tends to exclude us.
This is so life-affirming. For all #exvangelicals out there and for people who still have ties to the church, the feelings of exclusion that we experience in relation to our religious upbringings are so strong that they almost manifest in corporeal form whenever we’re exposed to the teachings inculcated in us from when we were congregants.
We were taught that the body is a site of shame. We were taught that we were tainted by Adam’s original sin, that our flesh is something we must overcome in order to become one with God. We were taught that sharing our bodies with others outside the confines of monogamous, heterosexual marriage separates us from the holy.
We were taught that sharing our bodies with others outside the confines of monogamous, heterosexual marriage separates us from the holy.
We were even condemned for finding pleasure(s) on our own. Masturbating was something we all discovered by accident, performed in secret, and never talked about. It was the secret sin that tainted our relationship with God, with our families, with ourselves. The rose is not branded an apostate when it blooms, so why then should we be branded? This is not even mentioning the shame accompanying your masturbatory fantasies if you were anything other than 100% straight.
The rose is not branded an apostate when it blooms, so why then should we be branded?
But our sexual and gender expressions are as integral to who we are as our religious upbringings are. To separate these aspects of ourselves—to separate life as a sexual being from a life with God—is to bifurcate our psyche, like a musical progression that never comes to resolution.
I love the imagery Bolz-Weber (I think from here on out I’m just going to refer to her as Pastor Nadia) uses here. So many of us who were raised in the church had to develop a dichotomy between our spiritual and corporeal identities, thus the bifurcation she’s talking about here. We were all musical progressions never coming to a resolution. If you ask me, we were robbed. That forced separation caused us to become less of ourselves, meaning that in the end we had less to offer God and less to give to others.
That forced separation caused us to become less of ourselves, meaning that in the end we had less to offer God and less to give to others.
What would we be like if this bifurcation had not caused us to tear ourselves asunder? What if instead we read the Scriptures with new eyes?
Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is within you, whom you have [received as a gift] from God, and that you are not your own [property]? You were bought with a price [you were actually purchased with the precious blood of Jesus and made His own]. So then, honor and glorify God with your body.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20 (AMP)
At what point did the church carnalize our bodies? When we are taken in totality, no bifurcation is necessary, and if we are to believe the Scriptures, our bodies house (contain) the Holy Spirit. Now, I am by no stretch of the imagination a Bible scholar or theologian, but there’s nothing wrong with my reading comprehension.
When we are taken in totality, no bifurcation is necessary, and if we are to believe the Scriptures, our bodies house (contain) the Holy Spirit.
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’ He answered, ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’ And he said, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?’
Genesis 3:6-11 (NIV)
Here we see that shame was a consequence of the first sin—before sin, the first humans were naked, without shame, and free.
So what are the implications for us? Because man fell [from grace or right standing with God], we all have an awareness of our nakedness, of our bodies as a site of inherent shame, and this inherent shame is a direct consequence of the serpent’s temptation. So every time a little effeminate boy is called a faggot and beat up by his classmates, or a transgender Black woman is murdered for having the audacity to exist in public, the serpent wins, and the anti-LGBT people of faith rejoice with him. Is that saying a whole hell of a lot? You bet it is. I said what I said.
So every time a little effeminate boy is called a faggot by his classmates, or a transgender Black woman is murdered for having the audacity to exist in public, the serpent wins, and the anti-LGBT people of faith rejoice with him.
I refuse to accept or participate in a faith tradition that excludes some while exalting others, that prizes some bodies above others, or draws lines of demarcation between who can and who cannot be joint-heirs with Christ. He didn’t just die for them. I don’t know which version of the Bible they’re reading, but in every one of the baker’s dozen I own, Jesus welcomed everyone to his table, and there are no garbage tables in God’s Kingdom.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
I have a lot of these, but this will probably be the last batch I’ll share for a while. I have a lot of reading to catch up on because my day job has been incredibly time-consuming recently. Let me know what you think!
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
As promised, here are more of the quotes graphics I made last year.
Listen, I know I’m not going to win any awards for graphic designing but these were so much to make. Stay tuned for part three!
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
There was a time last year when I became obsessed with making quotes graphics like a bored suburban Pinterest Princess.
I’m not going to lie, I’m probably going to do it again sometime in the future. It was a good way for me to have a creative outlet that wasn’t writing and that didn’t require me to practice delayed gratification, which is not something people with ADHD are good at.
This time in my life also coincided with Taylor Swift’s surprise release of folklore, and let’s just say I was *really* in my feelings. As we all probably were.
This time in my life also coincided with Taylor Swift’s surprise release of folklore, and let’s just say I was *really* in my feelings. As we all probably were.
This is probably going to be a three-part series because I have a lot of graphics to share. I hope you enjoy them!
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
We all need a little inspiration from time to time, and this is one conversation I return to whenever I need a spiritual tune-up. I hope it helps you as much as it’s helped me.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
The Voracious Bibliophile 