be yourself - you already know who you are

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: that I am nobody but myself.
~Ralph Ellison

New Talk Show

The Simple Grace Program - How to Live a Meaningful Life will be featured for one year on a new coffee-talk-style talk show. Meet host Sarak and wish her a congratulations for The Sarak Show. Her new show will hit the airwaves this summer.

www.sarakshow.com

It is our light that frightens us

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

from A Return to Love, by Marianne Williamson

Simple Grace

Awareness - Medita...

By Beth Jannery

Book Preview

rough edges

With every passing encounter there is a chance to grow or inspire.

Our rough edges can be sanded and smoothed by helping others and by allowing ourselves to be touched by others. We learn then heal then laugh.

Whatever you are going through today - big or small - someone somewhere has been through it and survived. Ask for help. Share your fear with a friend. Feel. Embrace the pain. Inhale grace. Grow. Bloom. Stand vulnerable in the moonlight.

photo: landscape photographer Cliff Lambson

rewards of the simple life

To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter... to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life. ~John Burroughs

a favorite thing to do alone

http://smithsonian.org/visit/whatsnew/

one of my favorite things to do alone is wander around the Smithsonian Institute. if you haven't done this lately, here is a current link with new events and exhibitions. click, plan, visit, and get lost in thought.

best of all... all the museums are FREE.

here are two that look extra cool:

I Do Solemnly Swear: Photographs of the 2009 Inauguration
here until July 12, 2009

and

Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn: Jazz Composers and Their Signature Works
here until June 28, 2009

Find Somebody to Help

If you have no troubles of your own, go out and find somebody else’s. They are not half so hard to carry and your heart and soul need the exercise. - Hazelden Foundation