The True Self is not our creation, but God's. It is the self we are in our depths. It is our capacity for divinity and transcendence.

Sue Monk Kidd

Categorized in : Self Depth Divinity

Nobody should go through life without falling in love. by Sue Monk Kidd

Nobody should go through life without falling in love.

falling-in-love should fall

I didn't know then what I wanted, but the ache for it was palpabl... by Sue Monk Kidd

I didn't know then what I wanted, but the ache for it was palpable.

ache knows wanted

I know you've run away - everybody gets the urge to do that some time - but sooner or later you'll want to go home.

want home running

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket.

white house people

I felt a trembling along my skin, a treaveling current that moved up my spine, down my arms, pulsing out from my fingertips. I was practically radiating. The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them. I was wondering what my body knew that I didn't.

skins mind long

When he spoke, the roughness was gone from his voice. "I could tell you I did it. That's what you wanna hear. I could tell you she did it to herself, but both ways I'd be lying. It was you who did it, Lily. You didn't mean it, but it was you.

voice mean lying

We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment an... by Sue Monk Kidd

We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.

pomegranates taste writing

I realize what a strange in-between place I am in. The Young Woman inside has turned to go, but the Old Woman has not shown up.

realizing strange young

You don't have to place your hand on Mary's heart to get strength and consolation and rescue, and all the other things we need to get through life. You can place it right here on your own heart. Your own heart.

heart hands needs

Look, I know you meant well creating the world and all, but how could you let it get away from you like this? How come you couldn't stick with your original idea of paradise? People's lives were a mess.

creating people ideas

This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted. And I too... by Sue Monk Kidd

This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted. And I took her away.

knows wanted

It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back. by Sue Monk Kidd

It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back.

nostalgia wish lost

Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in the depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlived parts of me, and they came with a force and dazzle that I couldn't contain. They seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.

autumn struggle self

Elizabeth A. Johnson explains that including divine female symbols and images not only challenges the dominance of male images but also calls into question the structure of patriarchy itself.

males female challenges

The second thing I wrote down that day was that exclusive male imagery of the Divine not only instilled an imbalance within human consciousness, it legitimized patriarchal power in the culture at large. Here alone is enough reason to recover the Divine Feminine, for there is a real and undeniable connection between the repression of the feminine in our deity and the repression of women.

divine-feminine males real

When a woman starts to disentangle herself from patriarchy, ultimately she is abandoned to her own self.

patriarchy abandoned self

My mother's life was way too heavy for me. by Sue Monk Kidd

My mother's life was way too heavy for me.

heavy mother way

Sunset is the saddest light there is. by Sue Monk Kidd

Sunset is the saddest light there is.

saddest sunset light

It was the first time I'd ever said the words to another person, and the sound of them broke open my heart.

sound heart firsts

all that paddling around in the alphabet soup of one's childhood, scooping up letters, hoping to arrange them into enlightening sentences that would explain why things had turned out the way they had. It evoked a certain mutiny in me.

paddling mutiny childhood