Something to get you through the day

These two are excerpts from Marianne Williamson’s glorious book A Return to Love. If you (and more importantly, if Marianne will forgive me), the most important thoughts, those that speak for themselves are italicized. At least, I hope that’s how they come out:

“None of us are really objectively attractive or unattractive. There is no such thing. There are people who manifest the potential for sparkle that we all share, and those who don’t. Those who do are usually people who somewhere along the line, either from parents or lovers, were told verbally or nonverbally, ‘You’re wonderful and beautiful.’ Love is to people what water is to plants.”

“How could Leonardo Da Vinci not have painted? How could Shakespeare not have written? In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke tells a young writer to write only if he has to. We are to do what there is a deep psychological and emotional imperative for us to do. That’s our point of power, the source of our brilliance. Our power is not rationally or willfully called forth. It’s a divine dispensation, an act of grace.”

Writing the Dialscan entry the other night felt just like divine dispensation to me. I cannot tell you the exhilaration I felt while typing the stream-of-consciousness thoughts and the almost orgasmic sensation of reading it later. So what if there were punctuation errors and redundancies. For the first time in I can’t even tell you how long, I felt that writing is what I was put on this planet to do. Anything else is a waste of my time and talent.