Bring your broken hallelujah here - the Rev. Theresa Soto (poem and prayer)

Bring your broken hallelujah here.
Bring the large one that is beyond
repair. Bring the small one that’s
too soft to share. Bring your broken
Hallelujah here. I know that people
have told you that before you can give
you have to get yourself together. They
overstated the value of perfection by a
lot. Or they forgot. You are the gift.
We all bring some broken things, songs
and dreams, and long lost hopes. But
here, and together, we reach within.
As a community, we begin again. And
from the pieces we will build something new.
There is work that only you can do. We
wait for you.

Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man - Emmanuel Acho

 

Talking to policemen

"Proximity breeds care and distance breeds fear. And because there's not enough proximity, there's a lack of care or a lack of empathy and a heightened amount of fear.”

Talking to Joanna and Skip Gaines

Talking about "Reverse Racism"

Talking to a family with white parents and adopted black children

Source of Most Quotes / Echoes in My Life

 

Joe vs. the Volcano

"Some things take care of themselves. They're not your job; maybe they're not even your business.”

"Very interesting. As a luggage problem."

"I know he can get the job, but can he do the job?"

"Dear God, whose name I do not know - thank you for my life. I forgot how big... thank you. Thank you for my life."

“Joe, nobody knows anything. We'll take this leap and we'll see. We'll jump and we'll see. That's life!”

“My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement.”

Princess Bride

"As you wish"

"I'm not a witch; I'm your wife, but I'm not even sure I want to be that anymore after what you just said."

"Mahwaaj. Mahwaaj is what bwings us togevar today. Mahwaaj - dat bwessed awangement. Dat dweam wifin a dweam...."

Shell Seekers

The Holy Grail

"I'm not dead yet."

"It's just a flesh wound."

"Now go away or I will taunt you a second time."

Dan in Real Life

"Put it on my tab..."

The Jerk

"All I need is this lamp. All I need is this desk, this lamp, and this..."

Alone - Maya Angelou (poem)

Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don't believe I'm wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

There are some millionaires
With money they can't use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They've got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Now if you listen closely
I'll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
'Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Apparition - Mark Doty (poem)

The old words are dying,
everyone forgets them,
pages falling into sleep and dust,

dust and sleep, burning so slowly
you wouldn’t even know there’s a fire.
Or that’s what I think half the time.

Then, at the bookstore, a young man reciting,
slight for fourteen, blonde, without irony
but not self-important either;

his loping East Texas vowels threaten
to escape the fence of pentameter,
his voice seems to have just arrived here,

but the old cadence inhabits anyway.
He makes the poem his own
even as he becomes a vessel

for its reluctance to disappear.
All right, maybe they perish,
but the boy has the look of someone

repeating a crucial instruction
that must be delivered, word for word,
as he learned it:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

Quote - The Rev. Marta Valentin

Excerpt:

Isn’t it amazing
how we crave to know an outcome
before its time
even as we accept
that we cannot know
how anything will go?

Self-Portrait as a Door - Donika Ross (poem)

All the birds die of blunt-force trauma —
of barn of wire of YIELD or SLOW
CHILDREN AT PLAY. You are a sign
are a plank are a raft are a felled oak.
You are a handle are a turn are a bit
of brass lovingly polished.
What birds what bugs what soft
hand come knocking. What echo
what empty what room in need 

of a picture a mirror a bit of paint 

on the wall. There is a hooked rug. 

There is a hard hand as you are 

hard pounding the door. There is the doormat

owl eye patched by a boot by a body

with a tree for a hand. What roosts 

what burrows what scrambles 

at the pound. There is a you 

on the other side, cold and white 

as the room, in need of a window 

or an eye. There is your hand 

on the door which is now the door 

pretending to be a thing that opens.

Advice to Myself - Louise Erdrich (poem)

Leave the dishes.

Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in through the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

We have a soul at times - Wislawa Szymborska (poem)

 

We have a soul at times.

No one’s got it non-stop, for keeps.

 

Day after day, year after year may pass without it.

 

Sometimes it will settle for awhile only in childhood’s fears and raptures.

Sometimes only in astonishment that we are old.

 

It rarely lends a hand in uphill tasks,

like moving furniture, or lifting luggage, or going miles in shoes that pinch.

 

It usually steps out whenever meat needs chopping or forms have to be filled.

 

For every thousand conversations it participates in one,

if even that, since it prefers silence.

 

Just when our body goes from ache to pain, it slips off-duty.

 

It’s picky: it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds;

our hustling for a dubious advantage and creaky machinations make it sick.

 

Joy and sorrow aren’t two different feelings for it.

It attends us only when the two are joined.

 

We can count on it when we’re sure of nothing

and curious about everything.

 

Among the material objects it favors clocks with pendulums

and mirrors, which keep on working even when no one is looking.

 

It won’t say where it comes from or when it’s taking off again,

though it’s clearly expecting such questions.

 

We need it, but apparently it needs us for some reason, too.

The Big Miss

Ok, I'll say it. Republicans are NOT just acting out of loyalty to one man. They are choosing a means to an end. Trump and Trumpism are the means. The big lie justifies "voter reform" bills that ensure voter disenfranchisement, removing tools of leverage and power for people of color and their allies, and ultimately shoring up white control of government.

They don't BELIEVE the big lie; they believe in its power to cover their actions and justify their egregious, anti-democratic, racist actions. Policies that will disproportionately and negatively impact communities of color are racist policies. This is a racist lie; racist strategy; and racist outcome. 

Let's not miss the big picture here. Loyalty only begins to explain it. Trump doesn't just happen to be racist. He's the chosen leader of racists.