Enjoyment of Beauty...

"To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business - not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything else is flaking away into... rhetoric and plot."

- Elizabeth Gilbert (excerpt from Eat, Pray, Love.)

It Takes Courage

It takes strength to be firm,
It takes courage to be gentle.
It takes strength to conquer,
It takes courage to surrender.
It takes strength to be certain,
It takes courage to have doubt.
It takes strength to fit in,
It takes courage to stand out.
It takes strength to feel a friend's pain,
It takes courage to feel your own pain.
It takes strength to endure abuse,
It takes courage to stop it.
It takes strength to stand alone,
It takes courage to lean on another.
It takes strength to love,
It takes courage to be loved.
It takes strength to survive,
It takes courage to live.

- Author Unknown

Creative Magic

You are here today to bring possibilities to life. Through your focus and your action, you continually transform what can be into what is.

You are a finely tuned and highly effective instrument of creativity. Whatever you most intensely and persistently imagine, comes surely and steadily to life. It is completely natural for you to bring dreams into reality. For that is what you do.

The limitations you perceive create rock-solid obstacles as long as you choose to hold them. The possibilities you imagine with passion and purpose are expressed through your life as magnificent achievements.

Often without even realizing it, you work your creative magic. With every thought, every action, every moment, every experience, you add your own special gifts to life.

Fill your dreams with beauty, fill your thoughts with integrity, and fill your moments with loving purpose. For they are what your world is surely becoming.

-- Ralph Marston

Hall of Fame football coach

"Any man's finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on thefield of battle - victorious."

- Vince Lombardi (1913-1970)