Katrina Kenison quotes:

...there is no such thing as a charmed life, not for any of us, no matter where we live or how mindfully we attend to the tasks at hand. But there are charmed moments, all the time, in every life and in every day, if we are only awake enough to experience them when they come and wise enough to appreciate them.

we can learn to trust our maternal selves and to have faith in the innate goodness and purity of our children - even when we feel overwhelmed and the kids are pushing all our buttons. we can support one another....we can be understanding of each other and easier on ourselves.

we can learn to trust our maternal selves and to have faith in the innate goodness and purity of our children - even when we feel overwhelmed and the kids are pushing all our buttons. we can support one another.we can be understanding of each other and easier on ourselves.

It has taken awhile, but I certainly do know it now ­­â?? the most wonderful gift I had, the gift I finally learned to cherish above all else, was the gift of all those perfectly ordinary days.

Meaning and purpose come not from accomplishing great things in the world, but simply from loving those who are right in front of you, doing all you can with what you have, in the time you have, in the place where you are.

Reading, reading actively, strengthens the soul.

Solitude is the soul's holiday, an opportunity to stop doing for others and to surprise and delight ourselves instead.

We are the windows through which our children first see the world. Let us be conscious of the view.

This, I suspect, is the territory that lies just ahead and around the curve of today. A place where loss grows more familiar, where joy is harmonized by sorrow, where endings outnumber beginnings, and where kindness becomes a sacrament.

At times, my nostalgia for our family life as it used to be--for our own imperfect, cherished, irretrievable past--is nearly overwhelming.

I want to hold on tight to everything and everyone I cherished and, at the same time, saw in a way I never had before that living on this earth, growing older, and growing up in the true sense of the word is really about learning how to let go.

As I loosen my grip on the past, as I keep taking one small step after another in the direction I want to go, I discover I'm being supported and guided after all, and that as soon as I'm willing to embrace change, something or someone comes along and shows me how. Magic wasn't something I had to go in search of; it was here within me, all the time. When hearts are open, when love is flowing, magic happens.

Growth and transformation occur not by changing who we are, but as we summon the courage to be who we are.

I can only bring peace to my children when I possess it myself.

I know I can't make time slow down, can't hold our life as it is in a freeze frame or slow my children's inexorable journeys into adulthood and lives of their own. But I can celebrate those journeys by bearing witness to them, by paying attention, and, perhaps most of all, by carrying on with my own growth and becoming. Now it dawns on me that the only way I can figure out what I'm meant to be doing is to try to understand who I'm meant to be...I will not waste this life, not one hour, not one minute. I will not take for granted the blessing of our being here...I will give thanks...

I take the seashell from my jeans pocket and rub my fingers across its silken, indented surface, shallow as my own open hand. This chalice, subtly shaped by some divine intelligence to allow water to flow in and out with ease, is what I aspire to become: a vessel through which feelings can pour in and spill right out again, without all the grasping and holding that obstructs the flow. Can I be as serene and simple as this bleached shell, rubbed smooth by wind and water, receiving and releasing, filling and emptying and filling again, eternally receptive to the currents of life?

In simplicity, there is freedom - freedom to do less and enjoy more.

In stillness, we find our peace. Knowing peace at home, we bring peace into the world.

Life finds its balance. Children grow up. Second chances come along. In the meantime, I could choose to savor this moment. What good would it do to allow annoyance to interfere with gratitude?

Magic wasn't something I had to go in search of; it was here, within me, all the time. When hearts are open, when love is flowing, magic happens.

Now I see that the journey was never meant to lead to some new and improved version of me; that it has always been about coming home to who I already am.

One of the greatest challenges I've faced as a mother-especially in these anxious, winner-takes-all times-is the need to resist the urge to accept someone else's definition of success and to try to figure out, instead, what really is best for my own children, what unique combination of structure and freedom, nurturing and challenge, education and exploration, each of them needs in order to grow and bloom.

One thing we've learned this summer is that a house is not an end in itself, any more than "home" is just one geographic location where things feel safe and familiar. Home can be anyplace in which we create our own sense of rest and peace as we tend to the spaces in which we eat and sleep and play. It is a place that we create and re-create in every moment, at every stage of our lives, a place where the plain and common becomes cherished and the ordinary becomes sacred.

Perhaps the real point of life is simply to wear us down until we have no choice but to start abandoning our defenses. We learn that the way things are is simply the way they are meant to be right now, and then, suddenly, at long last, we catch a glimpse of the abundance in the moment--abundance even in the face of things falling apart.

Stay focused on what is beautiful and abundant even as illness carves more and more of what you love away

When we focus on what is good and beautiful in someone, whether or not we think that they "deserve" it, the good and beautiful are strengthened merely by the light of our attention.

Alone-in moments of prayer or meditation, or simply in stillness-we breathe more deeply, see more fully, hear more keenly. We notice more, and in the process, we return to what is sacred.