worth quoting

[photo taken at Tufts University}

Courage
by Anne Sexton

It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

{i want the small but significant courage that anne sexton portrays in her poem. i want to be that little child taking the small steps, entering into the battle completely ill-equipped with a simple hat to protect me.

i like this poem because it shows courage in the little places, in the small things that are important and make us into more courageous people}

I would like to beg you...to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try and love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. and the point is to live everything. live the questions now. perhaps then, someday far in the future you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
-Rainer Rilke

{My dad sent me this quote while I was in Costa Rica. It now hangs on my wall and has blessed me immensly as I wrestle with questions, and wrestle with wrestling itslef, longing to be okay with the challenges of paradoxes and seeing so much gray instead of black and white. But what I love about this quote is that there is beauty in those questions and paradoxes - and I hope to be a person who seeks that beauty and instead of seeing "gray," is excited to be a part of coloring between the black and white}

Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave--that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing...What have I to leave you but the ruins of old courage, and the lore of old gallantry and hope? Well, as I have said, it is all an ember now, and the good Lord will surely someday breathe it into flame again.
-Marilyn Robinson, Gilead (p 246)

{Precious things have been put in my hands, and I hope to have the courage to make myself useful. And if you've read Gilead you know that the courage Robinson is speaking of is persevering through loneliness and learning to forgive. I want that courage too}