Here's the content from our industry-exclusive inspiration page for September 2009! We welcome your pages and look forward to seeing what you create on this subject. Please join us at Inside Out to share your LOs and your heart with us!
Tomorrow - the launch of our October 2009 Kit - LOSS.
You can see the Design Team's September LOs here. You'll need to login, but it's worth it! :)
Journaling Prompts
Love and Desire:
One of the experiences most often featured in poetry, music and literature is unrequited love. Yearning is probably the most accurate word to describe the pain of separation and loss felt by someone in love with someone who doesn’t return their feelings. Sometimes, those who do love each other are separated by distance or the wishes or demands of others. Or love can be lost by death or divorce. What experiences have you had with love gained, lost or desired? What words other than yearning describe the emotions you’ve felt under these difficult circumstances?
Be Careful What You Wish For:
There are so many things we desire throughout our lives. What have you wanted most and ached for. Of those things, which desires have you realized, and which have been outside your reach? Have you been in a situation where you’ve desired a certain outcome and then been surprised or disappointed by getting what you thought you wanted? What do you want most now, and do you ever think about what it might mean if it turns out that it’s not what you expect?
Fame, Fortune, Love:
There are so many things to yearn for throughout life…some of us want to be famous writers or actors, some of us want the wealth that we think will bring us happiness or freedom, and some of us want to feel safe and secure in the arms of a loved one. If you HAD to choose only one thing, what would you choose? What do you have now, and what do you still want? DO you ever feel envious of others who possess what you yearn for?
The Big Picture:
What yearnings and desires do you have that extend outside yourself to what you want for your family, friends and the larger world around you? It is sometimes hard to separate our own wants from those of others, especially when we want the best for them. How do you maintain your boundaries? Have others in your life ever imposed their desires on you? Did you give in, or argue, and how did that impact your relationship? What do you wish the larger world would know, appreciate and understand to make life easier and more peaceful?
Quotes
A happy life is one spent in learning, earning, and yearning. Lillian Gish
When the yearning for living ends, there can be no more birth. Sri Sathya Sai Baba
I seldom think about my limitations, and they never make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times; but it is vague, like a breeze among flowers. Helen Keller
I am never long, even in the society of her I love, without yearning for the company of my lamp and my library. Lord Byron
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries. Iris Murdoch
At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one's lost self. Brendan Francis
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Emma Lazarus
Books may be burned and cities sacked, but truth like the yearning for freedom, lives in the hearts of humble men and women. Franklin D. Roosevelt
Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time. John Steinbeck
I follow in the footsteps of those who enjoy the Love of my Beloved. I beg of them, I implore them; I have such a yearning to meet God!. Sri Guru Granth Sahib
That cry of the soul to be lifted out of the bondage of the narrow circle of life, which carries up to God the protest and yearning of suffering man, never finds a more sublime expression than where humanity is oppressed and religion is corrupt. Hall Caine
When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race. Margaret Sanger
Yearning for the seemingly impossible is the path to human progress. Bryant H. McGill
Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning. Alice Raine
I know not what you believe of God, but I believe He gave yearnings and longings to be filled, and that He did not mean all our time should be devoted to feeding and clothing the body. Alton Swann
There is a need to find and sing our own song, to stretch our limbs and shake them in a dance so wild that nothing can roost there, that stirs the yearning for solitary voyage. Barbara Lazear Ascher
In all ranks of life the human heart yearns for the beautiful; and the beautiful things that God makes are his gift to all alike. Harriet Beecher Stowe
The best antidote I have found is to yearn for something. As long as you yearn, you can't congeal: there is a forward motion to yearning. Gail Godwin
That man is a creature who needs order yet yearns for change is the creative contradiction at the heart of the laws which structure his conformity and define his deviancy. Freda Adler
I empathize with those who yearn for a simpler world, for some bygone golden age of domestic and international tranquility. But for the mass of humanity it is an age that never was. Shirley Hufstedler
Someone who goes with a half a loaf of bread to a small place that fits like a nest around him, someone who wants no more, who's not himself longed for by anyone else, He is a letter to everyone. You open it. It says, LIVE. Rumi
We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.” Jimmy Carter
We live in a world that responds to our longing; it is a place where the echoes always return, even if sometimes slowly. John O'Donohue
Feeling and longing are the motive forces behind all human endeavor and human creations. Albert Einstein
The first half of life is spent in longing for the second - the second half in regretting the first. French Proverb
Strangely enough, this is the past that somebody in the future is longing to go back to. Ashleigh Brilliant
There is a space between man's imagination and man's attainment that may only be traversed by his longing. Kahlil Gibran
There is a third dimension to traveling, the longing for what is beyond. Jan Myrdal
The desire is thy prayers; and if thy desire is without ceasing, thy prayer will also be without ceasing. The continuance of your longing is the continuance of your prayer. Saint Augustine
The chemist who can extract from his heart's elements compassion, respect, longing, patience, regret, surprise, and forgiveness and compound them into one can create that atom which is called love. Kahlil Gibran
To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God's hand, his brain as God's brain, his purpose as God's purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ. George Bernard Shaw
There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for. Saul Bellow
A feeling of sadness and longing that is not akin to pain, and resembles sorrow only as the mist resembles the rain. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and though they are with you yet they belong not to you. Kahlil Gibran
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. Bertrand Russell
Happiness is the longing for repetition. Milan Kundera
All lovers live by longing, and endure; summon a vision and declare it pure. Theodore Roethke
Longing is like the rosy dawn. After the dawn out comes the sun. Longing is followed by the vision of God. Ramakrishna
And a nameless longing filled her breast, - A wish, that she hardly dared to own, for something better than she had known. John Greenleaf Whittier
Is there anything better than to be longing for something, when you know it is within reach? Greta Garbo
The act of longing for something will always be more intense than the requiting of it. Gail Godwin
To put meaning in one's life may end in madness, But life without meaning is the torture of restlessness and vague desire-It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid. Edgar Lee Masters
Yet, it ought to be obvious that good music generally occupies a higher plane that mere politics. Great writers can express moods through melody and capture experiences we share most powerfully - love, lust, longing; joy, rage, fear; triumph, yearning and confusion. Tony Snow
Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart. Mahatma Gandhi
The Creator has not given you a longing to do that which you have no ability to do. Orison Swett Marden
There is no past that we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternally new now that builds and creates itself out of the Best as the past withdraws. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Music Playlist
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