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I'm a simple person who enjoys life's simple pleasures. Music, the beauty of the world coming to life in the spring, my son's smile...my three favorite things in the world, followed only slightly by a clear moonlit sky. I love my family, my friends who have become like family, and myself, finally.

I don't ask for much - Love, a good book, my guitar, time with those who mean the most to me: these are life's necessities, to feel as though my life has purpose, to dream, to fly...

I'm a worrier, a dreamer, a poet, a musician, a mother, a daughter, a sister, a hopeless romantic. Love is the only thing that lasts forever.


Quotes which inspire me:

**We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. -- T.S. Eliot

**There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. -- Albert Einstein

**Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. -- Carl Jung

**We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are. -- Talmud

**This is the true joy in life: the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no 'brief candle' to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. -- George Bernard Shaw

**Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do. -- Voltaire

**Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.
- Voltaire

**You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Mahatma Ghandi

**In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in an clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth. -- Mahatma Ghandi

**True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness. -- Albert Einstein

**To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men. -- Albert Einstein

**Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments: love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. -- William Shakespeare

**Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much. -- Alan Paton

**I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true. -- Luigi Pirandello

**Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me. -- Alice Walker

**The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. -- Elie Wiesel

**I tell you: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star.
- Nietzsche

**Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue. -- Plato

**This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness. -- Dalai Lama

**But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. -- Kahlil Gibran

**Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. -- Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

**I tell you everything that is really nothing, and nothing of what is everything, do not be fooled by what I am saying. Please listen carefully and try to hear what I am not saying. -- Charles C. Finn

**I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. -- Richard Wright

**Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. -- Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821

**Love withers under constraints. Its very essence is liberty; it is comparable neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear; it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited where its votaries are in confidence, equality and unreserve.
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

**There are moments when one feels free from one's own identification with
human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only Being.
-- Albert Einstein

**The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. --Anaïs Nin



The Rules for Being Human

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period this time around.

2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a fulltime informal school called life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant and stupid.

3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error, experimentation. The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately "works."

4. A lesson is repeated until learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.

5. Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive there are lessons to be learned.

6. "There" is no better than "here." When your "there" has become a "here" you will simply obtain another "there" that will again look better than "here."

7. Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.

8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.

9. Your answers lie inside you. The answer to life's questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.

10. This will often be forgotten, only to be remembered again.
(Cherie Carter-Scott)



AP Family:
Mom: ViciousWarrior
Dad: MasterDeviant
Grandfather: The Grimm Poet
Grandmother: Sock
Siblings: Jim, Bob, Sally, Joe, Kate, Ron, Harry, Dick, Bong, Schlong, Cannabis, and Maggie
Uncles on Dad's side: EmeraldJewel
Uncles on Mom's side: Korvair Blackheart, The Molt, I.n.k-W.e.a.v.e.r (Duchess De Swagga's hubby)
Aunts on Mom's side: Daughter Bastet, Strawberry Jam, Duchess De Swagga, Secret.
Great Aunt: ComaTwinSnickies
Great Uncle: The Rivaling Mimic
Godmother: billy badass
Godfather: Blindtruth
Cousins on Mom's side: BrokenXandXdefeated, lolita-button, MattsTeddyBear, IchigoKurosaki



My mother was a poet and I wish my words could begin to be the equal of hers:


Don't listen to the foolish unbelievers
who say forget.
Take up your armful of roses and
remember them
the flower and the fragrance
When you go home to do your sitting
in the corner by the clock
and sip your rose-thorn tea
It will warm your face and fingers
and burn the bottom of your belly
But as her gone-ness piles in white,
crystal drifts,
It will be the blossom of her moment
the warmth in your belly
the tiny fingers unfolding
the new face you've always known
That has changed you
Take her moment, and hold it
as every mother does
she will always be
your daughter
And when the sitting is done you'll find
bitter grief could never poison
the sweetness of her time.

-Sheila Franklin Thacker

She was my best friend and my inspiration. I miss you, Mama.