Life Reclamation Quotes

Life cracks us into unrecognizable shards of former incarnations. Slivers of our hurt and our pain and our shame nestles next to fragments of our truth, our divinity, our fierce reclamation of power. It is this very brokenness that allows us to knit together, kaleidoscope style. And we spin and shift and turn to the light until we appear brilliant, lit from within. Suddenly we are revealed; unexpected beauty born directly from brokenness. We have to be willing to break in order to become.

So many of us were taught to keep a lid on anything and everything outrageous. To just turn it off. We turn off our life force, turn off our feelings, turn off our sensuality, and as a consequence, we turn off our power.

One can easily forgive a child who’s afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light,

No matter how awakened you are, the conditioning roots are deep; very deep. Reclamation is a constant process.

They had to learn to see me as a sensual woman who desired a full, passionate life—not just a mother whose best years were behind her and whose future was limited to caring for grandchildren and other family members

Take them and claim their deaths as your reclamation to life.

Knowing yourself is first step towards self reclamation.

The feminine is the feeling part of us, our deepest intuition, our sense of community and connection. Additionally, it is a sense of spiritual morality and consciousness. The feminine is life. It may shock you to hear that she does not care about production, accomplishment, domination, assertiveness, or winning. Those are masculine values. On the contrary, she favors enjoyment, inclusion, surrender, and sustainability.

How about cunt? It just feels too harsh, even though the etymology of the word is pretty impressive. The word cuneiform, which is the most ancient form of writing, derives from kunta—which translates to “female genitalia” in ancient Sumerian. Kunta also means “woman” in several Near Eastern and African languages, and its alternate spelling, quna, is the root of the word queen. Kunta is also the root of kundalini, which means “life force.” Pretty powerful, huh?

Whether you know it or you don’t, whether you accept it or not, everything you do is about the reclamation of your own ‘soul’.

So much of a child’s life is lived for others. . . . All the reading I did as a child, behind closed doors, sitting on the bed while the darkness fell around me, was an act of reclamation. This and only this I did for myself. This was the way to make my life my own.

All of life is not a learning but a remembering. Remembering the knowledge built into our bones, the wisdom spliced into our genes. Recognizing lovers from past lives, rediscovering truths long ago experienced, recalling lessons learned and learned and learned. If we were born with the collective wisdom of the cosmos implanted in our being, our task is only this: to live and seek and love until we've removed barriers that unlock it all.

Throwing the leg of lamb out the window may have been Aunt Carol's outward expression of the process going on within her soul: the reclaiming of herself. Perhaps it was her way of saying how tired she was of waiting on her family, of signaling to them that she was past the cook/chauffeur/dishwasher stage of life. For many women, if not most, part of this reclamation process includes getting in touch with anger and, perhaps, blowing up at loved ones for the first time.

Living one’s desire is an adventure like no other. There are no safety nets, no seat belts. In fact, when you plight your troth to your desires, you’re kind of asking for it. You’re grabbing the hand of the Great Pussy in the Sky and asking to be broken open. Asking to be remade. Asking for the current version of you to be shattered and reassembled into the woman you were born to become. This is part of the life cycle of what it means to be a woman. Just as the seasons are cyclical, with winter as necessary as spring, and the sun and moon move in cycles, with times of light and times of darkness, so moves the body and soul of a woman. We each require the dark night of the soul as much as we require the light. The word I use to describe this undoing? Rupture.

For most of human history, when you were born you inherited an off-the-shelf package of religious and cultural constraints. This was a kind of library of limits that was embedded in your social and physical environment. These limits performed certain self-regulatory tasks for you so you didn’t have to take them on yourself. The packages included habits, practices, rituals, social conventions, moral codes, and a myriad of other constraints that had typically evolved over many centuries, if not millennia, to reliably guide – or shall we say design – our lives in the direction of particular values, and to help us give attention to the things that matter most. In the twentieth century the rise of secularism and modernism in the West occasioned the collapse – if not the jettisoning – of many of these off-the-shelf packages of constraints in the cause of the liberation of the individual. In many cases, this rejection occurred on the basis of philosophical or cosmological disagreements with the old packages. This has, of course, had many great benefits. Yet by rejecting entire packages of constraint, we’ve also rejected those constraints that were actually useful for our purposes. “The left’s project of liberation,” writes the American philosopher Matthew Crawford, “led us to dismantle inherited cultural jigs that once imposed a certain coherence (for better and worse) on individual lives. This created a vacuum of cultural authority that has been filled, opportunistically, with attentional landscapes that get installed by whatever ‘choice architect’ brings the most energy to the task – usually because it sees the profit potential.” The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, in his book You Must Change Your Life, has called for a reclamation of this particular aspect of religion – its habits and practices – which he calls “anthropotechnics.”6 When you dismantle existing boundaries in your environment, it frees you from their limitations, but it requires you to bring your own boundaries where you didn’t have to before. Sometimes, taking on this additional self-regulatory burden is totally worth it. Other times, though, the cost is too high. According to the so-called “ego-depletion” hypothesis, our self-control, our willpower, is a finite resource.7 So when the self-regulatory cost of bringing your own boundaries is high enough, it takes away willpower that could have been spent on something else.

Colonialism not only displaces our bodies from the practices, ways, and places that have affirmed our connection to the earth and sustained our self-determined livelihood for millennia, but also displaces our soul from its connective source and fundamental nature as a compass. This is also why the reclamation of earth-based practices and ancestral traditions is such a deep remembrance. It returns us to something essential, primordial in its truth, connective nurturance, and power, specific in its resonance; it repairs inherent roadmaps for respectful dignified life on this planet so that it may continue in integrity and reverence. Remembrance is not to recreate or romanticize the past, but to build futures anchored in the foundational truths that still determine our lives today, and the generational wisdom that is already in our bones to nurture it with autonomy and sovereignty. These skills have been stripped from us on purpose. For the longevity of our species and the many who live alongside us, we must reclaim them. Our places are what make us, and what teach us who we are and how to live well across the spheres of time. Original wounds require original medicine to heal.

Ali, of course, hasn't whipped every obstacle in his life. Only enough of them that we remember him as having done so.

As a final note, if you’re interested in going deeper into how we avoid, deny, and distrust life and how to start allowing who we are, you’ll enjoy my forthcoming book, Reclamation of Allowing.

sinner…and I ask for forgiveness…and I believe with my heart…what your word says…and I ask for that gift…of eternal life…come into my heart…and save me…thank you…in Jesus name…amen.

Whether we realize it or not, we women spend a lot of our lives trying to “get ours.” To get what we deserve, get what we want, get what we think we can’t have. The feeling of scarcity that comes from our sense of lack is a result of thinking that the only way to be in relationship is by serving our partners. But when we reverse that idea and learn how to maintain our own radiance, the desperation to “get ours” falls away. In other words, we’ve finally learned how to get ours. As a result we feel powerful and confident in all areas of our life.

He wished for the noise of the pile driver, the clattering of the conveyor belt. He wished for something to prove that life had changed. But it was as if nothing had changed, nothing would ever change (Heng 432).

But these concrete plans are byproducts of a deeper solution: the reclamation of each person’s calm, present, vastly resourceful true nature. As the poet David Whyte wrote, “What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make enough plans.

To put it a little more simply, much of the cure can be found in the isolation and then restoration of normal function in the prime life systems which have been compromised leading to disease. This is the central healing focus of the Un-Diet Diet program. It revolves around the stimulation of the natural restorative capacity inherently contained within each of the foundational requisites of life and health.

Goals are the roadmap to a successful life. If we have no fixed destinations, we can go on aimlessly forever and eventually arriving nowhere. It is important to be realistic, but don’t be afraid to stretch yourself. Let your mind drift a bit to find the most compelling reasons for you to complete the program and remain upon the earth.

Broward had been vilified by modern environmentalists for his intense assautl on the everglades, but he was considered a staunch conversvationist in his day. he supported strict laws to protect fish, game, birds, and oysters, and his top priority was the reclamation of a swamp for agriculture and envelopment. Brossard never stopped to think what draining the Everglades might do to the fish, game, birds, and oysters that lived there, but hardly anyone did. The conservationist John Giford dedicated his book of Everglades essays to Broward, explaining that “the man who makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before is the proverbial public benefactor, bu the man who inaugurates a movement to render 3,000,000 acres of waste land highly productive deserves endless commendation.” Broward was also a progressive- an anti railroad, anti corporation, anti-Flagler populist. His crusade for Everglades drainage was not just a fight for man against nature; it was a fight for ordinary Floridians angst’s the “seductive and enslaving power of corporate interests” who monopolized state lands without improving them. Flagler and other railroad barons, he complained, were “draining the people instead of the swamps” At a time when the richest one percent of Americans owned halfthe nation’s wealth, when forty-two corporate trusts controlled at least 70 percent of their industries, Broward wanted to turn the Everglades into a place where ordinary people could deprive their lot in life through hard work. That’s what he had done.

My reclamation would be accomplished, like Malcom's, through books, through my own study and exploration. Perhaps I might write something of consequence someday. I had been reading and writing beyond the purview of the schools all my life. Already I was scribbling down bad rap lyrics and bad poetry. The air of that time was charged with the call for a return, to old things, to something essential, some part of us that had been left behind in the mad dash out of the past and into America.

our dreams, our feelings. In short, it’s the absence of pussy. The feminine is the feeling part of us, our deepest intuition, our sense of community and connection. Additionally, it is a sense of spiritual morality and consciousness. The feminine is life. It may shock you to hear that she does not care about production, accomplishment, domination, assertiveness, or winning. Those are masculine values. On the contrary, she

Rupture is a natural part of life, and a natural consequence of desire. For whenever we get something we want, we must say good-bye to what we had. No matter how dissatisfying it might have been, it was familiar. Perhaps you desire a relationship, for example. When you finally meet someone and fall in love, your life as a single person must end. Just because you’ve gotten what you wanted doesn’t mean you’re going to feel uncomplicated joy. There will be a sense of loss as your former life disappears before your eyes. To move ahead as the happy half of a happy couple, you’ll need to mourn, even briefly, the world of being single. But

Stories are medicine… They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything—we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories. —Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD American author, Jungian psychoanalyst, and spoken word artist

If I asked you to come here again,” he said, “and let me be with you, would you?” There was no hesitation. “Yes.” “Even if things couldn’t be…normal…between us? Sexually speaking.” “Yes.” He frowned. “This is going to come out wrong….” “Which is fine, because I’ve already put my foot in it with you back at the clinic. We’ll just be even.” Rehv had to smile, but the expression didn’t stick. “I have to know…why. Why would you come back.” Ehlena lay back down against the pillows and, in a slow sweep, moved her hand up over the satin sheet that covered her stomach. “I have only one answer to that, but I don’t think it’s going to be what you want to hear.” The cold numbness, which was returning as the remnants of those orgasms he’d had dissipated, sped up its reclamation of his body. Please let it not be pity, he thought. “Tell me.” She was quiet for a long while, her stare shifting out toward the blinking, glowing view of Caldwell’s two halves. “You ask me why I would come back?” she said softly. “And the only answer I have is…how could I not.” Her eyes flipped to his. “It doesn’t make sense to me on some level, but then, feelings don’t make sense, do they? And they don’t have to. Tonight…you gave me things I not only haven’t had for a long time, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt.” She shook her head. “I wrapped up a body yesterday…a body of someone my own age, a body of someone who likely as not had headed out of his house the evening he was killed with no clue that it was his last night. I don’t know where this”—she gestured back and forth between them—“thing with us is going. Maybe it’s just a night or two. Maybe it’s a month. Maybe it’s longer than can be measured by a decade. All I know is, life is too short not to come back here and be with you like this again. Life is just too short, and I like being with you too much for me to give a crap about anything other than having another moment like this.” Rehvenge’s chest swelled as he stared at her. “Ehlena?” “Yeah?” “Don’t take this the wrong way.” She drew in a deep breath and he saw her bare shoulders tighten. “Okay. I’ll try not to.” “You keep showing up here? Being who you are?” There was a pause. “I’m going to fall in love with you.” -Rehv & Ehlena

Enough rationalization. They simply had what you wanted, so you took it. [My chair-- I shit on my good chair!] You shit more than just your chair. You shit the world. All you ever cared about was winning -- And you did. The last man standing on a mountain of filth [. . .] Kazumi taught forgiveness. She accepted all refugees looking for a better life. And you turned that against her. Kazumi would show mercy. I'm not Kazumi.

Keep your eyes on your own paper. It’s hard when so-and-so is doing the thing you want to do. And it’s worse when you realize you are rooting for them to fail because you’re jealous. Jealousy is a terrible feeling. Jealousy is how we morph into the worst, most petty versions of ourselves (and inevitably why we end up owing a few apologies). Never have I gone down the rabbit hole of creeping on somebody’s work or life or Instagram and come away feeling good…But it happens, and we’re human, and it’s easy to think that if you can chart out someone else’s trajectory to the top, you’ll learn what it takes to be them – or beat them. Every time I’ve acted out of jealousy, I’ve told myself it was an act of control or reclamation. And every time after the fact, I’ve felt spectacularly unhinged and out of control.

second-wave feminists, who believed Plath had turned the personal details of her life into overtly political art.

was the tragic lark of an irresponsible, wildly gifted artist who gambled her life for her art, and lost. In his letter to Wagner-Martin, Dr. Horder addresses this trend, calling it “so limited an explanation as to be nearly ridiculous.

Assia, living, and ultimately refusing to conform to the demands he made about the size and shape of her body, the way she spoke and dressed, and the role she played in his life, could not be espaliered.

The immediate correlation of Plath’s suicide with her poetry has trained us to hear the many voices she left behind as coming from beyond the grave, rather than as the record of her life—a unique form of censorship.

When Hughes tells Leeming he can access what Plath is thinking not just now but in the life she had prior to knowing him, we can read in this a classic sign of intimate partner violence, almost always rooted in a desire to know everything about one’s spouse so that one can wield power over that person.

In 1970, seventeen months after the deaths of Assia and Shura Wevill, Ted Hughes married Carol Orchard. She was twenty-two and he was forty. He left her on their wedding night to be with Brenda Hedden. This was the double life that Hughes was already leading by the time of Plath’s death. For Plath, it was intolerable. By February 1963, the only possible marriage left to them was Middlebrook’s resonant myth, where Hughes was Orpheus and Plath was dead. BIRTHDAY LETTERS HAS MOSTLY