Mosaic Pieces Quotes

We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves.

We’re all a little broken, Briana. We are a mosaic. We’re made up of all those we’ve met and all the things we’ve been through. There are parts of us that are colorful and dark and jagged and beautiful. And I love every piece of you. Even the ones you wish didn’t exist.

We are mosaics. Pieces of light, love, history, stars... Glued together with magic and music and words.

Fuck the usual. I don't want to be picture-perfect with you. I want to be a fucking mosaic, made up of broken pieces so damn colorful, you can't help finding them beautiful.

We are mosaics - pieces of light, love, history, stars -- glued together with magic and music and words.

...but beautiful mosaics are made of broken pieces.

Life has a way of shattering our expectations, of leaving our hopes in pieces without explanation. But when there's love in a family, the fragments left behind from our shattered dreams can always be pulled together again, even if the end result is a mosaic.

Am I just a mosaic of myself, held in the shape of a whole person?

We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves.

I see the fragmented beauty of grace in their lives despite continued struggles. Beautiful mosaics formed by broken pieces.

Music is, for me, like a beautiful mosaic which God has put together. He takes all the pieces in his hand, throws them into the world, and we have to recreate the picture from the pieces.

Why are we, with all our "progress," so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform? ... I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be. And maybe I will never find it all in one culture but maybe I find parts of it in several cultures, maybe I can piece it together like a mosaic and unveil it to the world.

To be anorexic...she thought, amounted to wanting to shed yourself of some of the imperfect mosaic of pieces that made you who you were. She could understand that now for, maybe underneath that desquamated self you would locate a new version.

The crash all those years ago shattered the life I had, but the pieces wound up making a pretty good mosaic. That's what art is, I suppose: transforming things from what they were into what they could be. My life now, without question, is transformed. Maybe that makes it a work of art.

Your life is like a mosaic, a puzzle. You have to figure out where the pieces go and put them together for yourself.

I don't want to be picture-perfect with you. I want to be a fucking mosaic, made up of broken pieces so damn colorful you can't help finding them beautiful.

I’ve come to acknowledge my brokenness; I don’t try piecing myself together as if I’m normal. Instead I make a mosaic with the broken pieces of myself.

Today Means Amen Dear you, whoever you are, however you got here, this is exactly where you are supposed to be. This moment has waited its whole life for you. This moment is your lover and you are a soldier. Come home, baby, it's over. You don't need to suffer anymore. Dear you, this moment is your surprise party. You are both hiding in the dark and walking through the door. This moment is a hallelujah. This moment is your permission slip to finally open that love letter you've been hiding from yourself, the one you wrote when you were little when you still danced like a sparkler at dusk. Do you remember the moment you realized they were watching? When you became ashamed of how much light you were holding? When you first learned how to unlove yourself? Dear you, the word today means amen in every language. Today, we made it. Today, I'm going to love you. Today, I'm going to love myself. Today, the boxcutter will rust in the garbage. The noose will forget how to hold you, today, today-- Dear you, and I have always meant you, nothing would be the same if you did not exist. You, whose voice is someone's favorite voice, someone's favorite face to wake up to. Nothing would be the same if you did not exist. You, the teacher, the starter's gun, the lantern in the night who offers not a way home, but the courage to travel farther into the dark. You, the lover, who worships the taste of her body, who is the largest tree ring in his heart, who does not let fear ration your love. You, the friend, the sacred chorus of how can I help. You, who have felt more numb than holy, more cracked than mosaic. Who have known the tiles of a bathroom by heart, who have forgotten what makes you worth it. You, the forgiven, the forgiver, who belongs right here in this moment. You, this clump of cells, this happy explosion that happened to start breathing, and by the grace of whatever is up there, you got here. You made it this whole way: through the nights that swallowed you whole, the mornings that arrived in pieces. The scabs, the gravel, the doubt, the hurt, the hurt, the hurt is over. Today, you made it. You made it. You made it here.

Solitude became, for me, an interesting mosaic of broken pieces, a place where the neglected parts of myself get collected—for better and for worse, sometimes barely tolerated and sometimes arranged into lovely patterns.

I was in Sarasota, Florida, on a spring-break trip with my friends Bruce and Karen Moore. Bruce and I were waiting on the beach for the rest of our crew when and a man and his grown kids came strolling up the sand. They looked at me for a minute, sort of hesitating, and then asked, "Would you mind taking a picture?" "Sure," I said, and quickly arranged all of us in a line, putting myself in the middle and motioning to Bruce to come snap the photo. Right about that time, the father said, "Actually, we were wondering if you could take a picture just of us." An understandable mistake on my part, but really embarrassing. Bruce has had a field day reminding me of that one ever since. Lesson learned: Never assume anything about your own importance. It's a great big world, and all of us are busy living our lives. None of us knows all the time and effort that another person puts into his or her passion.

We are all a little broken. We are a mosaic. We're made up of all those we've met and all the things we've been through. There are parts of us that are colorful and dark and jagged and beautiful. And I love every piece of you. Even the ones you wish didn't exist.

…but beautiful mosaics are made of broken pieces.

Thus Milton refines the question down to a matter of faith," said Coleridge, bringing the lecture to a close, "and a kind of faith more independent, autonomous - more truly strong, as a matter of fact - than the Puritans really sought. Faith, he tells us, is not an exotic bloom to be laboriously maintained by the exclusion of most aspects of the day to day world, nor a useful delusion to be supported by sophistries and half-truths like a child's belief in Father Christmas - not, in short, a prudently unregarded adherence to a constructed creed; but rather must be, if anything, a clear-eyed recognition of the patterns and tendencies, to be found in every piece of the world's fabric, which are the lineaments of God. This is why religion can only be advice and clarification, and cannot carry any spurs of enforcement - for only belief and behavior that is independently arrived at, and then chosen, can be praised or blamed. This being the case, it can be seen as a criminal abridgement of a person's rights willfully to keep him in ignorance of any facts - no piece can be judged inadmissible, for the more stones, both bright and dark, that are added to the mosaic, the clearer is our picture of God.

I’ve always thought of mosaic as this big metaphor for my life,” she says. “All these jagged, incongruous pieces…” She holds up a small shard of milky jade-green glass. “These are like the things that happen to you. But if it’s laid out a certain way and if you take a step back from it, it makes sense.

He’s flying through Norway. Notice the fjords I created with hundreds of individually cut-out gray mosaic pieces? It’s daylight there in the winter, it would be untruthful to have the night sky be so dark.

Who can find a proper grave for such damaged mosaics of the mind, where they may rest in pieces? Life goes on, but in two temporal directions at once, the future unable to escape the grip of a memory laden with grief.”31

There is good even in church people. You find it hard to believe, right? Jesus never shut the door on religious people. He just made sure that they understand He was that door, and not their deeds and tasks. Some of us, even I, need to be reminded of this. This being understood, the people of the church are like broken pieces of glass fixed into beautiful mosaic to reflect Jesus. The picture is beautiful, but the pieces do indeed still have sharp edges that can cut.

I know that the history of man is not his technical triumphs, his kills, his victories. It is a composite, a mosaic of a trillion pieces, the account of each man’s accommodation with his conscience. This is the true history of the race.

Being a mosaic does not necessarily mean scattering into pieces, answered Elder Innokenty. It is only up close that each separate little stone seems not to be connected to the others. There is something more important in each of them, O Laurus: striving for the one who looks from afar. For the one who is capable of seizing all the small stones at once. It is he who gathers them with his gaze. That, O Laurus, is how it is in your life, too. You have dissolved yourself in God. You disrupted the unity of your life, renouncing your name and your very identity. But in the mosaic of your life there is also something that joins all these separate parts: it is an aspiration for Him. They will gather together again in Him.

When suffering shatters the carefully kept vase that is our lives, God stoops to pick up the pieces. But he doesn't put them back together as a restoration project patterned after our former selves. Instead, he sifts through the rubble and selects some of the shards as raw material for another project-a mosaic that tells the story of redemption.

Sylvia Plath's greatest poetry was sometimes conceived while she was baking bread, she was such a perfectionist and ultimately such a fool. The trouble is, of course, that the role of the goddess, the role of the glory and the grandeur of the female in the universe exists in the fantasy of the male artist and no woman can ever draw it to her heart for comfort, but the role of menial, unfortunately, is real and that she knows because she tastes it everyday. So the barbaric yawp of utter adoration for the power and the glory and the grandeur of the female in the universe is uttered at the expense of the particular living woman every time. And because we can be neither one nor the other with any piece of mind, because we are unfortunately improper goddesses and unwilling menials, there is a battle waged between us. And after all, in the description of this battle, maybe I find the justification of my idea that the achievement of the male artistic ego is at my expense for I find that the battle is dearer to him than the peace would ever be. The eternal battle with women, he boasts, sharpens our resistance, develops our strength, enlarges the scope of our cultural achievements. So is the scope after all worth it? Again, the same question, just as if we were talking of the income of a thousand families for a whole year. You see, I strongly suspect that when this revolution takes place, art will no longer be distinguished by its rarity, or its expense, or its inaccessibility, or the extraordinary way which in it is marketed, it will be the prerogative of all of us and we will do it as those artists did whom Freud understood not at all, the artists who made the Cathedral of Chartres or the mosaics of Byzantine, the artist who had no ego and no name.

I don’t want to be picture-perfect with you. I want to be a mosaic, made up of broken pieces so damn colorful, you can’t help finding them beautiful

Our heroes move with fractured parts and pieces, too, we just follow in collective awe as they bend and shape them into comely mosaics.

All of our jagged pieces might not have fit together perfectly, but what a beautiful, disastrous mosaic we made.

There’s a certain vulgarity in assigning worth to any individual life when each represents a piece in the mosaic of the whole.

She never moved in pieces like a mosaic She moved whole like a sculpture But it was next to impossible With her limited means even if she had started And besides They were watching

Stories,” she blurted. “The mosaic told stories, didn’t it?” “Yes, old ones.” “I’ll tell them to you.” His eyes cracked open. He didn’t remember closing them. “You know those tales?” “Yes.” She didn’t. This became clear as she began to tell them. She knew bits and pieces, cobbled together in ways that would have made him smile if smiling didn’t hurt. “You,” he breathed, “are such a faker.” “Don’t interrupt.” Mostly pure invention. She remembered the images--it pleased him, how vividly she knew the temple floor’s details. Which god curled around which, or how the snake’s tongue forked into three. But the stories she told had little to do with his religion. Sometimes they didn’t even make sense. “Do this again,” he said, “when I have strength to laugh.” “As bad as that?” “Mmm. Maybe not. For a Valorian.

I know people who read interminably, book after book, from page to page, and yet I should not call them 'well-read people'. Of course they 'know' an immense amount; but their brain seems incapable of assorting and classifying the material which they have gathered from books. They have not the faculty of distinguishing between what is useful and useless in a book; so that they may retain the former in their minds and if possible skip over the latter while reading it, if that be not possible, then--when once read--throw it overboard as useless ballast. Reading is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Its chief purpose is to help towards filling in the framework which is made up of the talents and capabilities that each individual possesses. Thus each one procures for himself the implements and materials necessary for the fulfilment of his calling in life, no matter whether this be the elementary task of earning one's daily bread or a calling that responds to higher human aspirations. Such is the first purpose of reading. And the second purpose is to give a general knowledge of the world in which we live. In both cases, however, the material which one has acquired through reading must not be stored up in the memory on a plan that corresponds to the successive chapters of the book; but each little piece of knowledge thus gained must be treated as if it were a little stone to be inserted into a mosaic, so that it finds its proper place among all the other pieces and particles that help to form a general world-picture in the brain of the reader. Otherwise only a confused jumble of chaotic notions will result from all this reading. That jumble is not merely useless, but it also tends to make the unfortunate possessor of it conceited. For he seriously considers himself a well-educated person and thinks that he understands something of life. He believes that he has acquired knowledge, whereas the truth is that every increase in such 'knowledge' draws him more and more away from real life, until he finally ends up in some sanatorium or takes to politics and becomes a parliamentary deputy. Such a person never succeeds in turning his knowledge to practical account when the opportune moment arrives; for his mental equipment is not ordered with a view to meeting the demands of everyday life. His knowledge is stored in his brain as a literal transcript of the books he has read and the order of succession in which he has read them. And if Fate should one day call upon him to use some of his book-knowledge for certain practical ends in life that very call will have to name the book and give the number of the page; for the poor noodle himself would never be able to find the spot where he gathered the information now called for. But if the page is not mentioned at the critical moment the widely-read intellectual will find himself in a state of hopeless embarrassment. In a high state of agitation he searches for analogous cases and it is almost a dead certainty that he will finally deliver the wrong prescription.

In the midst of this flow, I'm aware of myself as one tiny piece in the gigantic mosaic of nature. I'm just a replaceable natural phenomenon, like the water in the river that flows under the bridge toward the sea.

Who can find a proper grave for such damaged mosaics of the mind, where they may rest in pieces? Life goes on, but in two temporal directions at once, the future unable to escape the grip of a memory laden in grief.

Valor and I were so broken that our pieces had found a way to mend each other. Our story was a tragically beautiful mosaic created from trauma. It’s why we were so connected. There were pieces of me holding hers together and vice versa.

Life has a way of shattering our expectations, of leaving our hopes in pieces without explanation. But when there's love in a family, the fragments left behind from our shattered dreams can always be pulled together again, even if the end result is a mosaic.

Life has a way of shattering our expectations, of leaving our hopes in pieces without explanation. But when there’s love in a family, the fragments left behind from our shattered dreams can always be pulled together again, even if the end result is a mosaic.

The course and affairs of our individual life, in view of their true meaning and connection, are like a piece of crude work in mosaic. So long as one stands close in front of it, one can not correctly see the objects presented, or perceive their importance and beauty; it is only by standing some distance away that both come into view. And in the same way one often understands the true connection of important events in one’s own life, not while they are happening, or even immediately after they have happened, but only a long time afterwards.

The feeling that with Priest, every piece of me, dark and light, sweet and bitter, saintly and sinful was glued together by his acceptance into a beautiful mosaic. That feeling that with him, I’d never been so beautiful and whole. We were two broken halves that locked together in a way that could never be undone.

Being a mosaic does not necessarily mean scattering into pieces, answered Elder Innokenty. It is only up close that each separate little stone seems not to be connected to the others. There is something more important in each of them, O Laurus: striving for the one who looks from afar. For the one who is capable of seizing all the small stones at once. It is he who gathers them with his gaze. That, O Laurus, is how it is in your life, too. You have dissolved yourself in God. You disrupted the unity of your life, renouncing your name and your very identity. But in the mosaic of your life there is also something that joins all those separate parts: it is an aspiration for Him. They will gather together again in Him.

By God’s design, the Scripture presents the messiah in terms of a mosaic profile that can only be discerned after the pieces are assembled. Paul tells us why in 1 Corinthians 2:6–8. If the plan of God for the messiah’s mission had been clear, the powers of darkness would never have killed Jesus—they would have known that his death and resurrection were the key to reclaiming the nations forever.

[T]he information acquired through reading must not be stored up in the memory, corresponding to the successive chapters of the book. Rather, each little piece of knowledge thus gained must be treated as if it were a stone to be inserted into a mosaic, so that it finds its proper place among all the other elements that form a general worldview in the reader's mind. Otherwise only a confused jumble of chaotic notions will result from all this reading. That jumble is not merely useless, but it also tends to make the unfortunate possessor of it conceited.

By far, the most important distortions and confabulations of memory are those that serve to justify and explain our own lives. The mind, sense-making organ that it is, does not interpret our experiences as if they were shattered shards of glass; it assembles them into a mosaic. From the distance of years, we see the mosaic’s pattern. It seems tangible, unchangeable; we can’t imagine how we could reconfigure those pieces into another design. But it is a result of years of telling our story, shaping it into a life narrative that is complete with heroes and villians, an account of how we came to be the way we are. Because that narrative is the way we understand the world and our place in it, it is bigger than the sum of its parts. If on part, one memory, is shown to be wrong, people have to reduce the resulting dissonance and even rethink the basic mental category: you mean Dad (Mom) wasn’t such a bad (good) person after all? You mean Dad (Mom) was a complex human being? The life narrative may be fundamentally true; Your father or mother might really have been hateful, or saintly. The problem is that when the narrative becomes a major source of self-justification, one the storyteller relies on to excuse mistakes and failings, memory becomes warped in its service. The storyteller remembers only the confirming examples of the parent’s malevolence and forgets the dissonant instances of the parent’s good qualities. Over time, as the story hardens, it becomes more difficult to see the whole parent — the mixture of good and bad, strengths and flaws, good intentions and unfortunate blunders. Memories create our stories, but our stories also create our memories.

But this raises the question of what happens when the mosaic of faith shatters into a thousand, a million jagged pieces. When the quest for common good devolves into bespoke kindness designed to advance a particular cause for a particular person. Or when citizens forsake all the news that’s fit to print for only the news they want to hear. All of these amount to a challenge to efforts at collective action. And from climate change to rising inequality, the enormous challenges that we face demand collective action and a new shared way of thinking about the accretion and use of power.

horrified, indulgent, and relentless, and pulls Tony inside out like a sock. It takes time, because Tony has no single clear image of her mother. The memory of her is composed of shiny fragments, like a vandalized mosaic, or like something brittle that’s been dropped on the floor. Every once in a while Tony takes out the pieces and arranges and rearranges them, trying to make them fit. (Though she hasn’t spent very long at this yet. The wreck is too immediate.) So all Zenia can get out of her is a handful of shards. Why does she want such a thing? That’s for Zenia to know and Tony to find out. But, in the entranced and voluble moment, it doesn’t occur to Tony even to ask.

Standing up from his recline on his Harley, he was already moving toward me, pulled to me as if by some gravitational force. The force of love, my romantic heart whispered. I didn’t care what name I gave to it: love, worship, obsession. It all boiled down to one thing, one feeling that struck me the moment he clutched me in a hard, possessive embrace right there on the Linley’s stoop. The feeling that with Priest, every piece of me, dark and light, sweet and bitter, saintly and sinful was glued together by his acceptance into a beautiful mosaic. That feeling that with him, I’d never been so beautiful and whole. We were two broken halves that locked together in a way that could never be undone.

Let’s say it was May in the first decade of the hardly promising twenty-first century, and a white stucco wall, corsaged in bougainvillea and lit up by the moon, enticed them downhill a long way past gated properties to a wider road, then down that road and across it on the other side to the lookout onto the sparkle that was the city and what lay before them at the liftoff of another beginning, which feeling they would experience again, until decades shrank to pieces of colored stone, mosaics unexpected and unfitted yet shellacked together and made to glow alike in recollection so that all she had known of love and the end of love could be summoned and summed up in a ceiling pinked in sulfurous light.

I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be. And maybe I will never find it all in one culture but maybe I can find parts of it in several cultures, maybe I can piece it together like a mosaic and unveil it to the world. But the world is deaf. The world—and really I mean the West—has no interest in change or self-improvement and my role it seems to me on a dark day like today is merely to document these oddball cultures in the nick of time, just before Western mining and agriculture annihilates them. And then I fear that this awareness of their impending doom alters my observations, laces all of it with a morose nostalgia.

I sensed in it an absolute rest for the spirit, a beatifica- tion of the flesh. Summer, white clouds, the empty blue of the sky following the final lesson of the day, and the touch of nostalgic sadness tinging the glitter of sunlight filtering through the trees, induced a sense of intoxication. I existed.. . . How complex were the procedures necessary to attain this existence! Within it, a large number of concepts that for me were close to fetishes achieved direct association with my body and senses, quite independently of the agency of words. The army, physical training, summer, clouds, sunset, the green of summer grasses, the white training suit, sweat, muscle, and just the faintest whiff of death. . . . Nothing was lacking; every piece of the mosaic was in place. I had absolutely no need of any others, and thus no need of words. The world I was in was made up of conceptual elements that were as pure as angels; all foreign elements had been temporarily swept aside, and I overflowed with the infinite joy of being one with the world, a joy akin to that produced by cold water on skin warmed by the summer sun.

Final Cause is the reason, the interest in why you do what you do, your hope for how things turn out—how you imagine your best future. Final Cause is more than the goal of the goal—it’s the effectual living beyond the goal. Final Cause is the success after the success. Final Cause is the place where your time is spent on your values. Final Cause is where misaligned commitments are reexamined. Final Cause is purpose. Final Cause helps you integrate your purpose into everything you do—even before you’ve finished the puzzle to your big-picture dream. Puzzles are put together one piece at a time, not in one big block—and so are dreams. Final Cause helps you identify the big-picture dream, and Time Tipping helps you put together the oddly shaped interlocking pieces. The mosaic of our dreams draws closer as we draw the mosaic wide awake. Final Cause is your intangible expression of joyful living—that feeling of starting something new harmonizing with the fulfillment of accomplishment. To Time Tippers, Final Cause is not the end—it’s both the end and the beginning. The end informs the beginning so you can begin living the values of the end from the beginning.

Isis in Darkness, he writes. The Genesis. It exalts him simply to form the words. He will exist for her at last, he will be created by her, he will have a place in her mythology after all. It will not be what he once wanted: not Osiris, not a blue-eyed god with burning wings. His are humbler metaphors. He will only be the archaeologist; not part of the main story, but the one who stumbles upon it afterwards, making his way for his own obscure and battered reasons through the jungle, over the mountains, across the desert, until he discovers at last the pillaged and abandoned temple. In the ruined sanctuary, in the moonlight, he will find the Queen of Heaven and Earth and the Underworld lying in shattered white marble on the floor. He is the one who will sift through the rubble, groping for the shape of the past. He is the one who will say it has meaning. That too is a calling, that also can be a fate. He picks up a filing-card, jots a small footnote on it in his careful writing, and replaces it neatly in the mosaic of paper he is making across his desk. His eyes hurt. He closes them and rests his forehead on his two fisted hands, summoning up whatever is left of his knowledge and skill, kneeling beside her in the darkness, fitting her broken pieces back together.

He did not look like a pirate. He looked... familiar. There was something there, in the handsome angles and deep, wicked shadows, the hollows of his cheeks, the straight line of his lips, the sharp line of his jaw- in need of a shave. Yes, there was something there- a whisper of recognition. He wore a pin-striped cap dusted with snow, the brim of which cast his eyes into darkness. They were a missing piece. She would never know from where the instinct came- perhaps from a desire to discover the identity of the man who would end her days- but she could not stop herself from reaching up and pushing the hat back from his face to see his eyes. Only later it would occur to her that he did not try to stop her. His eyes were hazel, a mosaic of browns and greens and greys, framed by long, dark lashes, spiked with snow. She would have known them anywhere, even if they were far more serious now than she'd ever seen them before. Shock coursed through her, followed by a thick current of happiness. He was not a pirate. "Michael?" He stiffened at the sound of his name, but she did not take the time to wonder why. She flattened her palm against his cold cheek- an action at which she would later marvel- and laughed, the sound muffled by the snow falling around them. "It is you, isn't it?" He reached up, pulling her hand from his face. He wasn't wearing gloves, and still, he was so warm. And not at all clammy.

November 1 SINGING YOUR OWN PRAISES “Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.” —A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh As an introvert, you might have grown up feeling anything but grateful for your personality. You tried to cure your introversion by mimicking extroverted behavior. Of course, this didn’t work because you can’t fix what isn’t broken. You are an introvert. You like people, but sometimes you like your alone time more. You think deeply and choose your words carefully. You enjoy different pastimes than the extrovert down the street. None of this makes you a bad person. In fact, there are billions of other people who share your preferences. So, let’s try a different approach, shall we? Let’s try on a little self-acceptance for size. Instead of trying to fix or cure, let’s celebrate our strengths. For the longest time, I saw my quietness as a fatal flaw, a sign that I was not friendly or feminine enough. Now, I see it as just another piece of the intricate mosaic that is my personality. Alongside my quietness, there is also intuition, wisdom, and an ability to read between the lines. Sure, I speak slowly and pause often, but I am singing on the inside. Those who matter can hear my silent song. This month’s entries will help you to see the beauty in your introverted nature and guide you toward singing your own praises (quietly, of course).

We try to grasp too much of life at once; since we think of it as a whole, instead of living one day at a time. Life is a mosaic, and each tiny piece must be cut and set with skill, first one piece, then another.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), the novelist Milan Kundera wrote: ‘Without realising it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.’ And maybe that is what internet memes accomplish. They take the confusing pieces of the world and order them into a mosaic (or news feed) that makes sense to us. And instead of curing us of our myth-making, the internet has made this practice even easier, no matter what pain it might cause to others.

Each of us is a unique, well-painted, well-crafted piece of a large mosaic, which when it is completed must spell out “JESUS.

Kaleidoscope Yoga: The universal heart and the individual self. We, as humanity, make up together a mosaic of beautiful colors and shapes that can harmoniously play together in endless combinations. We are an ever-changing play of shape and form. A kaleidoscope consists of a tube (or container), mirrors, pieces of glass (or beads or precious stones), sunlight, and someone to turn it and observe and enjoy the forms. Metaphorically, perhaps the sun represents the divine light, or spark of life, within all of us. The mirrors represent our ability to serve as mirrors for one another and each other’s alignment, reflecting sides of ourselves that we may not have been aware of. The tube (or container) is the practice of community yoga. We, as human beings, are the glass, the beads, the precious stones. The facilitator is the person turning the Kaleidoscope, initiating the changing patterns. And the resulting beauty of the shapes? Well, that’s for everyone to enjoy... Coming into a practice and an energy field of community yoga over and over, is a practice of returning, again and again, to the present moment, to the person in front of you, to the people around you, to your body, to others’ bodies, to your energy, to others’ energy, to your breath, to others’ breath. [...] community yoga practice can help us, in a very real, practical, grounded, felt, somatic way, to identify and be in harmony with all that is around us, which includes all of our fellow human beings.
 We are all multiple selves. We are all infinite. We are all universal selves. We are all unique expressions of the universal heart and universal energy. We are all the universal self. We are all one another. And we are all also unique specific individuals. And to the extent that we practice this, somatically, we become more and more comfortable and fluid with this larger, more cosmic, more inter-related reality. We see and feel and breathe ourselves, more and more, as the open movement of energy, as open somatic possibility. As energy and breath. This is one of the many benefits of a community yoga practice. Kaleidoscope shows us, in a very practical way, how to allow universal patterns of wisdom and interconnectedness to filter through us. [...] One of the most interesting paradoxes I have encountered during my involvement with the community yoga project (and it is one that I have felt again and again, too many times to count) is the paradox that many of the most infinite, universal forms have come to me in a place of absolute solitude, silence, deep aloneness or meditation. And, similarly, conversely and complimentarily, (best not to get stuck on the words) I have often found myself in the midst of a huge crowd or group of people of seamlessly flowing forms, and felt simultaneously, in addition to the group energy, the group shape, and the group awareness, myself as a very cleanly and clearly defined, very particular, individual self. These moments and discoveries and journeys of group awareness, in addition to the sense of cosmic expansion, have also clarified more strongly my sense of a very specific, rooted, personal self. The more deeply I dive into the universal heart, the more clearly I see my own place in it. And the more deeply I tune in and connect with my own true personal self, the more open and available I am to a larger, more universal self. We are both, universal heart and universal self. Individual heart and individual self. We are, or have the capacity for, or however you choose to put it, simultaneous layers of awareness. Learning to feel and navigate and mediate between these different kinds and layers of awareness is one of the great joys of Kaleidoscope Community Yoga, and of life in general. Come join us, and see what that feels like, in your body, again and again. From the Preface of Kaleidoscope Community Yoga: The Art of Connecting: The First 108 Poses

It’s like David in the Bible when his child got sick. He ripped his clothes and shaved his head and wouldn’t eat and prayed all day and begged and cried and everyone was scared to tell him that the boy was dead. But when he found out he washed his face and ate breakfast. When there’s still a chance to salvage something you torture yourself. When it’s gone, you wash your face. You wake up. You start picking up the pieces, no matter how tiny and scattered they are. And then suddenly, the life that you had that was whole is suddenly a mosaic made of the old pieces. And something entirely new. I don’t know how. I just know it happens.

There were insults, offensive comments, complaints—all of them vulgar. “Son of a bitch, we’re going to drink your blood!” They’d say things like that. Or: “We’re going to crush you to pieces;” “Your days are numbered;” and other things I won’t even repeat. Other letters came without any words—just a Nazi swastika or a white hand over a black piece of paper. It was understood that those were death sentences. There were days when it wasn’t just two or three of these anonymous letters; it was a whole handful of them!

My point is we're all broken. You just look for someone who's edges match up your edges. You take the pieces and make a beautiful mosaic.

All science, like all religion, like most history, like philosophy and probably all great art, addresses a set of universal, enduring questions: how did we get here? Why are things as they are? Where are we going? What does it all mean? Is there an ultimate purpose to our existence, or is what we can see around us just the result of a horrible accident, or a sublime one? What science--and in this story, physics--does is take a little piece of one of those questions and, systematically and provisionally, deliver an answer. This answer on its own may help nobody and answer nothing. But physics goes on to another little question within that bigger question, and then another and then another, and sooner or later, the mosaic of little answers starts to deliver something of more substance: a pattern, a direction of travel, a model that seems to make sense. Actually, substance might not be the right word: we can never be sure that what we see is reality: we may be observing a mirage, or a reflection of reality, or just the silhouette of reality, as if a figure through an opaque glass door,

Until the war had broken out, there had been some sort of order in the strange and complex mixture of the four disparate peoples crowded into the little valley, all calling themselves Bosnians. They celebrated separate holidays, ate different foods, feasted and fasted on different days, yet all depended on one another, but never admitted it. They had lived amidst an ever present, if dormant, mixture of hatred and love for each other. The Muslims with their Ramadan, the Jews with Passover, the Catholics with Christmas, and the Serbs with their Slavas- each of them tacitly tolerated and recognised the customs and existence of others. With suckling pigs turned on spits in Serbian houses, giving off a mouth-watering fragrance, kosher food would be eaten in Jewish homes, and in Muslim households, meals were cooked in suet. There was a certain harmony in all this, even if there was no actual mixing. The aromas had long ago adjusted to one another and had given the city its distinctive flavor. Everything was "as God willed it." But it was necessary to remove only one piece of that carefully balanced mosaic and that whole picture would fall into its component parts which would then, rejoined in an unthinkable manner, create hostile and incompatible entities. ‏Like a hammer, the war had knocked out one piece, disrupting the equilibrium.

Until the war had broken out, there had been some sort of order in the strange and complex mixture of the four disparate peoples crowded into the little valley, all calling themselves Bosnians. They celebrated separate holidays, ate different foods, feasted and fasted on different days, yet all depended on one another, but never admitted it. They had lived amidst an ever present, if dormant, mixture of hatred and love for each other. The Muslims with their Ramadan, the Jews with Passover, the Catholics with Christmas, and the Serbs with their Slavas- each of them tacitly tolerated and recognised the customs and existence of others. With suckling pigs turned on spits in Serbian houses, giving off a mouth-watering fragrance, kosher food would be eaten in Jewish homes, and in Muslim households, meals were cooked in suet. There was a certain harmony in all this, even if there was no actual mixing. The aromas had long ago adjusted to one another and had given the city its distinctive flavor. Everything was "as God willed it." But it was necessary to remove only one piece of that carefully balanced mosaic and that whole picture would fall into its component parts which would then, rejoined in an unthinkable manner, create hostile and incompatible entities. ‏Like a hammer, the war had knocked out one piece, disrupting the equilibrium. Wartime turned differences into outright hatred and instead of blaming the foreign enemy for all their hardships, people blamed their nearest neighbours, which, in turn, represented an invaluable favour to the true enemy of all.

Cahokia was one big piece in the mosaic of chiefdoms that covered the lower half of the Mississippi and the Southeast at the end of the first millennium A.D.

Stories,” she blurted. “The mosaic told stories, didn’t it?” “Yes, old ones.” “I’ll tell them to you.” His eyes cracked open. He didn’t remember closing them. “You know those tales?” “Yes.” She didn’t. This became clear as she began to tell them. She knew bits and pieces, cobbled together in ways that would have made him smile if smiling didn’t hurt. “You,” he breathed, “are such a faker.” “Don’t interrupt.” Mostly pure invention. She remembered the images--it pleased him, how vividly she knew the temple floor’s details. Which god curled around which, or how the snake’s tongue forked into three. But the stories she told had little to do with his religion. Sometimes they didn’t even make sense. “Do this again,” he said, “when I have strength to laugh.” “As bad as that?” “Mmm. Maybe not. For a Valorian.” But eventually everything grew slow, unthreaded. He thought of raw cotton pulled apart, fibers trailing. Maybe Kestrel had talked for hours. He didn’t know. When had she rested her cheek against his heart again? His chest rose and fell. “Arin.” “I know. I shouldn’t sleep. But I’m so tired.” She threatened him. He didn’t hear the whole of it. “Lie with me,” he murmured. It bothered him to think of her kneeling on the ground. “Promise not to sleep.” “I promise.” But he didn’t mean it. He knew what would happen. She slipped in beside him. Everything became too soft, too dark, too velvet. He sank into sleep. He sighed, and let go.

The floor is a fifteenth-century revival of medieval Cosmatesque mosaic style. The Cosmati family developed their unmistakable technique in Rome in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This decorating style was a fantasy of geometric shapes and swirls in cut pieces of colored glass and marble (much of which was “recycled” from pagan Roman palaces and temples). Stunning examples of authentic Cosmati floors and decorations can be found in some of the oldest and most beautiful churches, basilicas, and cloisters in Rome and southern Italy.

Sometimes life hurts. We suffer. We heal. We move on. But sometimes life hits back. Harder. Lethal in its cruelty. Shattering us into a million glittering shards of pain and loss and anguish. And we suffer, too broken to heal, to become what we once were. So we learn to live with the shards of pain and loss and anguish forever embedded in our souls, and with shaking fingers we piece together the bloody fragments of who we were into a mosaic grotesque in its stark reality, exquisite in its sharp-edged story of the tragic, breathless beauty of a human who survived life. And we move on, often unaware of the light glittering behind us showing others the way through the darkness.

The eye of the movie camera is an evil eye. When you act in front of it, that cyclops keeps taking from you, until you feel empty. On the stage, you give something to the audience, more comes back. When the curtain comes down in a theater, you have a feeling of exhilaration - something's been completed, fulfilled. It's so different from an exhausting day of shooting at the studio. You come home tired, drained. Making a =movie is like making a mosaic - laboriously putting little pieces together, jumping from one part of the picture to another, never seeing the whole, whereas in a ply, the momentum of the continuity works with you, takes you along. Doing a play is like dancing to music. Making a movie is like dancing in wet cement.

The history of our eyes is a lot like that of a car. Take a Chevy Corvette, for example. We can trace the history of the model as a whole—the Corvette—and the history of each of its parts. The ’Vette has a history, beginning with its origins in 1953 and continuing through the different model designs each year. The tires used on the ’Vette also have a history, as does the rubber used in making them. This supplies a great analogy for bodies and organs. Our eyes have a history as organs, but so do eyes’ constituent parts, the cells and tissues, and so do the genes that make those parts. Once we identify these multiple layers of history in our organs, we understand that we are simply a mosaic of bits and pieces found in virtually everything else on the planet.

Mo wondered if people in heaven felt whole or shattered, or if there was a glue up there that made the broken pieces whole again.

Salt water is the greatest component of our world, yet some people never see an ocean. That doesn't change the ocean. It is constant and powerful, and like the love of God, whether we're immersed in it, standing on the shore, or a thousand miles away, it remains.

He know where He wants to take me, and He'll get me there, in spite of myself.

Writing unearths the fragmentary remains of the years lived, to recover those out of a sense of pressing need for to build the loosely knit is not to fall apart in pieces but to form a mosaic that holds them all..

The first thing to describe is the event, not your attitude to it. Your attitude has to be made clear by the film as a whole, to be part of its total impact. In a mosaic each separate piece is of a particular, single colour. It may be blue, or white, or red — they are all different. And then you look at the completed picture and see what the author had in mind.

I love how the Jungian analyst Jim Hollis describes the ego as “that thin wafer of consciousness floating on an iridescent ocean called the soul.” He writes, “We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves.

Maybe if we just assumed everyone was a mosaic, made up of cracks and mis-colored pieces, fighting to stay together and appear whole, we could be more tender, more sympathetic, more patient. We might end up being the glue that holds them together, even for another minute, and keeps it from shattering into a thousand distorted pieces.

My confidence suddenly soars, and I start adding other fruit to the leftover contents in the blender, filling it to the brim with slices of mangoes and strawberries, like I've seen Grandma do when she was preparing "summer smoothies," a medley of different citrusy flavors that combined so well. PC, Victor, and Cintia flank me, watching wide-eyed. "She's like the smoothie whisperer," PC jokes. I reach for more milk, following my instinct, and fill the blender to the brim to compensate for all the extra fruit I added. Who knew that blending fruit would be this exciting? I watch all the bright, colorful pieces of fruit stacking up in the blender, looking like a beautiful mosaic.

Lots of people lose lifelong friends, lose their families, their husbands, their jobs, their money, their homes, their footing, their sense of self, their place in the world. They don’t go running around town sprouting extra personalities. I wouldn’t argue with you. I don’t know why it was. All I can tell you is that in my heart, in my mind, in my spirit: I broke. I broke into pieces. There are only tiny shards left now, a mosaic almost pretty if the pattern weren’t so irregular, in place of what was whole.

I’ve always thought of mosaic as this big metaphor for my life,” she says. “All these jagged, incongruous pieces…” She holds up a small shard of milky jade-green glass. “These are like the things that happen to you. But if it’s laid out a certain way and if you take a step back from it, it makes sense.” Edie

All the pieces in my life will get rearranged into something new like the tiles of a mosaic. I never thought that from those pieces I might be able to choose something different. Something that's mine. But I can - I will." -Emma

That’s what I’ve taken from all this. The crash all those years ago shattered the life I had, but the pieces wound up making a pretty good mosaic. That’s what art is, I suppose: transforming things from what they were into what they could be. My life now, without question, is transformed. Maybe that makes it a work of art.

So where does the secure attachment come from? As more studies become available, there is increasing evidence that a secure attachment style doesn't originate from a single source. The equation of a caring and sensitive parent producing a secure-for-life child is too one-dimensional; instead it seems that an entire mosaic of factors comes together to create this attachment pattern: our early connection with our parents, our genes, and also something else- our romantic experiences as adults. On average, about 70 to 75 percent of adults remain consistently in the same attachment category at different points in their lives, while the remaining 25 to 30 percent of the population report a change in their attachment style. Researchers attribute this change to romantic relationships in adulthood that are so powerful that they actually revise our most basic beliefs and attitudes toward connectedness. And yes, that change can happen in both directions- secure people can become less secure and people who were originally insecure can become increasingly secure. If you are insecure, this piece of information is vital and could be your ticket to happiness in relationships. If you are secure, you should be aware of this finding because you have a lot to lose by becoming less secure. p140

Life Is a Mosaic I am picking up the pieces of my life and doing what is necessary to build a beautiful mosaic.

Amidst the shattered pieces of a broken life, may you find the strength to gather fragments of hope and forge a mosaic of resilience.

I want to be a fucking mosaic, made up of broken pieces so damn colorful, you can’t help finding them beautiful.

I want too much. I always have. And all the while I am aware of a larger despair, as if Helen & I are vessels for the despair of all women and many men too. Who are we and where are we going? Why are we, with all our ‘progress,’ so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform? Charlotte wrote that rumors are flying about Howard and Paul, and Howard might lose his job at Yale. And her nephew, getting his PhD at Wisconsin, was declared insane and committed to a state asylum when they discovered he was a leader in the Communist Party there. I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be. And maybe I will never find it all in one culture but maybe I can find parts of it in several cultures, maybe I can piece it together like a mosaic and unveil it to the world. But the world is deaf. The world—and really I mean the West—has no interest in change or self-improvement and my role it seems to me on a dark day like today is merely to document these oddball cultures in the nick of time, just before Western mining and agriculture annihilate them. And then I fear that this awareness of their impending doom alters my observations, laces all of it with a morose nostalgia. This mood is glacial, gathers up all the debris as it rolls through: my marriage, my work, the fate of the world, Helen, the ache for a child, even Bankson, a man I knew for 4 days and may easily never see again. All these pulls on me that cancel one another out like an algebraic equation I can’t solve.

The path to greatness is a mosaic of trials and triumphs; trust each piece to reveal the masterpiece of your journey, for every step backward is a lesson, and every leap forward is a victory

Cultural Transformation is the masterstroke in your Talent Revolution journey. Think of it as the soul of your organization; the vital force that powers every function, every interaction, and every decision. This is where all the pieces come together, forming a vivid mosaic of values, behaviors, and attitudes that define who you are as a company and what you stand for.

You know what? I’ve always wanted to make a mosaic. Do you think that could work? To make something beautiful out of all these broken pieces?’ Luke looked at her in admiration, marvelling at the resilience of his friend. ‘Absolutely,’ he told her. ‘You could definitely make that work.

So,” he finally said aloud, “where are the other pieces?

It was all so incredible, yet the pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fit perfectly—including the reason DeeAnn could not leave Africa.  At least not yet.

Fuck the usual. I don’t want to be picture-perfect with you. I want to be a fucking mosaic, made up of broken pieces so damn colorful, you can’t help finding them beautiful.

Another survivor, Charlotte Delbo, describes her dual existence after Auschwitz: “[T]he ‘self’ who was in the camp isn’t me, isn’t the person who is here, opposite you. No, it’s too unbelievable. And everything that happened to this other ‘self,’ the one from Auschwitz, doesn’t touch me now, me, doesn’t concern me, so distinct are deep memory and common memory. . . . Without this split, I wouldn’t have been able to come back to life.”29 She comments that even words have a dual meaning: “Otherwise, someone [in the camps] who has been tormented by thirst for weeks would never again be able to say: ‘I’m thirsty. Let’s make a cup of tea.’ Thirst [after the war] has once more become a currently used term. On the other hand, if I dream of the thirst I felt in Birkenau [the extermination facilities in Auschwitz], I see myself as I was then, haggard, bereft of reason, tottering.”30 Langer hauntingly concludes, “Who can find a proper grave for such damaged mosaics of the mind, where they may rest in pieces? Life goes on, but in two temporal directions at once, the future unable to escape the grip of a memory laden with grief.”31

Your hands are the mosaic Which holds the pieces Of my Soul, Broken edges of my heart, Fragments of my grief, And a prism that contains Everything that I ever wished for, Buried and bruised in wounds Of all the colors that there are, In the spectrum of our bond You and I shared.