Small things such as this have saved me: how much I love my mother — even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tr… - Cheryl Strayed

My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger.

Transformation doesn’t ask that you stop being you. It demands that you find a way back to the authenticity and strength that’s already inside of you. You only have to bloom.

I never got to be in the driver’s seat of my own life,” she’d wept to me once, in the days after she learned she was going to die. “I always did what someone else wanted me to do. I’ve always been someone’s daughter or mother or wife. I’ve never just been me.” “Oh, Mom,” was all I could say as I stroked her hand. I was too young to say anything else.

...but thinking about it didn't do a thing. Thinking about it was a long dive into a bucket of shit that didn't have a bottom.