Monday Whatevers

September 19, 2022

Sep 19, 2022

Hello, Friend!

It’s Monday, so… inspired by on one of my favorite bits of the Bible, let’s start every week off with a little bit of whatever’s good and noble in the world. Here are a few excellent and noteworthy things I’m seeing in the world right now. Some are beautiful, promising, and reassuring. Some are poignant, thought-provoking, and necessary. All of them add to a greater knowing of God’s presence in this world, within our humanity, and out in the great beyond. And, they all prove there’s an abundance of spectacular, breathtaking tangible and intangible cosmic matter between us.

Please feel free to share in the comments whatever is good that you’re seeing in the world as well.

Blessings,
Marcie

Buzzfeed’s 11 Of The Most Beautiful Sentences In Literature

Read by LeVar Burton

And while I loved that Buzzfeed video with LeVar Burton, and I agree wholeheartedly that those are some of the most beautiful sentences in literature—not a single BIPOC woman made the cut. So I’d like to use this week’s Monday Whatever to add some color the list.

Happy Monday!

WHATEVER IS TRUE…

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

“To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all at the same time.”

WHATEVER IS HONEST…

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

“But death, too, had the power to awe, she knew this now-that a human being could be alive for years and years, thinking and breathing and eating, full of a million worries and feelings and thoughts, taking up space in the world, and then, in an instant, become absent, invisible.”

WHATEVER IS JUST…

Woman of Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros

“Salvador inside that wrinkled shirt, inside the throat that must clear itself and apologize each time it speaks, inside that forty-pound body of a boy with its geography of scars, its history of hurt, limbs stuffed with feathers and rags, in what part of the eyes, in what part of the heart, in that cage of the chest where something throbs with both fists and knows only what Salvador knows, inside that body too small to contain the hundred balloons of happiness, the single guitar of grief, is a boy like any other disappearing out the door, beside the schoolyard gate, where he has told his brothers they must wait.”

WHATEVER IS PURE…

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

“When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over.”

WHATEVER IS LOVELY…

Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks

“A marriage made up of Sunday papers and shoeless feet, baking powder biscuits, baby baths, and matinees and laundrymen, and potato plants in the kitchen window.”

WHATEVER IS GRACIOUS…

Beloved by Toni Morrison

“In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass.”

WHATEVER IS EXCELLENT…

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

“Sometimes I wish I could photosynthesize so that just by being, just by shimmering at the meadow's edge or floating lazily on a pond, I could be doing the work of the world while standing silent in the sun.”