Tiny Beautiful Things

This summer I have been doing something that I have never really enjoyed (or been very good at) but have always wanted to enjoy. I have been reading. I am currently on my third book of the summer (which I will hopefully write about when I am done because I have many things to say about it), but I wanted to first write about one of the books I have finished. The book is called Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on love and life from Dear Sugar (TBT) by Cheryl Strayed. The first book I read this summer was Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail also by Cheryl Strayed which is how TBT came about. The book is formatted in a series of letters that were published in The Rumpus under the Dear Sugar advice column. Readers mail in their letters and ask for advice and Sugar (which recently was revealed to be Cheryl) does her best to speak wisdom into their lives.

Now Cheryl is not a Christian and she even says that she doesn't really believe in God, but the wisdom and advice that she gives and speaks to her readers is something that can only be a gift from God. Granted, I know a lot of her advice is not God centered (she talks about sex a lot but to be fair she is asked about sex a lot too...), but the love and compassion that she shows to each and every person (or at least the ones she chooses to respond to and consequently published in this book) who writes to her inspires me. In the intro one person says about Cheryl that "she offers what we wish every mother would: enough compassion to make us feel safe within our broken need, and enough wisdom to hold on to hope." This is my desire. I believe that each and every one of us should have this kind of compassion towards others and reading this book has inspired me to pursue that in any way I can. I pray that I can give sound, God centered, loving advice and wisdom to others around me and that I can show compassion to make others feel safe and enough wisdom to hold on to hope.

Here are just a few clips and things I highlighted throughout the book (there are many, many others... I highly recommend this book!)

"Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word 'love' to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will."

"Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true."

"I'm not suggesting that one deny negative emotions, but rather that you accept them and move through them by embracing the power we have to keep from wallowing in emotions that don't serve us well."

"If I believed in God, I'd see evidence of his existence in that. In your darkest hour you were held afloat by the human love that was given to you when you most needed it."

"Inhabit the beauty that lives in your beastly body and strive to see the beauty in all the other beasts. Walk without a stick into the darkest woods. Believe that the fairy tale is true."

"There are so many things to be tortured about, sweat pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don't let a man who doesn't love you be one of them."

"You don't have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you're holding. And, dear one, you and I both were granted a mighty generous hand."

"I suppose this is what I mean when I say we cannot possibly know what will manifest in our lives. We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren't and people we didn't know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait. To trust that someday we will know what it means, so that when the ordinary miraculous is revealed to us we will be there, standing before the baby girl in the pretty dress, grateful for the smallest things."

Like I said... there are many many other things that I highlighted and noted in this book. It definitely lives up to the name. It is full of Tiny Beautiful Things. And I highly recommend it!