Official Website of Shannon Harden; Settle Down Soul

Writer. Author. Thinker. Storyteller. Recommender

Soul Soother's

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."

—Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855)

You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions.

Focusing entirely on your own self will not get you the results you are longing for. Give what you have away and watch God show up and show out for you.

It's only crazy to others until you do it.

We don’t reach the mountaintop from the mountaintop. We start at the bottom and climb up. Blood and sweat and tears is involved.

—Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice from Dear Sugar (2012)

Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore.

We pay a high price for low living. Keep your values and morals intact.

You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you’ve got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. That’s all.

—Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice from Dear Sugar (2012)

"Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves"

There are times in our lives where we will experience loss. It could be a relationship, a job, a dream, a home, financial loss or even a death. But in those times, is usually when we find our most authentic self. It's in the valley where the wild things grow.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854)

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