Victoria Moran
Victoria Moran
Founder, Main Street
Vegan
(1950- )
Look for light in the darkness. If others aren't seeing any and you've found some, you're like the one person in a blackout who has a working flashlight.
Those who look for miracles get them. Those who look for something less
get that.
Even the most dazzling lives are punctuated more by commas and periods that
by exclamation marks.
You do the most for someone else by staying connected to what keeps you
glowing.
In solitude we tend to get our novel ideas and brilliant hunches.
Nurturing one tiny part of the Divine in expression, yourself, increases the
bliss in the universe.
Life is risky, delicate, temporary, and magnificent. Once you come to grips
with that confounding reality, you’ll be less afraid.
When you cycle through a rough patch, get back as quickly as possible to a
place where you can experience joy. Life is too precious to spend one more
minute feeling like overcooked porridge.
When you tap into your own gentle strength, you become the person you hoped
you’d grow into when you’d been on earth so briefly you could almost
remember heaven.
Luck finds its way to penthouses and park benches. Put out the welcome mat.
It’s a new day only when you approach it in a new way.
You’re more remarkable than you may have thought, and you have some control,
via your thoughts, words, and attitude, over how you experience life.
What you’re looking for is not in the refrigerator. It’s also not at the
mall.
Regard your life as an extended working vacation. Find nooks and crannies to
explore, side streets to meander...Be a tourist in your hometown and your
own life.
We build the courage to get through the substantial trials by learning to
cohabit serenely with the trivia.
When you are discreet, you protect yourself. Your preserve your honor. You
conserve your power.
Make it a point to eat a minimum of one meal a day sitting at a table and
using utensils. Flowers, candles, cloth napkins, and dishes that would break
if you dropped them are extra credit.
The ultimate secret to aging exquisitely is to identify more with the part
of yourself that doesn’t grow older—the inner part—and less with the outer
part that metamorphoses through ages and stages all your life long.
Make a practice of stopping every so often to simply be present to the
present: what you see, what you smell, who is with you, how this moment
feels physically and emotionally.
Behind the glory nearly everyone wants to attain is a degree of discomfort
nearly everyone wants to avoid.
When we fail to relish details, it’s tempting to succumb to greed and
discontent. Without the joy of tiny things, we want more and bigger ones.
Self-esteem is the result of recognizing our personal power; awe and wonder
come from recognizing our lack of it. Both are true, and in an exceptional
life there is no conflict between them.
Images routinely stand in for reality. Plastic pretends to be money.
Chemicals pretend to be food...It’s more important than ever to indulge
ourselves...in living books, live music, and unfiltered nature.
Positive thinking may not be a panacea, but it is the most basic way we have
to cooperate with benevolence.
Life has planted within us a reliable gauge for measuring our proximity to
our true selves: when we get too far away, we feel rotten.
Redefine ‘spiritual life’ so that it’s your day-to-day life, lived well,
with intention, integrity, and well-placed awe.
When you’ve detoured a few yards to get yourself taken care of, you’ll be
able to go the extra mile in caring for others with far less likelihood of
resentment or regret.
Although we depend on the electronic accoutrements of modern life, our cells
and our souls need something else. Indulge them, part of the time at least,
in a charmed environment that’s free of beeps, bleeps, and buzzes.
You have a function on this planet. There may not be time to have a clean
house, a clean car, and clean hair all on the same day, but there is time to
do what you came here for—and fit in a little sightseeing.
When you act as a midwife for the dreams of others...you become part of a
network of people eager to assist when it’s your turn to bring a new dream
into being.
Don’t get too sophisticated to be frequently amazed.
Happiness comes from accepting the present situation, whether it’s something
you wish to savor as long as possible or change as quickly as you can.
You can be playful like a child, as wise as your own grandmother, or both—a
day is long enough
Stop thinking of anybody as old. Think of everyone, yourself included, as
ageless—eternal even.
When you make a point of seeing everyone as a soul living in a body, the age
of the body means a great deal less and the quality of the soul a great deal
more.
There is a singular reality to ink on paper....Often when you start to write
your worries, you find yourself writing their antidote.
In this moment, there is plenty of time. In this moment, you are precisely
as you should be. In this moment, there is infinite potential.
When you take control of your time, you take control of your life. You also
lengthen your life, since you’re more aware of living it.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take on the mantle of
the valiant, a vocal commitment to fairness and justice, and an
unwillingness to back down.
These days standing up for your values won’t lead to being burned at the
stake, although it could get you gossiped about at the country club. Do it
anyway.
Because words can’t be recalled like a defective product, don’t send them
out until you’re sure you want them on the market with your name on them.
Assume that you deserve every inch of the space your take and every blessing
life bestows on you. Humility is a fine thing; sackcloth and ashes make
anybody look bad.
Who’s in charge here? When it comes to your life, your body, and your
decisions, you are.
The way you sign your name. The way you fold the laundry. The straightness
of the stamp on the envelope. Making your bed even though no one will be
home to see it. These details and hundreds like them are little things that
give you a little edge.
Let coincidence amuse and guide you. At times it could be mere happenstance.
At others, it is divine appointment.
Circumstances shift more reliably than the weather in Chicago. Peace comes
in accepting that when you went to the recruiting office to apply for life
on earth, you signed up for one wild ride.
Pay attention to the minute as well as the major aspects of your life,
because minutia is more plentiful, and some of it is lovely.
The inspiration that comes from words or music, a sermon or a sunset, gives
you a soul lift. That’s a facelift on the inside.
There will always be something to clean or file or answer or pay or decide
on or worry about. Sometimes you just have to walk in the park anyway.
Linear thinking sees conception, birth, growth, maturity, decline, death.
Cosmic thinking sees no such straight line. When you’re talking birth and
death and life and wonder, you’re into circles and spirals and arcs and
coils.
Your astonishing, immortal soul has deigned to occupy your astonishing,
albeit mortal, body. You’ve heard of guilt by association? This is grace by
association.
There is more to you than you’re able to know, and more to this process of
life than any of us is equipped to imagine.
Character is doing what you say you’ll do and being the same person in
company as you are when you don’t think anyone is looking.
The world is crying for generosity and benevolence, and it extends certain
kindnesses to those who show them.
Some people are too afraid of their own dreams to encourage yours. Others
are mourning dreams that got away. There are, however, certain extraordinary
human beings who will astonish you with a degree of advocacy beyond any you
could reasonably expect.
When your to-do list defies the twenty-four-hour day, laugh. Then cut it by
half or two-thirds.
Be every ounce the person you are. The more add-ons and ought-to’s you can
strip away, the more unique and admirable you’ll be.
No one has absolute security, in a house or in a life. Lease-free renters
are said to live month-to-month, yet we all live just moment to moment by a
genuinely amazing Grace that deals in hope, promise, and synchronicity.
We share atoms and ozone; our lives are inextricably linked with all other
lives.
Observing a Sabbath punctuates a week, compelling us to pause for a bit. It
keeps the days from blurring together and makes us more mindful of the
passage of time.
We savor life by expecting nothing and experiencing everything. When we go
at high speed, we miss it.
Forever, and next weekend, can take care of themselves. You take care of
today.
Blame is demeaning; responsibility is empowering. Take the responsibility,
not the blame.
Impress upon yourself this eternal truth: most things don’t amount to a hill
of beans.
Being humble isn’t putting yourself down but seeing yourself without
judgments, whether they’re weighted toward canonization or infamy.
Courage travels with faith. When you’re counting on a Higher Power or a
higher purpose, you’ve got yourself a light to help you through the dark
places.
Comparing is a game that nobody wins. Besides, in a spiritual sense, we’re
connected to everybody else anyway.
Adopt one better habit. This is a gentle way to change.
Meditation, or some similar focused discipline, is as essential to
spirituality as practice is to music or patience to parenting.
Beauty rubs off. You cannot stand face-to-face with a Rembrandt and walk
away the same person.
Forgive someone something...You’ll be closer to what is divine because
you’ll be doing something that is divine.
Graciousness is acting on the belief that we have been given adequate time
and ability to care for one another.
Dine with gratitude. And Mozart.
Choose food that is as beautiful as you wish to be yourself.
Destiny and temperament determine the size of your life’s stage; you
yourself determine the quality of the performance.
What matters is staying in touch with the light within. Then, no matter what
else changes, you’re grounded in the one thing that doesn’t.
When the processed food goes, the body that processed food built goes with
it.
I realized I could only play-act at the spiritual life as long as my
appetites were stronger than my empathy.
Cruelty to animals is an enormous injustice; so is expecting those on the
lowest rung of the economic ladder to do the dangerous, soul-numbing work of
slaughtering sentient beings on our behalf.
