When you’ve learned to lighten up on yourself, learned compassion and kindness, you grieve for the years the locust has eaten. When you were so unjustly hard on yourself. When you looked in the mirror or at your life.

When kindness arrives at your door, you look back at old photos and realize, “there was nothing wrong with me”. And anything that appeared to be out of place was merely fear and a deficit of love towards yourself playing itself out in the world.

When kindness arrives, you fall in love, maybe for the first time.

The world is not our personal yardstick by which we measure ourselves. We will always come up short when we do.

It is by the heart we see ourselves rightly—even in the most difficult of circumstances.

Stay close to your heart. When hope or life feels spare, remember to return again and again.

Your heart is the book by which you rightly read your life.

~Shoshana