COURAGE
Courage is the price which life exacts for granting peace.
The soul that knows it not, knows no release
from little things;
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear
Nor mountain heights, where bitter joy can hear
The sound of wings.
How can life grant us boon of living, compensate
for dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate,
Unless we dare
The soul’s dominion?
Each time we make a choice we pay
With courage to behold resistless day
And count it fair.
~ Amelia Earhart ~
Amelia Earhart was the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean,
and the first person to fly solo across the Pacific from Honolulu to Oakland, California.
Her first poems were submitted for publication the same year she became a pilot.
Photo: Amelia Earhart perched atop the nose of her plane in 1936, courtesy The New York Times
Homepage photo of Amelia Earhart is from her 1923 driver license.
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A Prayer
Give us courage, gaiety and the quiet mind.
Spare us to our friends, soften to us our enemies.
Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors.
If it may not, give us the strength to encounter
that which is to come, that we be brave in peril,
constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath,
and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates
of death, loyal and loving to one another.
~ Robert Louis Stevenson ~
Excerpt from Prayers Written at Vailima, written by Robert Louis Stevenson during the last years of his life, at his home in Samoa.
Mrs. Fanny Stevenson, his wife, wrote that “In every Samoan household the day is closed with prayer and the singing of hymns. …
With my husband, prayer, the direct appeal, was a necessity. When he was happy he felt impelled to offer thanks for that undeserved joy;
when in sorrow, or pain, to call for strength to bear what must be borne.”
Photo by Talitha Ishi-Smith, on Unsplash
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