For as long as I can remember, I've walked with inspiration from those who came before me. Like a prayer, or manifesto.

Today, in Rome, getting ready for the Frequency of Freedom retreat, I felt so many of those words coming to me and reverberating inside as I prepared my body and soul.

I'll share some of them with you. I learned this one 10 years ago or so:

"Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed." —Terence McKenna

When I first read the next quote, at 12 years old, I cried. It stirred something primal in me, and I said it to myself almost every night for a long time... through so much life, and through many iterations of me. It became my mantra:

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." —Theodore Roosevelt

And lastly, the prayer that I've been moved by ever since I've learned to pray, I've been saying it with my whole heart from when I was 7 or 8:

וְטַהֵר לִבֵּנוּ לְעָבְדְךָ בֶּאֱמֶת

Hashem, please purify my heart so I can serve you with truth.

Words create. Faith creates. Start where you are. If you choose.

Love, Rivky