Ashley Asti Quotes

How is the ocean not enraged,
swelling -
how is it not furious with grief:
we have drowned it in plastic,
its waves are no longer its own.
How does it survive this,
blistered by our carelessness?
We are drops of the ocean:
why can't we see this?

- when plastic outnumbers fish

Your existence is defiance: as those around you perish, you gather those passed souls and rise with them, as if your voice and leadership is made stronger by a long line of ancestors who stand tall, in spirit, with you. And I think that's what I loved most about your description of your physical self: 'I would not change anything about me. I represent my ancestors.

Know that the pain you have endured does not define you to me. What defines you to me is the way you talk about love, especially loving yourself. 'I have learned to love everything about me,' you wrote. You are powerful.

We have only to look below our feet to see what we have in common: one earth belonging to us all. So if you do not see yourself in me, that's okay. Just look to your feet and remember - what you find beneath your soles is you and it is me.

I
don't
want
to wait
until I'm 73 to
embrace
my body.
To look back
and think of
my beauty:
How did I
miss it?

Let's not wait another moment.

I think one of the best gifts you could offer me, as a writer, is to engage with my words, to tell me how they felt to you. To let me, for a moment, see my words through your eyes. And it feels like you read my words so carefully, that you were gentle with them, nurturing. I feel loved and seen by the way you responded. Thank you for caring for the words that rise from my soul.

The way
to your spirit
is through your body.

When you buy a product, you don't just buy the product: you buy everything that company stands for.

Sisters, are your things rooted in peace?

I just wanted to remind us:
every shape and way of being
is tempting,
not because it's your job to be
desirable,
but because the form you come in
was ordered up by God
and that's
madly rousing.

We are nature.
Our bodies carry its swimming waters.
We are made of the soil
and eat the plants that grow from it.
From dust to dust
we come and go.

Each time I bring
my hands to my heart
in prayer,
flowing my body with my breath,
it is devotional,
a dance with the earth
and of the earth.

I dance with every tree,
sway with the wind,
bloom with every flower
in my being.

My breath,
Mother Earth,
is yours.

- the whole planet is in me

Beauty cannot possibly be youth alone:
that is like earth stopping at autumn and saying
that is enough.

- I want to see all of you

This may sound naive, but I didn't fully imagine that little girls grow up in this country with stories like yours. And that, I am sure, you are not the only one. That little girls grow up in tents and start smoking cigarettes by age eight. So seamlessly have we (those in power) written over stories and lives like yours that, to someone like me, it is very easy not to hear about lives like yours. Not to know or imagine they exist. Not to know that public policy is failing you. Not to know that the prison system is an impoverished and wholly inadequate response to your experience and that it, too, is failing you. Which means it's failing all of us.

Don't dig
for your purpose -
let it drop
from the heavens
and fall in your lap.

- you can't hunt your way to it