This is a very cool thing: a woman named Kate Nowak hatched a plan to offer a blessing a day for 100 straight days. The project succeeded beyond her wildest dreams, with over a million people having seen her fabulous little movie: Heartfelt Blessings

Here’s one of the 100 blessings she sent out that particularly caught my eye. I was intrigued first by the way her quote interprets the ‘grist for the mill’ concept that has always been at the center of my creative impulse – the  idea that everything that happens to you is valuable, and can be profitably used, and then by the way she equates the tension involved in the process with beauty…

"Things don’t go wrong and break your heart so you can
become bitter and give up. They happen to break you down and build you
up so you can be all that you were intended to be."
~ Charles Jones

Even a lump of clay thrown on the potters’ wheel undergoes pressure.
It is the pressure of the potter’s hand that coaxes the beauty out.