How can you be in a bad mood with this weather?
Sometimes I’m overwhelmed with the insatiable desire to learn. To know astronomy and geography and language and architecture; to recognize each constellation, planet, and star; to speak and understand all languages, be able to decipher ancient Greek and Latin text; to grow my understanding of how the human body works; study the differences and similarities of each religion; recognize the use for each herb and seed and sapling.
I want to better myself, not for fame or recognition or power. I just want to understand.
In order to make a relationship last, you really have to flow with a person as they change. Give them space. My friend always told me about his grandfather who was with his wife for 60 years before she passed. His grandfather said that through all that time, his wife changed so much it felt like he had been with 8 different people by the end. But he said the secret to making it last was that through all those changes, he never suffocated his wife with his own idea of who he expected her to be. Rather he loved, fully, every new woman she became.
“Maybe it’s okay that you don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe you should stop predicting and controlling and enjoy each moment as it comes.”
— Mandy Hale
gentle reminder
please try your best to not compare yourself to others; i know it’s hard, but everyone is different - and you’re you, which always has been and always will be enough
“I don’t know how to want without consuming.”
— Jody Chan, from “Elegy for the Pre-Packaged Pie I Ate on March 14, 2018,” published in Hot Metal Bridge
Source: hotmetalbridge.org
violentwavesofemotion-deactivat
“Listen. Pay attention. One day all the confusion will be over, all the torment and the unexplained, you will learn to live in the great absent-mindedness, that opens all doors and windows, so that the light can flow in and lead you away. Where? Do not ask where. Live your life, that is the answer. Don’t forget to remember, it leads you forward. You are still a child, you have such happy, attentive eyes. Don’t lose them. Be inquisitive. Pay attention. Do you promise?”
Bo Carpelan, tr. by David McDuff, from “Urwind,” published c. 1993 (x)
what 2014 taught me:
1. do not tie yourself to someone or something for too long. not yet. 2. love and let yourself be loved. 3. travel. 4. drown your mind in information that you’d like to learn. 5. pick up a new (or old) hobby. 6. be fluid in thought, choices and decisions. 7. drink water. 8. be politically, socially and culturally aware. 9. you have a voice - use it for a strong, passionate purpose. 10. everything is good growth, in one form or another. 11. breathe.
2014 me was too hella wise
“I have a habit of falling in love with souls who have yet to be at peace with their bodies, their minds, their weaknesses. I try to build them, to find the parts of them that are missing in me. I end up with holes in my chest.”
— Farah Gabdon
Source: quotemadness.com
“Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it.”
— Henri J.M. Nouwen