Phasmid eggs | Levon Biss
these are actual eggs of the stick insect family
which fictional death has affected you the most emotionally? like had you straight up crying your eyes out or similar responses
Lemon and Parsley - Cressida Campbell , 1988.
Australian , b . 1960 -
Colour woodblock print, 41 x 29 cm .
“It is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer, from Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2020)
Grasshopper and Beetles. 1951. Leonard Baskin. Linocut. Plate 23 from A Little Book of Natural History. [source]
Your purpose in life is not to love yourself but to love being yourself.
If you goal is to love yourself, then your focus is directed inward toward yourself, and you end up constantly watching yourself from the outside, disconnected, trying to summon the “correct” feelings towards yourself or fashion yourself into something you can approve of.
If your goal is to love being yourself, then your focus is directed outward towards life, on living and making decisions based on what brings you pleasure and fulfillment.
Be the subject, not the object. It doesn’t matter what you think of yourself. You are experiencing life. Life is not experiencing you.
Crazy how we are everything that has happened to us but then you meet someone and you don’t see everything that has happened to them you just see them. And you both try to explain everything that has happened to you but your words and memories are so biased and oversimplified.
Fulvio Rinaldi, L'orologio, tempera, 1995
This reminds me of a Marilynne Robinson quote:
You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marks to be understood as “beauty”. Think about Dutch painting, where sunlight is falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning—that beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary. […] You also get that in Edward Hopper: Look at the sunlight! or Look at the human being! These are instances of genius. Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that. And it’s not Versailles. It’s a brick wall with a ray of sunshine falling on it.
Co Breman (Dutch, 1865-1938), Trees in front of a farm, 1899. Oil on canvas, 61.5 x 50 cm.
