Friendly reminder that you don’t have to wait until the weekends to live and enjoy your life. Go to your favorite coffee shop after school, call your friend, bake cookies on a Wednesday afternoon, dance around in your underwear. Your life is yours to live and you shouldn’t put it on hold because of work or school.

not to start any drama but once you realize that you do not need men to be happy/complete/sexually satisfied & that their roles in the lives of women have been greatly exaggerated, you open your life up to a quiet and peaceful independence. i appreciate that you can want men and love them, but you don’t need them for a single solitary thing, not even to become a mother, and once i understood that i added 548 years to my life expectancy

“When I say be creative, I don’t mean that you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem.”

put yourself first. if you’re tired, sleep; if you’re hungry, eat; if you don’t wanna do that thing, say no. you are allowed to take care of yourself. that’s not selfish.

Please take care of your heart, your mind, your body, and soul. These come first.

When I kick it with somebody, I don’t want them to be on their phone all the damn time. It may sound selfish but it’s tiring. I miss dialogue. This is why I’d rather spend most of my time alone.


The purest form of love, I think, is having someone who wants to learn about you, from you and with you

Be kind, for whenever kindness becomes part of something, it beautifies it. Whenever it is taken from something, it leaves it tarnished

“Sometimes what you’re most afraid of doing is the very thing that will set you free.”


Make sure you don’t start seeing yourself through the eyes of those who don’t value you. Know your worth even if they don’t.”


start working out now. make that hair dresser appointment now. let your next meal be the healthiest you’ve ever eaten. move the furniture in your room right now. text that old friend or crush. make a new playlist. go on a run. open a window. it doesn’t matter what you do, no matter how big or small change is; change is change. and it will always, always, always help you to turn your life around and clear your head. it gives you that boost, that confidence to be a better version of yourself, no matter the impact it has.



learn to be patient. don’t rely on instant gratification, wait for the sense of accomplishment after completing a daily goal or achieving a long-term goal


things you don’t need:
a person who was nice to you but doesn’t make effort anymore
friends who pressure you or make you feel worthless
expensive equipment if you want to make art
doing whatever your friends are doing
being “naturally talented”

You’re healing every time you

• get out of bed because there’s something you’re excited about.
• don’t think about people who left.
• clean the clutter in the room and dishes in your sink.
• smile at yourself and random people.
• do something kind and out of the blue to make someone happy.
• work out or meet with friends even though you have no energy to.
• calm yourself down when your thoughts race.
• remember to drink water.
• don’t dwell on things you can’t control.
• do things good for yourself, even though you have no motivation.
• tell yourself that you’re growing from this, and you won’t feel like this forever.

What 2020 is all about:

• less: saying yes to people, things and events that are not good for your mental health, more: saying no, setting clear boundaries, walking away from toxic people, doing things and being with people that make your heart happy
• less: working up to the point of a mental breakdown, neglecting yourself, more: taking time to recharge your batteries, taking breaks, investing in me-time and self-care
• less: negative self talk, more: positive thoughts to remind yourself how amazing, beautiful and capable you are - remember that the way you talk to yourself matters
• less: comparing yourself to the path of others, more: realising that you walk your own path, being proud of everything you are and everything you have achieved
• less: doing things just because others say so, being afraid to show your true self, more: fully expressing yourself, choosing things because you - and no one else - want them
• less: bottleing up your feelings, saying you are okay when you are not, hiding behind a mask, more: being open and honest about the way you feel, being vulnerable, knowing that is is okay not to be okay
• less: being too hard on yourself when you have a bad day, more: letting yourself feel without judging every emotion, knowing that bad days are part of the process, being kinder to yourself

In today’s society, more than ever, there is a pressure to do the things everyone is doing and to act exactly the way other people are acting. Especially in school, peer pressure is a very prominent topic and it often damages a person more than it gives them a sense of belonging. So, I just wanted to say that it is okay if:

• you do not think it is cool to go out, drink and get completely wasted every weekend.
• you have not had sexual experiences at whatever age.
• you do not look the way society labels as perfect and ideal - you are not ugly, my love, you are good enough the way you are.
• you avoid gossiping about others under any circumstance - this just shows that you are a pretty awesome human being, do not let other peoples’ need to bash someone become your way of fitting in.
• you enjoy your own company the most - you do not have to be around other people constantly, it is okay if you need time to recharge, darling.
• other people might view you as ‘boring’ or as an outsider - you do you and you have to remember that the others’ opinions do not define you, they say more about them than they say about you.

You were born to be special, my love. Born to give the world something it has never seen before. So, please do not let anyone take that away from you. Your life is not about being cool, fitting in, being beautiful and being liked by as many people as possible. Your life is about you - and only about you. Be brave enough to swim against the tide. Do not become someone you do not want to be. Do not waste the wonderful human being you are. Show your true colours and be unapologetically yourself.

“You don’t have to gain awareness from something big and dramatic– it can come from the details”

— Sofia Coppola

Opportunities multiply as they are seized.

Extract from The Art of War, Sun Tzu (544 BC - 496 BC)

Because each work of art originates in the mind and feelings of a human being, it reaches its destination in the mind and feelings of another. A work of art, therefore, is a fact of consciousness quite as much as it an object existing beside us in the physical world and an event in the chronology of the historical past. A history of art is therefore a history of consciousness, and a history of modern art is uniquely a history of self-consciousness […]

George Heard Hamilton, Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880-1940 (via mesogeios

As Sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you.

Anne Carson, Eros The Bittersweet

ephyr”

— (zɛf ər), noun | Deemed one of the most beautiful words in the English language due to its euphony, rare sighting and letter composition, zephyr is described as a gentle, mild breeze. It does not disrupt, nor cause chaos, it merely brings a pleasant sensation on a warm summer day.

Poetry is made in bed like love.

André Breton

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.

Roland Barthes, from The Pleasure of the Text tr. Richard Miller

You are allowed to admit that you do not know what you are going to do with your life yet. You are allowed to admit that you do not know what your passions are yet. It is simply okay if you do not know what you want to do someday. There is no need to feel ashamed if you cannot present a fully structured plan to others if they ask about your future. That does not make you weird and it definitely does not make you a loser, my love. You are allowed to not know - because you really do not have to. You have so much time to explore yourself, to find out what makes your heart happy and to stumble upon a path that you want to walk. It is okay if you have no clue what you want to do in the future, or even right now. It is absolutely okay, darling. Take your time.

things to do this year:

• put nice notes in library books
• compliment a lot of strangers
• say a lot of nice things about yourself
• write/draw a lot, even if you think your art is bad
• make music even if no one hears it
• read more books than you thought you would
• take a lot of walks
• look at a lot of art
• learn to love and live and be yourself without being too scared

You have value, you have worth on your own. You were not born with the intention to find someone to complete you. You do not need to be completed, for you are already whole on your own. You are not a painting with missing colors, you are not a puzzle with missing pieces, you are not a song without a melody. You are not just a half of something, you are everything.

And so, for a woman, every outfit is a hopeful spell, cast to influence the outcome of the day. An act of trying to predict your fate, like looking at your horoscope. No wonder there are so many fashion magazines. No wonder the fashion industry is worth an estimated $900 billion a year. No wonder every woman’s first thought is, for nearly every event in her life - be it work, snow or birth - the semi-despairing cry, ‘But what will I wear?’

When a woman says, ‘I have nothing to wear!’, what she really means is, ‘There’s nothing here for who I’m supposed to be today.’

Self Care Tips 💗

• Give yourself at least one day of rest. Sleep in, stay in bed, watch a TV show, stay away from your phone, eat something yummy and just spend some time with yourself.
• Turn off the notifications on your phone. I swear this is a game changer. It is such a good feeling, because it takes away so much pressure and you automatically spend less time checking your phone.
• Make a list of things that you are grateful for/that make you happy. It ultimately puts you in a better mood.
• Ask for help if you need it. Call a family member or a friend when you are hurting and feeling low. Asking for help is not weak, my love.
• Do something nice for another person. Write a letter to a friend, buy a little something for your roommate, help a stranger on the streets - acts of kindnesses are so needed on this planet and they make the other person feel loved and valued, which gives you a sense of purpose and makes you feel happier.
• Stay away from gossip and complaints. As Vex King states in his book Good Vibes, Good Life, conversations that hate on other people lower your vibrations and leave you feel down and blue. Stay away from negative people as much as you can and start surrounding yourself with radiant beings.
• Stop negative self talk. I have said it before and I am never going to stop repeating it: The way you talk to yourself matters. What you tell yourself ultimately becomes your reality. So, try your hardest to fuel your mind with positive thoughts and watch yourself bloom, my love.
• Give yourself time to do absolutely nothing. It is important to have down time and just sit with your thoughts for a while. Sit in silence and remind yourself that everything is going to be alright. You are capable of so many things and everything is working out for you. Repeat this whenever you have some time for yourself.

things i want to get better at

 shoefaced-gemini

• being confident in my current skill level
• forgiving myself for messing up sometimes
• being comfortable in my own skin
• sticking to habits that make a difference in my life
• taking care of my body in ways that work for me
• showing my loved ones i appreciate them
• practicing gratitude on a daily basis
• living in the present moment and being mindful
• enjoying hobbies without caring about end results
• saying “no” to more things that drain my well-being
• relaxing without worrying about my productivity level
• spending more time outside and in nature
• caring less what others might think of me
• reducing my expectations for myself
• accepting failure as a learning experience
• spending less time on things that don’t add value
• expressing my true feelings without bottling them up
• putting my needs before others’ wants
• managing my time and giving myself proper breaks
• scaling back when i realize i’m starting to burn out
• creating healthy boundaries for myself
• respecting myself

“Seduction begins with the promise of touch, not touch itself. The deliberate withholding of it until the moment is exquisitely right.”

— Karen Marie Moning

“How beautiful it is to find someone who asks for nothing but your well-being.”

—

Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing.

It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.

It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.

A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.

It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.

It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.

If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.

It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.

It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.

It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.”

I want to have a nice little untidy house with you, a piano, lots of papers about, casual friends of congenial kinds and romantic walks.”

— Elsie Rosaline Masson (1890–1935), in a letter to Bronislaw Malinowski

“To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do. ””

— - Herman Hesse

“You’re not a kid anymore. You have the right to choose your own life. You can start again. If you want a cat, all you have to do is choose a life in which you can have a cat. It’s simple. It’s your right.”

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

Mary Oliver

In everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth. Someone once told me, “Even when building the imperial palace, they always leave one place unfinished.” In both Buddhist and Confucian writings of the philosophers of former times, there are also many missing chapters…

Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō (translated by Donald Keene)

New Year’s resolution ideas for students

• Finish all your schoolwork by 11 pm each day
• Limit yourself to one cup of coffee a day
• Get at least a B in all of your classes (or set goals for individual classes)
• Stretch for 10 minutes before bed
• Read a book each month for leisure
• Get at least 7 hours of sleep every night
• Spend less than two hours on social media a day (or some other time limit, depending on where you are now!)
• Journal every day
• Leave for class 5 minutes earlier than you need to
• Listen to podcasts or watch documentaries instead of binging Netflix or watching YouTube
• Get at least 1 hour of exercise a week
• Only spend money on things you really need (not just things you want)
• Finish papers at least a day in advance
• Spend 30 minutes a day on self care
• Wake up an hour earlier than you currently do every day

af·ter·glow

/ˈaftərˌɡlō/

nounthe color left in the sky after the sun has set or good feelings that remain after a successful or pleasurable experience.

I pay close attention to my manners. It’s not an abstraction, it’s a simple and comprehensible language of mutual respect.’

Jack Nicholson 

Elegance is elimination.

Cristobal Balenciaga

gjensynsglede”

— (noun) An untranslatable Norwegian word, gjensynsglede is described as the feeling of joy, anticipation, love you experience when you are about to meet someone you haven’t seen in a long time.

Everything seems to have a soul – wood, stones, the wine we drink and the earth we tread on. Everything, do you hear me, absolutely everything.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis, tr. by Carl Wildman, from “Zorba the Greek,” wr. c. 1946

Your miseries will lead you to great discoveries.”

- A. Abraham

Remind yourself that you don’t have to do what everyone else is doing.

If it makes you happy, no one else’s opinion should matter.”

Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.

Kahlil Gibran

I remember when
your eyes
said love
loudly

Charles Bukowski, The Miracle is the Shortest Time

“Elegance isn’t solely defined by what you wear. It’s how you carry yourself, how you speak, what you read.”

— Carolina Herrera

Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky 

Look closely. The beautiful may be small.”

— Immanuel Kant 

“My father says that Persians believe in silent communications; a look or gesture imparts far more than a book full of words.”

— Mahbod Seraji, Rooftops of Tehran

one very important advice i want to give you is to stop suppressing your emotions. this will literally kill you, i’ve experienced it myself to the point where it got so bad that my body reacted with physical pain. and by letting out your emotions i don’t mean crying on public transport (even though this is also valid!) but don’t say it’s fine when it’s not. everyone is telling us to be positive and to not get upset over little things but if little things upset you please be upset. because the goal is not to SAY that everything is fine but to BE at a state where everything is fine which you can only achieve by letting out what needs to get out.

Most of the time the universe speaks to us very quietly: In pockets of silence; In coincidences; In nature; In forgotten memories; In the shape of clouds; In moments of solitude; In small tugs at our hearts”

— Yumi Sakugawa

My sensitivity caused me to suffer cruelly. It also allowed me to sense things broadly.”

— Paul Valéry, tr. by Hilary Corke, from The Collected Works; “Autobiography,”

“What do you think an artist is? …he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”

Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable.

Octavia E. Butler

“I was feeling very comfortable; the coffee had warmed me up, and through the open door came scents of flowers and breaths of cool night air.”

— Albert Camus, The Stranger

…Distinct words have been produced by the unique aesthetic sense of the Japanese resulting from their love of fine, subtle things. They are delicately suggestive; for example, ‘kime’ (delicate texture), ‘koku’ (good substance, as of fine wine), and 'fūmi’ (an elegant taste). There are also words which represent an ideal of beauty, such as 'sabi’ (antique-looking and elegant), 'wabi’ (quiet taste), 'sui’ (refined taste, gracefulness), 'iki’ (smartness, refined and romantic), 'shibumi’ (elegant simplicity), 'fūryū’ (romantic refinement)…

I’d like to spend a few days with you somewhere sometime

Hiroshima mon amour 

There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night and spring after winter”

— Rachel Carson 

Beautiful Japanese nature-related diction, from Haruhiko Kindaichi’s The Japanese Language (translated by Umeyo Hirano):

hana-gumori — a hazy sky in the cherry-blossom season; literally, flower cloudiness
harumeku — to become more like spring
akimeku — to become more like autumn
kareru — the death of plants
edaburi — the way a tree branches
hanafubuki — flowers falling in the wind like snowflakes
konoshita-yami — darkness cast by dense trees
kaerizaki — the unseasonable blooming of flowers; also the second blooming of spring flowers in autumn
yosakura — the cherry blossoms viewed at night by torchlight; literally, night sakura

Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.

Erich Fromm 

“The Greek word for return is nostos. Algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”

— Milan Kundera 

“Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.”

— Maya Angelou

“You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky 

“We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelve

“It feels good to think about you when I’m warm in bed. I feel as if you’re curled up there beside me, fast asleep. And I think how great it would be if it were true.”

— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.”

— Haruki Murakami

American literature:  Does success have meaning?

French literature:  Does love have meaning?

Russian literature:  Does suffering have meaning?

German literature:  No.

Make the most of the best and the least of the worst.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Stop worrying about missed opportunities and start looking for new ones.”

“Peace is always beautiful.”

— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité.

Simone Weil, Correspondences

“The ability to sit down with another person and talk for hours, about anything and everything, is more attractive to me than anything else.”

— Koi Fresco

“I like how sleeping next to someone means more than sex sometimes, the body’s way of saying ‘I trust you to be by my side at my most vulnerable time,’ you have no defenses when you are asleep, you tell no lies.”

— Eric Shaw

The roots of expressions like … ‘less is more’ are subtly different than those that underlie emptiness. Emptiness does not merely imply simplicity of form, logical sophistication and the like. Rather, emptiness provides a space within which our imaginations can run free, vastly enriching our powers of perception and our mutual comprehension. Emptiness is this potential.””

— Kenya Hara

“I understood the true fate of Orpheus, that love is a constant terror of loss.”

— Kazimierz Wierzyński, tr. by Czeslaw Milosz, “A Word of Orphists,”

“Once I loved a man who was a lot like the desert, and before that I loved the desert. It wasn’t particular things but the space between them, that abundance of absence, that is the desert’s invitation. There the geology that underlies lusher landscapes is exposed to the eye, and this gives it a skeletal elegance, just as its harsh conditions – the vast distances between water, the many dangers, the extremes of heat and cold – keep you in mind of your mortality. But the desert is made first and foremost out of light, at least to the eye and the heart, and you quickly learn that the mountain range twenty mile away is pink at dawn, a scrubby green at midday, blue in the evening and under clouds. The light belies the bony solidity of the land, playing over it like emotion on a face, and in this the desert is intensely alive, as the apparent mood of mountains changes hourly, as places that are flat and stark at noon fill with shadows and mystery in the evening, as darkness becomes a reservoir from which eyes drink, as clouds promise rain that delivers itself with thunder, with lightning, with a rise of scents in this place so pure that moisture, dust, and the various bushes all have their own smell in the sudden humidity. Alive with the primal forces of rock, weather, wind, light, and time in which biology is only an uninvited guest fending for itself, gilded, dwarfed, and threatened by its hosts. It was the vastness that I loved and an austerity that was also voluptuous. And the man?”

- Rebecca Solnit, Two Arrowheads, from: A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”

— Albert Einstein

“It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.”

— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“I want to make you a unique library In it I want The rhythm of the rain, The dust of the moon, The sadness of the grey clouds, The pain of the fallen willow leaves Under the wheels of autumn”

— Nizar Qabbani

gezelligheid”

— (noun) Known as one of the most difficult words to translate, this abstract Dutch noun is identified as a cozy, warm feeling, inspired by those you love at home or in a pleasant atmosphere you experience. Overall, known as the heart of Dutch culture gezelligheid is described as an intimate and relaxed sensation, which connotes a sense of belonging and happiness.

“I love what is human, what gives softness,”

— Anaïs Nin, from a letter to Henry Miller written c. December 1933

“I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn’t capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.”

— Albert Camus, The Plague

“We’ve shared silences deeper than conversations.”

J’écrivais des silences, des nuits, je notais l’inexprimable. Je fixais des vertiges.”

—

Arthur Rimbaud

“.. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo..”

https://ecryre.tumblr.com/tagged/words/page/9

https://www.brunchonchestnut.com/things-of-note-april-19/