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Lady Godiva (1870) - Jozef Van Lerius (1823-1876)

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I love my little cub so much.. the way he nurses and then pops off when his belly is full and he starts to doze off, making the cutest little facial expressions of relaxation and contentment, and then we just snuggle while i listen to his little breaths and coos and smell his perfect head and kiss his soft round cheeks.. it feels so satisfying to provide his needs for warmth, food, and connection and for us to just chill happily in our little oxytocin bubble as long as we want

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“How much pleasure do you evoke, at will, for no reason at all? How regularly do you tune into your life force, procreative, reproductive energy (that can be wonderfully utilized sexually but doesn’t always have to be) for no reason at all? How often are you mesmerized by the potency and effectiveness of your well-resourced, pleasured self…easily pleased and pleasured by the simplest thing for no reason at all? Do one creative act, vocal act, and act of beauty, every day. It works!”

— India Ame’ye, Author, “Alignment”

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Jules-Joseph Lefebvre (1836-1911) "Rachel" (1888) Oil on panel

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Lobmeyr champagne bowl, ca. 1900

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beeswax and copper candles by Catherine Sieck

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Theo Van Rintel

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I liked the person I was before.

(Or, perhaps, I like the fantasy I have now of the person I was before...)

Nobody is ever ready for anything you cant prepare yourself for a relationship its so stupidddd that we get told this like “girll focus on yourselffff”. If you were smart you wouldnt be focusing on anything at all actually cuz nothing matters. But if we r gonna be sold this like true love fantasy then i guess focus on THATTT, fall sooo deep into the fantasy, let it destroy and rebuild you thats whats so good about love. This bubble wrapping urself generation like sorry but i just do not subscribe to this version of love im not happy that the options for me are guys that are “aware of dating rules”. I read GOOD books and watcj GOOD movies cunnnn I see my mum and dad i know what GOOD relationships look like its not “healthy communication “ or like “learning a love language” or “taking space” its explosion explosion explosion bomb bomb bomb holding up a mirror to eachother and hating it and seeing yourself in the things you hate about them and choosing to instead love that about them and yourself cuz yoy cannot change a person. You jhst havr to love them and its always your choice. Love and relationships is literally just destruction and unavoidable change and crisis over and over and over again its meant to obliterate your ego and your partner should every day naturally unconsciously be teaching you something new about the world. Or am i being dramatic lol. Romance exists to explode you and my confusion is this: how do you not love that??

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Srijon Chowdhury (Bangladeshi-American, 1987) - Moonflower (2025)

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the creaking and eerie dripping is normal of an evening when the heating turns on. the radiators always creak like that. it's a sound I grew up with, the house gurgling and respiring. the radiators are actually filled with oil. the radiators are the house's circulatory system. the heat is elementally water. there are four types of heating: fire, air, water, and earth (underfloor heating as is common in Scandinavia).

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William Baxter Closson - Nymph and Water Babies at Play

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never let me forget what it is like to pick up my sleepy baby and place him in the middle of my big soft bed and have his little mouth find my breast while his hand rests on me

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2:34am reminder to be FUCKING grateful

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well, if I'm treating breastfeeding like a mini menopause, or at least a reversal of pregnancy, a drying out after its excessive moisture, then I have a bit more context for this unprecedented sexual pause.

breastfeeding does feel like the end of a cycle, it's end end end every couple of hours. each time feels like a perfect cadence. I am eating, he is eating, we are both plump, cream cake major triad 7pm bedtime

but I feel like a virgin, not a crone. by my own understanding I haven't reached the final weeks of pregnancy or given birth, so the process did not complete, it rolled back to the beginning. I was saved from an inevitable fate - by grace?

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What distinguishes grace from everything else? Grace is unearned. If you’ve moved through the world in such a way as to feel you’ve earned cosmic compensation, then what you’ve earned is something more like justice, like propriety. Not grace. Propriety is correct. Justice is just. There’s an inescapable transactional quality: perform x good, receive y reward. Grace doesn’t work that way. It begins with the reward. Goodness never enters the equation.

— Kaveh Akbar, from Martyr!

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What is one cuneiform word everyone should know?

𒀭—a sign affixed to names to indicate nearness to heaven