onepunchwomxn

[onepunchwomxn]

Isca (Sun Hat Profile), 2021. Sebastian Blanck. Oil on linen.

[onepunchwomxn]

Toni Morrison on grief

[onepunchwomxn]

You believe romanticizing life means constantly striving to create a life extraordinary enough to romanticize. But the truth is it's not a matter of creating something extraordinary. It's a matter of realizing the beauty in the life you already have. When was the last time you appreciated the way gravity hugs you to the Earth? When was the last time you heard the wind and called it music? When was the last time you studied the lines on a stranger's face and tired to read the map of their past. Tell me, how long has it been since you submerged your head in the sea? How long has it been since you befriended the trees? How long has it been since you laid in the field and listened to the humming of the bees? There is romance in morning walks. There is artistry in a sunset sky. They is magic in late night talks. There is an entire universe in a person's eyes. So, if you are looking for extraordinary, you don't have to try.

– By "Whitney Hanson," Instagram account "whitneyhansonpoetry"

[onepunchwomxn]

[onepunchwomxn]

“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.”

— Alice Walker, Living by the Word

[onepunchwomxn]

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

[onepunchwomxn]

“[…] the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.”

— Jeanette Winterson, from Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (via women-loving-art)

[onepunchwomxn]

 Gordon Mortensen（b.1938 United States)

 Spring Flowers

 reduction woodcut

[onepunchwomxn]

letting go won't make the wound close - judas h.

[onepunchwomxn]

“Matins” by Louise Glück

You want to know how I spend my time? I walk the front lawn, pretending to be weeding. You ought to know I’m never weeding, on my knees, pulling clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact I’m looking for courage, for some evidence my life will change, though it takes forever, checking each clump for the symbolic leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already the leaves turning, always the sick trees going first, the dying turning brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform their curfew of music. You want to see my hands? As empty now as at the first note. Or was the point always to continue without a sign?

[onepunchwomxn]

㋡🥀

[onepunchwomxn]

nothing hits the spot like sitting still with your arms crossed and looking around and not talking

[onepunchwomxn]

“For women, only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl. The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man. The beauty of a boy resembles the beauty of a girl. In both sexes it is a fragile kind of beauty and flourishes naturally only in the early part of the life-cycle. Happily, men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks — heavier, rougher, more thickly built. A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has only exchanged one form of attractiveness for another: the darker skin of a man’s face, roughened by daily shaving, showing the marks of emotion and the normal lines of age. There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat. No wonder that no boy minds becoming a man, while even the passage from girlhood to early womanhood is experienced by many women as their downfall, for all women are trained to continue wanting to look like girls.”

— Susan Sontag, “The Double Standard of Aging”

[onepunchwomxn]

Sylvia Plath, from a letter to Ann Davidow-Goodman, featured in The Letters Of Sylvia Plath Volume I: 1940–1956

[Text ID: I know I’ll always think of you with something like hurt and nostalgia―and a great deal of love.]

[onepunchwomxn]

the years by alex dimitrov

[onepunchwomxn]

Dog Woman, Chris Abani

[onepunchwomxn]

Kindness, Naomi Shihab Nye

[ Text ID: Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, / you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. ]