rivenreverie - Tumblr blog

[rivenreverie]

I’m tired of pretending I don’t like doing things for my husband.

I’m tired of being demeaned for enjoying making food for him

For making sure he’s okay with the things I do

For getting dolled up for him

For following his lead

For not insulting and being rude to him

I’m tired of being made to feel like the love that I give to the person who’s most important to me is somehow insulting to me.

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Patriotism has then, many faces. Those who would reject it entirely do not seem to have considered what will certainly step - indeed has already begun to step - into its place. For a long time yet, or perhaps forever, nations will live in danger. Rulers must somehow nerve their subjects to defend them or at least to prepare for their defence. Where the sentiment of patriotism has been destroyed this can be done only by presenting every international conflict in a purely ethical light. If people will spend neither sweat nor blood for 'their country' they must be made to feel that they are spending them for justice, or civilisation, or humanity. This is a step down, not up. Patriotic sentiment did not of course need to disregard ethics. Good men needed to be convinced that their country's cause was just; but it was still their country's cause, not the cause of justice as such. The difference seems to me important. I may without self-righteousness or hypocrisy think it just to defend my house by force against a burglar; but if I start pretending that I blacked his eye purely on moral grounds - wholly indifferent to the fact that the house in question was mine - I become insufferable. The pretence that when England's cause is just we are on England's side - as some neutral Don Quixote might be - for that reason alone, is equally spurious. And nonsense draws evil after it. If your country's cause is the cause of God, wars must be wars of annihilation. A false transcedence is given to things which are very much of this world.

The glory of the old sentiment was that while it could steel men to the utmost endeavor, it still knew itself to be a sentiment. Wars could be heroic without pretending to be Holy Wars. The hero's death was not confused with the martyr's.

-The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis, (1960)

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In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer makes a powerful case for a return to the indigenous understanding of the land, based on careful stewardship, deep knowledge, and reciprocity... One way to work towards this stewardship is to be skilled within our own landscape, to foster ways of tending to its needs as we meet our own. We are, I think, only too painfully aware of these lost skills. Native Americans are still living a history that saw these practices forcibly taken from them. My own community lost them through indifference. The small, precise gestures that make up a skill set seemed so ordinary until we let them slip away. But now that they are gone they are very hard to reclaim. They are part of a web of intuitions and abilities so fundamentally interconnected that relearning them will be a life's work. They range from being able to hold a paring knife correctly to learning to read the weather. From understanding properties of different types of wood to knowing how to preserve food. This is not just a matter of forgotten knowledge, but also a matter of desire. We have forgotten how to want one good dress over fifty disposable ones. We have forgotten how to crave each new food as it comes into season. We must learn to know with our hands rather than our heads.

- Katherine May, Enchantment

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...he showed me what it was to be held by other hands, to be thrown into uncertainty, and to know I would be caught again.

-Enchantment, Katherine May

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Thanks for the tag @idyllicdomesticity!

Last song: Passerine by The Oh Hellos

Last movie: The Book of Eli (man I love that film)

Currently watching: The Expanse

Currently reading: Sacred Spaces, Holy Hygge, Lock Every Door

Last thing researched for writing purposes: dang it's been a minute...probably limb amputation.

I tag anyone who wants to play! And @greenmountainwitch @wedarkacademia @witchingtime

9 People Tag

tagged by the always-fabulous @arijensineink!

Last song: Epiphany by BTS

Last movie: My Neighbor Totoro

Currently watching: Like @arijensineink I don't really/haven’t watched TV in a while… do Yoongi’s tour vlogs count?

Currently reading: Killing Commendatore, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Your Brain On Art, and just finished I Work Like a Gardener about an interview with artist Joan Miró (not very lengthy at all but so interesting, highly recommend it + his work)

Last thing researched for writing purposes: Uncommon mental illnesses/disorders

tagging @toribookworm22 @words-after-midnight @pandoras-comment-box @chickensarentcheap @marigoldispeculiar @somniphobicfox @vsnotresponding @royal1asset-if @imdefnotvanessa and I know this is a 9 people tag but whatever, open tag

[rivenreverie]

Oooh, in no particular order:

Fight Club

V for Vendetta

Equilibrium

Book of Eli

The Matrix Trilogy

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Cinderella Man

The Village

The Phantom of the Opera

Signs

Top 10 fav movies because i'm bored XD

Amatw (2018)

Amatwq (2023)

Dsmom (2022)

ant-man (2015)

Dos tipos de cuidado (1953)

Los 3 huastecos (1948)

Jurassic park (1993)

Finch (2021)

Coco (2017)

Indiana jones and the last crusade (1989)

Tagging with no pressure: @ruben-the-spider-oc @aintinacage @trapezequeen @aeterna-auroral-avenger @maddielang16 if you want to make a top too! Anyone can join as well

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The child in me thinks strange things should be licked: computer mother boards, keys, coins, receipts, charging cables... Fortunately I have self control

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i feel like i’m constantly relearning to love the world again after very painful experiences and grief but sometimes it’s as simple as stepping outside and seeing a flower with a bright yellow centre and thinking “oh, how stunning!” 

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My bar makes my homemaker heart happy. Peep those new Home Goods wine glasses.

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This was me last month. So my husband and I drove 7800 miles to Ohio and back. Five national parks, a 5 day music festival, a theme park, two separate nights in Vegas, lots of bars, breweries, and fun. Sleeping under the stars for 14 nights. Meeting people across America that left marks on us. And yes, now we're back in the big city, but it fed our souls in a way that was truly renewing, and made us hunger to live, not just exist.

i need to turn my phone off i need to drive somewhere big and quiet and walk around in the cold and dark and see my breath and the stars and tell people to please stop expecting things of me for just a little while..

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7.19.23

Sometimes I am overwhelmed with gratitude for what my life has become. Sometimes I can barely breathe when I realize that this is real, it’s not a dream, a story I’ve become so immersed in I can no longer tell the difference from reality. I spent the first months of the New waiting for something to happen. Waiting for the bad to come, the hurt to start, the happy to leave. It never did.

“We can do hard things,” my favorite podcast preached. “I can do hard things,” I told myself for three years, so I wouldn’t die, wouldn’t drown beneath the tide of blood that washed over everything I held dear. I prayed it, held it like a talisman, chanted it, whispered into the fires I lit to chase away the monsters, never feeling like it was true.

But it was.

Somehow I did the hard things. I kept on. I breathed. I learned to swim the bloodtide, and though pressed in a vice, I was not crushed, I was not destroyed.

Now I tell myself this again. We can do hard things. We can heal, we can live, we can forget the things that are behind us in order to walk into the sunrise. We can remember who we used to be, hold her hand in ours, coax her out from under the bed where she has hidden, and draw her back inward, becoming whole with her again. We can turn our face to the sun, no longer feeling safe only under the moon. We can learn to look in the mirror and not fear. We can move in ways we had torn away from us, feel our skin without the burn of judgment, beat the ground with the rhythm of our newly healed soulsong.

We can do hard things. Sometimes the hardest thing is allowing yourself to be happy.

[rivenreverie]

I would like to share with you all some absolutely raw advice my mom gave me about my anxiety today

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socal gothic

you see a celebrity on the street. the only way you know is by the swarms of paparazzi, dressed in something akin to riot gear. you don’t look back to find out who it is. you can’t without protection.

rich women carry small demons in their purses. they coo down at them, asking how they are, as acid drips onto designer pet clothing.

“what a drought!” your neighbor says as you walk by. “take shorter showers!” their skin is cracking, oozing from the toxic sludge that runs through the pipes now. you don’t know why you’d touch the shower anyway.

the baseball rivalries grow stronger in april. you hear chanting, chanting, screaming, and a team name from the neighbors backyard barbecue.

you receive directions to turn at the starbucks on the corner. you turn, and turn, and keep turning. hours seem to have passed yet you keep turning.

you hear screams from the theme parks, see the lights flashing. it is 3 am, and they close at midnight.

in grade school, you go on field trips to this missions. as the tour leader speaks, you see the fathers out of the corner of your eye. they are coming for you.

“rain is coming!” the screams ring out through the streets. you run, try to hide. rain is coming. 

palm trees line the pretty streets. they are waiting.

the coyotes howl as you try to sleep. don’t acknowledge them. don’t wonder who is screaming. go to sleep.

“let’s go to the beach!” your friends say. they clamber into the water as you watch from the hot, burning sand. you wonder which one of them will be taken by the kelp.

“there’s a bible verse on the bottom of in n out cups, you know.” the next time you go, you check the bottom of your cup. there is an unreadable language, letters shifting. you can feel the curse settling in. 

tourists flock to the walk of fame, but locals know not to step over the stars. out of the corner of your eye you see a hand rising, dragging an unsuspecting woman under. hollywood changes people.

you take the metro to work. your phone loses service underground, and as the lights flicker and screams ring out from the next car, you wish you could have said goodbye.

the traffic seems thicker than normal. the days change. the i-5 is hungry.

the heat makes the air shimmer, the asphalt shaking. the thermometer reaches 115 and the ground opens and swallows things whole.

“june gloom is here!” the weatherman says. the fog rolls in, and when you wake up it’s july 1st.

[rivenreverie]

southern california gothic (orange county)

enjoy.

Keep reading

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STOP THINKING THERE IS A DEADLINE. THERE IS NO DEADLINE. TAKE A DEEP BREATH AND TAKE YOUR TIME.

[rivenreverie]