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moodboard for @dinosgf

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@gabyjenn/instagram

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@ninagmelin/Instagram

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from the cd packaging for 'silk & soul' by nina simone, copy printed 2006.

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Natalie Díaz, from "American Arithmetic", Postcolonial Love Poem

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Good-enough parenting requires a reciprocal refusal to be consumed by your children, to avoid succumbing either to the urge to make the other unreal, or the temptation of allowing them to make you so. For a child to recognize their parent’s independent existence might be just as hard as it is for a parent to recognize their children’s. Perhaps it is harder. There’s a whole genre of children’s book in which a baby animal of some kind seeks to locate or identify their mother. It’s an appealing primal quest. But there are hardly any books depicting a child seeking to get to know one’s mother.

A few years ago, while living abroad, I visited home fleetingly for a job interview. I’d hoped, perhaps assumed, my mum would meet me at the airport. Instead, she was away white-water kayaking for the weekend. She was pushing seventy at the time, and it was the dead of winter—I was impressed. But there was another feeling mixed in that was harder to place. Was I in some way put out that she should lead an independent life, even when I was gone? Some part of me still expected my parents’ activities to be defined by my own presence, waiting in suspended animation during my absences for my return. One of the reasons it is so hard to make sense of the identity of parent—mother perhaps in particular—is that its primary relatum isn’t (yet?) capable of understanding the limits or contingency of that identity. I am approaching forty now, and have a decent store of childhood memories of my parents at that age. It requires a pretty radical revision of those memories to allow that the adults in them had interior lives as real as my own now is. It’s like the opposite of finding yourself on a film set—buildings I treated as facades turn out to have interiors.

Through a thousand daily frustrations my children and I tell each other that our wills are separate. A refusal to be edible, the inducement of indigestion, is their best gift to me. In turn, I show them their own limits, my own reality. The business of being distinct people brings with it its own forms of loneliness. But it’s a loneliness that’s a precondition for the possibility of recognition—a loneliness that can drive us forward in the constantly shifting project of knowing and being known.

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“Life has many ways of testing a person’s will - either by having nothing happen at all, or by having everything happen at once.”

— Paulo Coelho

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Always in a constant state of "hmm maybe I wasn't as normal in that conversation as I thought I was"

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“I owe myself the biggest apology for putting up with what I didn’t deserve.”

— Unknown

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show me how ‘23 by Dayja Jay (via ig)

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Gratitude List - original poem - A4 and A3 download