#in an effort to be more kind to myself. i am simply practicing my proportions and what not by redrawing some low rarity cards

[twilight-twink]

[millennialincantations]

Hexing the Moon is Not a Thing

I have been hesitant to weigh in on the on the controversy surrounding the rumors that witches are out there hexing the Fae and the moon, but as this story is making its way into national news media, I feel that silence is no longer appropriate. I am aware that people reading this are likely to disagree with me, or perhaps even become offended by my take on the situation, but I am willing to take that risk in an attempt to be a voice of reason.

The gist of this story is that allegedly groups of neophyte witches are organizing on the social media platform TikTok and attempting to cast harmful spells on the Fae and the moon, the actual moon orbiting the Earth, and allegedly the sun is next. I was very deliberate in calling this a rumor in my opening statement. After a lot of research, I have been unable to find a lot of evidence that this is really going on. I've managed to find two TikTok users claiming to be hexing the moon, both with only around 1000 followers, and both of them have posted videos that are very clearly jokes and/or trolling. And I'll be honest, they were kind of funny.

I'm open to any contradicting evidence anyone is willing to provide me, but at this point I believe that this alleged group of witches hexing the Fae and the moon is nothing more than a rumor, a prank, or an internet troll scheme that has been blown completely out of proportion. I have seen so many angry reactions to the idea that this may be happening and simply not enough proof to believe it is actually happening. Did the rumor originate from an actual event? Probably. Is there a kernel of truth here? Maybe. Is there a widespread conspiracy of witches hexing mythological creatures and celestial bodies? Doubt it.

The story seemed to explode when a Twitter user claimed that these hexes were occurring and their tweet went viral. I've read the entire tweet, and while it was heavily laden with definitions and dire consequences, what it lacked was a shred of evidence, a single source, or any clue as to where someone might look to see proof of these hexes and this community of young maleficars. However in spite of this, it created a wave of anger and panic that has spread across all social media platforms and inspired many witches to create some very emotional responses.

Here is why I have a problem with all of this. Reactionary emotional responses, especially ones of anger, based on baseless rumors, have a tendency to make us all look foolish. And I sincerely feel that the global witch community is being made to look foolish right now. I will now thoroughly explain why.

I am going to begin with the obvious ageist and anti-novice dialogue this has inspired. I have purposefully avoided using the term “baby witch” until now, because I find it pretty offensive. I probably don't need to tell you that every story about this starts with a headline similar to “baby witches hex the moon.” “Baby witches” are the ones to blame, and “baby witches” are being vilified right now. In general, putting the word “baby” in front of another title serves to be diminutive, to express that while you and this person may share an identity, you are clearly superior to them. Using titles this way is infantilizing and demeaning. It suggests that while this person may be an adult, they are helpless, irrational, naive, stupid, and so on. There is nothing wrong with being a younger witch or a person who is new to the spiritual path of witchcraft. There is absolutely something wrong with taking a rumor as an excuse to release prejudicial venom against young and/or inexperienced people all across the internet.

Few of us were lucky enough to be born into witchcraft families. Many of us found witchcraft as a spiritual solace after escaping religious systems that oppressed us. Engaging in any kind of dialogue that makes witchcraft seem hostile to the young or new people who need it is simply not good form, and in my opinion, unethical. And let me remind any witches reading this that you most likely did or thought some pretty stupid things when you were new to witchcraft. I know I did.

Calling the subjects of this rumor “TikTok witches” serves nearly the same purpose as calling them “baby witches.” It's well known that as a newer and more complicated platform, TikTok is most popular with younger and more tech savvy users. Referring to someone as a “TikTok witch” not only makes an assumption about their age and level of experience, but also serves to denigrate their practice into an aesthetic rather than an identity. I am very active in the Facebook witch community, but I would never describe myself as a “Facebook witch,” because the sum of my spiritual path is much more than what I post and comment. My life as a witch is so much more than anything I do on the internet, and the same is true for most people, period.

Now I'd like to move on the statements I keep seeing regarding the supposed victims of the alleged hex. The Fae are not a large part of my practice, so I will not speak on them as much. My sister used to claim as a teenager that faeries would hide her things and that's why she could never find them. I thought this was just a dumb excuse until one day she dropped her camera memory card on the floor right in front of me, and it just disappeared. We tore her room apart looking for that thing, and I found it days later hidden between the pages of my journal. Let's just say, I've been socially distancing from the Fae ever since.

Hexing the entire Fae is kind of a ridiculous notion because that word has so many different connotations and denotations to so many different people that depending on who you ask you couldn't even really nail down a concrete definition of who and what they are, and some witches don't believe they're real at all. And if I were a Fae, I imagine I'd like it that way. It's a more common belief among witches that casting a spell requires knowledge and focus, and that doesn't really compute with attempting to target an ambiguous crowd of whatever the hell they are who might be, well, somewhere. As Willow Rosenberg (Buffy) would have said, “It's like trying to hit a puppy by throwing a live bee at it.” Anyway, I think the Fae are probably fine.

Now let's talk about the moon. So the moon is real, definitely. I've seen it. And the moon is gonna be fine. I'm less concerned with explaining why the moon will be fine and more concerned with unpacking some of the things I've heard about the moon being in peril. In the case of both the Fae and the moon, I've seen many impassioned pleas for witches to join together and combat this hex by using the magick to bless the Fae and the moon instead. Now, like I've said, I'm not super worried about the Fae, but I'm really really really not worried about the moon. Witches often leave water and objects under moonlight to bless and purify them, but now we're expected to believe that a hex can travel 238,900 miles through that same moonlight and still have the juice to do some damage. Really, its gonna be fine.

What this amounts to is a cry for an online holy war, witches versus witches, duking it out on their altars and cell phones for the fate of the moon. And while that might make for a pretty bitchin D&D campaign, it is an absolutely ludicrous waste of energy given the real world problems we are facing right now. Witches please, if you are feeling compelled to do a spell to help the world right now, hex the secret police in Portland, hex the fascist elements in government, hex the damn coronavirus, bless the protesters, bless election security, BLESS RUTH BADER GINSBURG! But please reconsider spending your effort playing tug of war with a celestial body that is most definitely totally going to be fine.

The three most concerning claims I have seen about how this hex against the moon will affect us are as follows:

1.) “The moon rules emotions, so hexing the moon will have a negative effect on all our emotions.” Yeah, um, that's probably got more to do with the horror survival game that is 2020, which I think we can all agree has not been anyone's year. Placing the state of our emotions under the control of strangers on the internet is a classic case of blame avoidance, in which we feel justified in our reckless actions and emotional outbursts by claiming it is not our fault or out of our control. Contrarily, a common tenet of much of witchcraft is control of the self. Such behavior is very unbecoming of anyone bearing the mantle of the witch.

2.) “Hexing the moon has angered the moon goddess Artemis, and this has angered her brother Apollo—who rules over medicine—and now we will never recover from the coronavirus.” Wow, that's a lot to unpack. First of all, are Artemis and Apollo really that close? Because he totally tricked her into killing her BF Orion that one time. Second, not everyone believes in the same deities, and not everyone believes in gods at all. Telling someone we're all gonna die of COVID-19 because of a god they don't believe in does not make anyone look smart. Third, this argument places the outcome of the pandemic in the hands of religion instead of where it belongs, which is in the hands of science. Witches, please, you can believe in science and faith and magick all at the same time, and it's something we all really need to start doing. Fourth, and most definitely worst, blaming sickness and plague on the spells of witches is something witch hunters did back when it was commonplace to murder people for witchcraft, and now we are actually seeing this claim come from other witches! Gah! I can't even. Please stop.

3.) “This or that moon goddess is mad and is going to retaliate by taking magick away from all witches.” I really just want to drop that GIF of Krysten Ritter rolling her eyes right here. Let's revisit the part where not all witches believe in the same deities and some don't believe in them at all. Now let's remind ourselves that magick comes from within, and while we may draw strength from outside sources, we don't need anything other than ourselves to perform witchcraft. I could never possibly believe that an action taken by another person I've never met could make me less of a witch. That smacks of fundamental insecurity in one's beliefs.

At this point, this story has been picked up by several major media companies, including Buzzfeed, NPR, Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, and several others. While I do think it's important for stories about real life witches to be covered in the media, I am not proud of this moment of exposure. Every story I read seems to go back to the original Twitter thread as their primary source, which as I've explained, is not sufficient evidence. This story has become more about the global visceral reactions witches are having online, and while those feelings and interactions are certainly real, it disturbs me that the witch community is making huge news by essentially throwing tantrums based on what is probably a lie.

Witches are not featured in major media very often, and when we are it is typically characterized by gross misinformation. I fear that we are currently fueling a fire that will only serve to make witches look ridiculous to a large number of people outside our community. And while I think we all have a healthy touch of “I don't care what you think about me,” it would be irresponsible to say that this will not have actual consequences for real people. As witchcraft is a practice and not necessarily a religion, it has little in the way anti-discrimination protections for anyone anywhere, and witches are still very much minorities. People who are brave enough to live openly as witches may face discrimination in employment, housing, service, and various other things if this story sways public opinion in a negative way, which would be a real shame considering the story is basically a sham.

This story has unique potential to damage the way witches are perceived in society because, while the story is fueled by backlash from witches are most certainly not hexing the moon, the witches doing the hexing are the headline. In this era, it is more common for people to assume a story from a headline rather than read an entire article, and so I fear the general impression people are getting is that witches are unfathomable children who really want the moon to fall out of the sky. And for those who actually read the articles, their first impression of witches very well may be the frustrated rantings of those of us who are not at our best right now.

In addition, this story subverts the historical meaning of the practice of hexing into a petty malicious act done out of boredom. The actual history of hexing stems from one common theme: the powerless trying to find a way to fight back against the powerful. This is why so many hexes have to do with women seeking revenge on abusive men. This is why witches have recently been discussed in the media for doing mass binding spells on President Trump and a mass hex on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh—which, controversial as they may be, these are stories I am actually proud of. So witches reading this, if you really wanna put a hex on something, let's target someone who really deserves it.

And if you think I'm referring to Betsy DeVos, well, I can't stop you from coming to that conclusion.

I do have one final remark, which is somewhat unrelated, but still important. If you are a witch who has found yourself deeply offended by the notion of hexing the moon (which you have every right to feel), I would invite you to please consider the feelings of indigenous people who have long been offended by the misappropriations of their culture, by their sacred acts being used and portrayed in ways they do not like or approve of. I think many of them have often felt the same way that you do now, except in their case, there's a lot more evidence the transgression actually occurred.

[adventures-in-asexuality]

‘Home’ Alone

You may have heard that Boris Johnson has recently become the leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, and, as such, the Prime Minister. This wasn’t an election open to the general public; party leaders are elected by the members of that party, and it’s no real surprise that the Conservative Party members like conservative candidates.

This isn’t a post about that, per se; there are plenty of other people detailing all of his failings and horrifying attitudes and behaviours. It’s just an illustration of how the political situation in this country is devolving faster and faster. I started talking about this in 2014, just a couple of years after I first got on tumblr at all, and I’ve been talking about it ever since, whenever I have the mental fortitude to do so - which, right now, isn’t often. 

But, hey, what’s another list of my deepest fears? 

I wrote a post a year or two ago with some of the things that we’re facing here, in the UK. I’ll link the entire post, but here is the most important paragraph:

‘But. I have been saying this. I said it when reports came out of the huge number of people dying within a few weeks of their disability claims being denied or revoked. I said it when a coroner went so far as to name the DWP as the cause of death on a death certificate for a disabled person. I said it when we started seeing stats of the huge proportion of cases of denied benefits that were winning at appeal or tribunal (and the huge barriers to even getting to appeal or tribunal in the first place). I said it when we heard about the suicide baiting in disability assessments. I said it when we heard that, even if you could get them, disability benefits were leaving people cold and hungry.’

These aren’t stopping.

Back in 2015, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities announced that they were going to investigate how the UK was treating disabled people. The report came out in 2016, and, as summarised here, found ‘‘grave and systematic’ violations of the rights of disabled people’. There’s no enforcement method for this, though, and the government were free to disagree and to carry on exactly as they were. Which they did. 

In 2016, the Brexit referendum happened. One of the topics that I remember very clearly from that time was the Conservative promises that they could write a new Human Rights Bill, since we would no longer be bound by the EU’s rulings on human rights. This was, of course, presented as a good thing, though I’m not even sure entirely how. All I remember was thinking about all the rights that we already knew were being violated, about how it was so obvious that a UN Committee was investigating it, and thinking: Why would a government ever write their brand new human rights bill to enshrine rights that they are already violating?

The answer, of course, is that they won’t. 

We haven’t heard anything more about the supposed brand new human rights bill since then - hell, we haven’t even left the EU yet - but this is always at the back of my mind, casting a shadow over my day-to-day life.

Because what this means for me is that my country does not want me. I can never be at home here because I am not wanted here; because my country would rather people like me die quietly, preferably in a way that doesn’t impact on their statistics, and leave the abled people alone. 

What does this have to do with asexuality, then? Well, I am ace and arospec and a lesbian, and there are two very obvious consequences of this.

Firstly, I don’t have a family. Anyone who’s been following me for a while will know this already, but here’s the bottom line: I am estranged from my family for many reasons, including that I am queer. This is a story everyone knows, I’m sure - it’s easier to list queer people of my acquaintance who do have a family - but it does remove one of the common support networks that people have. 

Secondly, I don’t expect to be in any kind of significant relationship any time soon. Don’t feel sorry for me or tell me to meet more people; it’s just a natural consequence of liking very few people and also being a bundle of trauma and disability. I’m used to it. The real problem is that this removes the other common support network, and most people in life assume that you have either one or the other. 

Coyote wrote a piece recently, On “single”, that’s relevant here. The whole post is well worth reading, but in it, ey comments on one of the conversations we’ve repeatedly had with each other: the issues with emergency contacts. You’re supposed to have someone who would drop everything to come help you. And, realistically, people expect this person to be either your partner or your immediate family. After all, those are the people that you can count on, right?

(Wrong. But we all know that.)

Coyote commented on how untenable this is in ir post, and I’m just going to quote the relevant part here. 

‘Ever since I left my family, I’ve been intensely aware of how, if I were to go for too long between jobs, or if I were to get severely sick, there’s practically no one close at hand to intervene or take care of me. And that weighs on me. That makes my life feel tenuous and unstable in a way that’s more far-reaching for me than simply not having a romantic partner. It would be different if I had solid career prospects and enough savings to coast on indefinitely, but I don’t.’

I want to underline that this is how the state of being singled affects us all. Not just the traumatised ones, not just the disabled ones, not just the ones who face other difficulties and marginalisations. All of us. This is always only survivable by the lucky ones. 

So where does this leave me? I have a bunch of progressive disabilities. I’m barely managing to hold down a job at the moment; I’ve given up having hobbies, seeing friends more than a couple of times a year, leaving the house at all except for essential errands, and I’m still constantly exhausted and in severe pain. All I do is work and rest for the next day’s work, and I’m still ill too often for my employer. I drag myself to work in so much pain that I’m propping myself upright, typing one-handed and slowly collapsing over my desk, and people still assume that I’m malingering, that I should just stop complaining and do my job better. 

And these are progressive disabilities. They are only ever going to get worse.

You can see, now, why the gutting of social safety nets is a very personal issue for me. 

Let’s recap. The government is aggressively uninterested in supporting disabled people, so when (and it will be when) I can’t manage to hold down a job no matter how much I injure myself in the process, I won’t be able to rely on them for such extravagant things as a roof over my head and semi-regular meals. People who support such cuts often say that people on disability benefits are just malingering, that real disabled people would have their family or partner care for them, but even setting aside what an awful situation that puts carers in even if it works as planned (and it is an awful situation), I don’t have either of those support networks. I’m on my own now, and, barring some extremely unlikely events, I’ll stay that way even when I can no longer support myself. 

This means that I don’t have a home. 

That’s a little overdramatic: I have somewhere to live at the moment. I’m even lucky enough, now, that I can live by myself; I have lived with strangers before, and it didn’t work well. I don’t want to repeat the habit. I can shape my space around me to some extent, and I do have a roof over my head, and both of these are important; I don’t want to trivialise that. 

What I don’t have, though, is any sense of security or welcome. I live here, and I have possessions here, and, bit by bit, I’ve even acquired nonessential items (even if every time I acquire something that wouldn’t fit in a suitcase packed in the dead of night, I panic a little bit). I’m always aware, though, that this place is only mine for as long as I manage to keep up full-time employment; as soon as I’m forced out of that sphere, I’ll need to be elsewhere, and I won’t have elsewhere to be. 

My welcome in this country, in this city, in this house is measured only by my participation in the capitalist workforce, and as soon as I involuntarily exit it, I will be unwelcome everywhere. 

Home is supposed to be the place that you’re always welcome, right?

Yeah, I don’t see that happening any time soon. 

This is the point where people start talking about wider communities, like the ace community. It’s an understandable impulse; if the normal support networks fail people, we want to think that there are backups. That smaller communities are still there to help us. 

I’ve talked before about not feeling welcome in the ace community for a variety of reasons, but that’s not entirely relevant; sure, I’m not at home here, but even if I was, there’s a bigger barrier here: we don’t have resources for this. (I feel like I should be talking more explicitly about the aro community here - because, at least to some extent, this would seem to be a more common aro-specific issue than an ace-specific issue - but I find it hard to think that it would be appropriate, since I'm not meaningfully involved in the aro community, largely because it's pretty clear I am unwelcome.) Most ace community resources are focused on dealing with people’s journey to recognise themselves as ace and how they can navigate their relationships afterwards - and even though that can be a large part of people’s lives, it’s not the be-all and end-all, and isn’t even on the radar for some of us.

This isn’t to say that this entire issue is just due to a failing of the ace community; this is a large and systemic problem, and it feels pretty self-defeating to throw any amount of effort at it at all. We also don’t talk about it, much, though, and that, I think, is the greatest disservice. It can feel like so much of ace community resources are devoted to reassuring aces that they are okay as they are and, from that basis, helping aces find partners, or at most reassuring unpartnered aces that just because they’re single now won’t mean that they’re single forever, that we ignore almost completely the logistical challenges of going through life without the societally expected support networks. 

We can’t solve this entire problem by ourselves - that would require completely rewriting society. But maybe we can include it in our directory of problems, understanding that this is an ace issue and finding or creating resources for it accordingly.

[phantom-le6]

The inherent flaw of February 14th (AKA Why I’m anti-Valentines)

As my Facebook friends will all attest, this year as in many recent years, my Facebook cover photo is a silhouette of a man with a shotgun, aiming said weapon at a silhouette of Cupid, and bearing the legend ‘Valentines? Bah, Humbug!’  This is because I am very much opposed to Valentine’s Day, and while some may assume this is just sour grapes on my part, that assumption would be entirely wrong.  Moreover, it smacks of the kind of egocentric thinking that all too frequently occurs in our society.  Just because someone doesn’t think as you do, it’s not always because they are bitter or jealous, and sometimes the proper response is to politely ask why and invite explanation and debate.

So, why do I oppose Valentine’s Day?  Well, as a lot of people who’ve known me for any length of time will be aware, when I got into secondary school, I got very heavily interested in girls and the idea of having a girlfriend, and I spent many years afterwards mishandling my pursuit of that goal.  Now part of this was due to my being autistic and not having much if any appropriate sources of guidance in this area, which is something I try to address in the factual autism book I’ve been working on for a few years now.

However, there is also the matter of how I was learning about relationships of a romantic nature, and that was primarily through pop culture that didn’t necessarily bear much relation to reality.  When you consider how romantic relationships are portrayed in family films, in some animated shows and in popular music, the portrayal is designed primarily to fit a particular creative vision, reflecting something of the reality but not showing that reality in a completely faithful way.

As a result of this lack of context, it can be easy for someone as literal-minded as me to leap to inaccurate conclusions about the nature of romance and how to attract someone.  It also doesn’t help that I am not someone to let go of a goal I wish to achieve very easily, often taking a longer period of time and more experiences than others to realise I might be going for something that is simply not for me.  Also, what successes I did have initially spurred me on as they were evidence that perhaps romantic relationships were something I could handle.

In sum total, I had only three relationships of a romantic nature during the time I was effectively ‘obsessed’ with having a girlfriend.  The first was when I was 13, going out for the better part of the autumn term with a girl of 11, who turned 12 a few weeks before we split up.  The second was not long after I’d started full-time employment, lasting just over a year.  The third, and final relationship, ran from August 2009 to February 2010, ending just a couple of months before I turned 25.  It was after that last relationship ended that I examined my previous relationships in the harshest possible light as I began to realise that I wasn’t enjoying the reality of relationships a lot of time.

A lot of this, I realised, was down to my need for time by myself.  Interacting with people is never easy for someone with autism; it takes a lot out of us even when it’s just the easier side of social interaction, like basic conversation with family or friends.  If, like me, you’re spending most of your weekday time in school as a kid then full-time employment as an adult, the free time you need to unwind after the high level of interaction you’ve just been through is, inevitably, very limited. Meeting up with friends can still be accomplished within that free time, but romantic relationships are another matter, or at least such is true of traditional monogamous romance.

Within monogamous romance, the level of social skills needed to make the relationship work and the amount of time that has to be put in are extensive, and for any autistic person, it would be extremely difficult to reach that social skills level, never mind put in the kind of time the relationship requires.  Not impossible, mind, as I am aware some people on the spectrum have managed long-term relationships and even gotten married, but it’s far from easy.  If like me the autistic person also works full-time, then the whole thing can get extremely stressful for us.  In my case, I’m also prone to a kind of excessive selflessness, putting others first even in situations where I’m actually in desperate need of some time to be selfish and look after myself.  As a result, I realised that getting into romantic relationships wasn’t for me just because it burned me out from a mental health perspective, and as a result I opted to swear off that kind of relationship in future.

However, I also realised that over the course of my girlfriend-obsessed years, I’d made a lot of mistakes that seemed out of proportion to just my difficulties with understanding social norms, and I realised that my autism was only part of the reason.  Another root cause was the way society, and the pop culture therein, has a tendency to overemphasise the importance of monogamous romantic relationships.  At times, this kind of overemphasis leads many to desperation, forcing them into unwise, even dangerous situations, because of pressure to find and form a relationship of this kind with anyone they can find.

This, then, is why I oppose Valentine’s Day, because it is a focusing point for such societal pressure, and it’s the only day that is dedicated solely to the kind of relationship people are generally pressured into by society.  Other occasions, such as New Year’s Eve in America where people are often expected to have someone to kiss the moment the new year starts, do not exclusively focus on the idea of encouraging romantic connections.  As such, their part in the process is inadvertent, and often specific to a given nation (we in the UK don’t seem to have the same New Year’s tradition the Americans do).

Now, I know some people will refute what I’ve just said. They’ll say Valentines is about celebrating all forms of love, that anyone can wish a ‘Happy Valentines’ to anyone else they care for, and it doesn’t have to be romantic.  To that, I would say ok, how come in sitcoms like Friends and Frasier, no Valentines cards are sent between parents and children, or between siblings?  If Valentines was about all forms of love, why did we never see Monica and Ross Gellar swapping Valentine’s Day greetings, or Rachel and Joey doing the same with their respective siblings?  Why didn’t Frasier and Niles swap Valentine’s Day cards?

The answer, of course, is that the notions of Valentine’s Day having a broader meaning is simply a modern myth, a flawed effort to expand the day’s appeal to try and be more inclusive, without recognising that this is only part of the problem.  The rest of the problem is that Valentines is too heavily rammed down our throats as a society, from too early an age and without proper context.  To work better, it needs to be amended, to be changed so that it has an ultimately more positive impact.

First, the occasion needs to be down-played more in society as a whole and in advertising in particular.  We all need to understand that the occasion is not for everyone, even if it is improved, and that it’s ok not to be in a romantic relationship with someone when they day rolls around.  In essence, we need to remove the pressure from people so they don’t end up with a Mr or Miss Right Now who then turns out to be Mr or Miss Wrong because the relationship was formed out of haste and desperation.

Second, the broadening of the meaning of Valentine’s Day has to be reflected in more than just a few industries; cards, soft toys and such like aimed at non-romantic forms of love are not sufficient to influence a change in society’s impression of the occasion.  TV, film and literature need to take a hand in this and change how they depict the occasion in future productions.  All too often, people are first introduced to new ideas and concepts through their depiction in modern culture, so if these forms of entertainment don’t back up other industries in broadening what Valentine’s Day can be, there will never be consensus on what the day actually is.

Third, Valentine’s also needs to broaden its scope in other areas.  Part of the problem is that it plays to societal defaults and focuses strictly on monogamous romance, but there are other types of adult relationship in the world, most of which are stuck on the fringes and difficult to access or understand as a result. Moreover, Valentine’s was originally a Roman festival of fertility, made ‘family friendly’ when co-opted by Christianity in order to help that religion supplant any pre-Christian religious practices. These two facts mean that Valentine’s Day could also cater to polyamorous relationships and to people in friends-with-benefit relationships, but so far as I know, this isn’t happening yet.

It is my belief that if all of the above were changed, February 14th would be a date worth noting on the calendar.  At present, it’s largely the myopic propagation of the myth that monogamous romance is somehow vital to the human experience, but as I’ve learned through my own experience, it is nothing of the kind. It’s a great thing to be able to experience, and to have if and when you’re able to have it for however long you can make it last, but it’s also perfectly ok not to have it.

Some people just aren’t suited for it; some have too much love for just one partner and need polyamory instead.  Some people will just prefer a friends-with-benefits relationship type, either for a time or for the rest of their lives, and some people might be ok just being by themselves and just experiencing love for family and friends rather romantic and/or sexual love.  The bottom line is that for Valentine’s Day to truly work as a celebration of love, every facet of it, every representation of it, has to include all of these people by default and without pushing any or all of it on people too hard.  When it can do that, when that day comes, I’ll be willing to wish people a Happy Valentine’s Day.  Until then, I am strictly anti-Valentines.

[nictophore]

The Way To Pick The Ideal Skincare Creams

Once you are a beauty editor a huge selection of makes toss Anti Aging Cream in you such as you'd not feel. Weeding through every one of these products has a good deal of energy and time In the event you chance to be always a skin care junkie like myself. I won't just smack such a thing. I do research look upward substances, also make an effort to provide a try to the products which produce my cut, as in, I create concerning them and do use them. I'll honestly feature products that I believe will continue to work into my routine and see how they do over time.

I rotate in between 5 8 skin care products sitting on my own plate. I pick and choose what to utilize based on how my skin looks and feels at the daytime and in the nighttime . Additionally, there are 14 products next that Igreasy 'll groggily employ if I am feeling dry or may sense an impending eruption in the middle of this night time. Can this seem excess for youpersonally? It should. The sum of products I use in relation for the countless I have waiting on deck in my flat is practically nothing at all , although it seems excessive for me personally.

Naturally, I understand how extremely lucky I am to have so lots of skin care care selections (who've been quite liberally given for me personally ) to select from, but moreover the fact which I didn't need to shell cash out, anybody who purchases skin care would be in an identical ship. The truth is that buyers have thousands upon tens of thousands of options to choose from. Walk to any Sephora, Ulta, department store or alternative wonder supplier and also there are makes and products for you to wade through. Just just how should you begin picking the best kinds for your own skin type? This is how a skincare specialist determines.

Know your skin type

Merely as you had skin in your teens will not indicate you really do. Hell, simply as you had that you may not awaken using dry patches weekly. A myriad of different things, the current weather, and also hormones could change skin variety. Knowing precisely what sort of skin you're working with would be the key to making sure that your own skin care regimen is really on point daily. Here's a guide that is wonderful.

Research

Knowing the needs of the skin start undertaking some analysis. What exactly are people about Instagram expression about skin care products that are various and the interwebs? Exactly what do your chosen, blogs and trusted attractiveness websites have to mention? You only have to be weary and be aware that lots of websites and bloggers do get paid to say favorable things about certain brand names and products. In addition, I suggest checking out Reddit's Skincare habit, but don't you dare toss me when you slip this rabbit hole! When an individual writes (yyy), they have no idea why it does or does not work.

Once you've got some merchandise in mind do some research about this newest . Do they fit with your core worth? Many people may only want to make use of products that are crueltyfree, organic, all-natural, vegan, etc.. You can find infinite specialized market brand names you are able to realize that struck most of the marks that you want. You also ought to seem into whether or not the brand has put out scientific studies to back up the claims in their goods.

Promises

Is a product promising you"botox in a box"? Proceed together. Comes out of the needle. Some products promise that the world but should you look at their elements they just do not measure up. That brings us to...

Ingredients

The FDA orders that SkinCell Pro must list their ingredients in order of the highest percentage to the bottom. This is exactly why it's crucial to always look at components. If a product, by way of example, a topical BHA exfoliant asserts to greatly help unclog pores and control acne although salicylic acid isn't recorded as one of the most effective three to four five elements that you ought to save your cash. As an alternative, find a product which comprises a higher proportion of the ingredients that thing instead of unintentionally picking one which chiefly contains additives.

To genuinely assemble an extraordinary skincare regular that my very best suggestion is always to hit on the web challenging. Do some study and study what ingredients have been demonstrated to be absolutely the absolute most effective for skin type and anti aging concerns. Do not simply take the word of something's packaging or marketing campaign. Do some grinding and have a few questions. It will definitely take time and effort, however it is well worth it plus it's actually pretty enjoyable.

Now, just what exactly?

After a commodity has made the trim be sure that you inspect the return policy in your own place of order. There's not any shame in returning with a item that will not work for you. It will not need to force you to break out or provide you chills, but if it is assumed to help with dry skin also you're maybe not seeing consequences following a few weeks you're going to be glad you stored that reception so you can return it and decide to try some thing else. Trial-and-error really are typical component of the process and frankly, intelligent skin care brands understand that. They would like one to become content with your order in order that they should perhaps not possess an problem with returns. Just Don't Forget, do not write off a fresh entirely because one or 2 goods did not Get the Job Done, they may have just been the wrong goods for you.How To Select The Proper Skin care Products

Once you are a wonder editor a huge selection of brand names toss SkinCell Pro reviews at you like you'd not imagine. If you chance to be always a skincare junkie like myself, sifting through all of these items has a lot of energy and time. I won't just smack any such thing on my own face. I look up substances, do exhaustive study, and make an attempt to give the goods which produce my minimize an actual try, as I personally really don't simply utilize them and write about them. I will actually feature products I believe would work to my regular and determine the method by which they perform over time.

At this time I rotate between 58 skin care products sitting on my own plate. I pick and choose what to use depending on what my skin looks and feels at the morning and also at nighttime. In addition, there are 14 products near my mattress which I will groggily apply if I am feeling tender, oily or may sense an impending eruption in the exact middle of this night. Can this sound excessive for youpersonally? It should. It sounds excessive to me personally, however, the sum of products I use in relation to the hundreds I have waiting on deck inside my flat isn't almost nothing at all.

Naturally, I know how extremely lucky I am to own so many skin care options (who've been quite liberally devoted for me) to choose out of, but moreover the simple fact that I did not need to fork out cash, anybody who purchases natual skin care is in the same ship. In fact, shoppers have thousands upon thousands of choices to select from. Head into almost any Sephora, Ulta, department shop or other wonder supplier plus there are endless makes and products that you wade through. Just just how should you start picking the most useful ones for your skin type? This is how a skincare specialist decides.

Know your skin type

Merely because you'd greasy skin in your teens will not signify that you still do. Hell, simply as you had oily skin last week doesn't indicate you wont wake up with warm spots weekly. A variety of different objects, the current weather, and also hormones could periodically change your skin style. Knowing which type of skin you are working together is the secret to ensuring your skin care regime is on point daily. Here's a manual that is excellent.

Re Search

Knowing the requirements of the skin layer start doing some research. What are people on Instagram saying concerning different skincare solutions and the interwebs? What do your favorite, reputable beauty websites and blogs need to express? Just be tired and know that bloggers and websites do receive money to express things that are positive about makes and products. Right dare toss me for them when you fall down that rabbit hole, although In addition, I suggest looking into Reddit's Skincare habit! If a customer writes (yyy), they've zero idea why it does or will not work.

Once you've got some products in mind do a little research concerning the newest new product. Do they match your core worth? Some may only desire to use products that are cruelty-free, all-natural, organic, vegan, etc.. There are specialized market manufacturers you are able to realize that struck on most of the marks that you want. You also ought to start looking into whether or not the brand has put out tests to back up the claims of their products.

Promises

Is a product promising you"botox in a box"? Proceed along. Stems from the needle. Some products assert the world however they don't step when you look at their components. Which brings us to...

Ingredients

Even the FDA orders that SkinCell Pro must put their elements in order of the maximum percentage to the lowest. That's why it is crucial to look at elements. If a product, by way of instance, a topical BHA exfoliant promises to help unclog pores and restrain acne although folic acid isn't recorded among the top three to four five five elements that you should save your money. Look for a item that contains a higher proportion of those ingredients that matter instead of unintentionally picking on one which contains fillers.

To put a skin care routine together that my tip is to hit on the net. Do a bit of study and study that which ingredients are demonstrated to be the type and skincare concerns. Do not simply take the sentence of a product's packaging or promotion campaign. Do a little grinding and ask a few concerns. It will surely take more time and hard work, but it really is worth every penny plus it is basically pretty enjoyable.

But just what exactly?

Once a commodity has made the cut be sure you look at the return policy at your place of order. There's not any shame in returning personally. It will not need to force you to break out or give you hives, but if it's assumed to assist with dry skin and you're maybe not seeing results following a few weeks you'll be glad you saved your receipt so it is possible to return it and try something else different. Trial-and-error are all area of the process and honestly, this is known by smart natual skin care brands. They would like in order that they should perhaps not have an issue with yields you to truly be satisfied with your order. Don't forget, don't write a new exclusively because one or 2 products didn't work, they may have just been the products foryou.

[ask-jungshook]

can i be real for a sec?? you are so amazing and im about to cry bc you're everything i wish i was. ppl love your art so much and your angst and you're so talented. you are so so talented. ok im sorry i just needed this off my chest

// OMG NOOOOOO NONNY PLEASE DON’T CRY!

For me, my ‘talent’ is probably an accumulation of ‘natural’ talent (basically your base stats in gaming terms lol), motivation, experience, practice, and personal drive.

So to get a general sense of where I’m coming from, let me tell you a story of a YOUNG DISSU and how her ‘talent’ developed. (aka my art journey LOL)

So let’s started!

Base Stats

When I first got into drawing (this was around middle school, so I was around 12 years old????), my base stat for drawing was probably a 1 out of 10 –  pretty horrible tbh because all I did was just to try and replicate my favorite mangas characters as they were drawn. (At the time I think it was Yu Yu Hakusho LMFAO). If I were to make an analogy or any type of comparison, let’s just say, my stick figures had better proportions than my actual drawings but I digress. But as much as I drew poorly, I found myself loving drawing and loving art because it was an outlet for me to relieve stress. (But looking back oh boy was I a hardcore weeaboo haha) This period of time was the time where I gave no shits if I drew poorly, I drew because I had fun and that was pretty much it. (So there was like pretty much 0 improvement since I didn’t really bother to learn anything technique-wise) 

Motivation & Practice

Around high school was when I first started digital art (I around age 16 at this time) and this was the time period when DeviantArt was the ‘go to’ place to post drawings and literature. (pretty sure tumblr and twitter didn’t exist back then and facebook like just became a thing lol) Avatar sites like gaiaonline were also super popular and filled with a bunch of talented artists. I remember distinctly being like ‘holy shit these people are so good and so talented and thinking that I could never surmount to anything like that’. But at the same time, another part of me was like AWE INSPIRED of their talent and would like obsessively see if they had any tutorials on drawing. So while yes, there was a portion of me that wanted to be like my art idols and draw the way they did, at the same time, I kinda knew in my head that that was impossible? (But it didn’t stop me from trying to emulate them) 

So while I kept on drawing because it was fun and I liked it as a hobby– BUT this time, I had people to look up to in terms of the ‘I want to draw like you’ aspect of it. They were my art idols and pretty much everything I wanted to be from an art standpoint hahaha. But those artists were my main source of motivation for wanting to improve throughout high school. So this was the period of time that other people’s art lead to me wanting to develop a better style and to improve my technique. (I drew a lot, but never really finished anything major because I was really impatient back then, but my style was HEAVILY impacted by my art idols lol – VERY VERY GRAPHIC NOVELY/DATING SIM-ESQUE)

Experience & Personal Drive

I think in recent years, I did a lot of growing not only as an artist but as a person. One thing to note about growth and  improvement is that seeing improvement/seeing growth does not happen overnight, and I took many art hiatuses during high school and most of college simply because I didn’t have time due to my course load. So after cycling through various styles, my art kinda just stagnated for a long time. At that time, it was a bit disheartening and frustrating for me, because at that point I drew for like 6 years and made like small baby steps. (I had a variety of styles, but I never really had the solid groundwork of like anatomy, how clothing works, or color theory.) So it did put a hamper down on my motivation to draw back then– simply because I didn’t think I was improving as fast as other people – which in retrospect, was mistake number one.

I also went through a pretty bad battle with depression while I was in college that ebbed down a bit, then resurfaced after I graduated (this was roughly a 3 yr span), which hindered a lot of my art growth substantially as well  because my mentality simply wasn’t there. (Music and art hold emotional ties for me, so whenever I’m depressed, everything relating to the creative side of me goes to shit and I will have 0 motivation to draw and basically just sleep all day.)

But to be brutally honest, this is where personal drive comes in. There was one day where I just had full blown out sit down with myself where I basically told myself that I was so sick of being sad all the time, so tired of just being tired, so sick of hating myself– and that I missed being happy and that I missed that sense of joy. So what did I do? I pushed myself and forced myself out of my bubble in an effort to crawl out of that pit that is depression. But one of the things that helped me the most was reconnecting with a bunch of art friends that I met online in high school on one of those avatar sites. I’m a lot stronger of a person mentally thanks to them. :) And with the help of my friends, I basically began my journey of a 360 degree change– my friends, music, art and the past depressed me were all sources of motivation for me to fight to win that mental battle against myself. (One of the things I did was delete all my social media and just start over– that way it’s easy to filter out unwanted things if you start with a blank slate. I also bought my dog around this time which helped my mentality exponentially.)

Getting started was probably the hardest part, because depression is a cycle of ups and downs– but in order to break free, YOU have to be the one to initiate change and stick to making it happen no matter how uncomfortable you may be. I understand that not everyone can be like me and resolve to do everything yourself. Some people need therapy, and some people need medication and that’s fine because as humans, we’re all different in how we cope with things. In my case, it was all about mental fortitude and my own will power. For me personally, I extended my art hiatus and took several more months off of art and just solely focused on myself and my mental health more than anything. I did a lot of soul searching during this time. Ironically, I think my main motivation for crawling out of that hell hole was just hating how much I hated being sad all the time because that’s just a place that I would never want to go back to.

And even now, it’s still a lot of self exploring of what I want for myself and understanding myself. I’m a person with many layers of personality (like an onion!) – and I’m still learning how to embrace all of those layers (even the bad ones) because in the end, your layers combined are what makes you who you are. If you try to reject a part of any layer, that’s pretty much you trying to reject a part of you– which may lead to or cause a lot of internal turmoil. (On a not so serious note, I realize this ‘layer’ thing was a totally unintentional analogy taken from Shrek, imsosorry lol)

And I just realized I took a HUGE tangent, but going back to the experience and personal drive, I think it was some time around 2016 and going into 2017 when I officially made it to be one of my goals for the new year as to get ‘better’ at art. At this point, I had like 10 years of ‘experience’ in digital art (probably a lot less if you factor in my hiatuses but I digress lol), so based off of those past experiences, I know what I’m good at and what needs improvement. (so I know where my groundwork is lacking and what I should focus on) From a mental perspective, I also understand myself more in the sense that I knew what caused mental stress on me, which in turn allows me to not put myself in uncomfortable positions mentally. At the same time, understanding myself has also allowed me to know my limits and understand how much I can push myself.

But more importantly (from an art standpoint), I’ve learned to take a lot of inspiration from other artists and a lot of art friends instead of wanting to have their style of drawing. I think it was important to me to realize and recognize that I will probably never draw like some of them (because they have a lot more experience than me), and that that should be taken as a positive thing because my art should reflect who I am. So remember that onion I was talking about? All the people I look up to and all the people who I’ve befriended through art also play a HUGE role in my many layers because without them, I personally wouldn’t have that personal drive to learn and get better. So def find something that motivates you to be a better version of yourself! (For me it’s music, books, and other people’s art!)

So going back to my main point of talent:

Don’t think of someone else’s talent as something you should replicate. Because honestly speaking, you can’t, since you literally are a different person– and no two people are the same. (Nor are two onions the same)  Instead– take an opportunity to view it as a source of motivation and inspiration to grow and foster your own talent and your own personal growth. Because talent is something you CAN cultivate into something beautiful given time and patience. (Related note: I wrote like an essay in my meet the artist link about my thoughts regarding art and improvement and about comparing yourself to other artists– dunno if that’ll help, but feel free to check it out here lol)  

It took me 12 years for my art to evolve to what it is now (I’m 24 now), and I still think I have a lot more room to grow because there was so much I missed out on when I first started out. So while yes, I would consider myself as ‘talented’, there were so many things that have attributed to and molded my base ‘talent’ from when I was 12  to what is it now. And beauty is, is that that everyone’s base stats are different– heck there are people HALF my age who draw better than I do now and that’s amazing! (Also don’t let someone’s age be a reason to put yourself down either! I personally find young artists super inspiring :’))

But honestly, the most important thing is that in the end, art should be about yourself! As I mentioned before, art and music are linked to me emotionally, so happiness is the main thing that I want my art to bring to me. You shouldn’t do things for the sake of others (like getting notes/being popular), you should do it because it makes you happy. (Because if you’re doing things for others, you’re literally putting your own happiness in the hands of other people– and it shouldn’t be that way) For me, drawing makes me happy because I like to see my progression over the years as well as that sense of accomplishment once you finish a piece.

I’m so sorry that this turned into a really long essay/rambling about my life (i tried to keep it as short as possible, but it still ended up long af weeps), but I just felt the need the type this because I’ve been in a similar position as you before. (When I first read this ask I had like a lot of mixed emotions because I was like yes, it’s a compliment, but at the same time, why do I feel really sad? lol so yeah … sorry about the wall of text)

So don’t wish you were me! LOL :’D (lol trust me bc I am far from perfect) Instead, embrace yourself, (& to paraphrase the chorus of Cypher 4)  know yourself, and most importantly, love yourself because you are ALSO a blooming talent in the garden that is life. 

:) So what I really want to see is the phrase of “you’re everything i wish i was“ turn into something like, “thanks for inspiring me to improve” or something along those lines.

As artists, we all learn off from each other. And personally, I would be honored to be some sort of inspiration to you – but as I said before, please don’t think that you’re any less than me or think negatively about yourself because you are amazing and talented in your own right! :’) And if it helps, I’ll be rooting for you to continue cultivating your own ‘talent’ into something even more spectacular! Nonny HWAITING!

Also if you ever want to talk, feel free to message me! (I hope I don’t come off as intimidating, I’m just very scatterbrained and get distracted easily lol i also apologize for any spelling mistakes in this because im too lazy to proofread lol)

[readbookywooks]

LETTER, DR. SEWARD TO HON. ARTHUR HOLMWOOD

6 September "My dear Art, "My news today is not so good. Lucy this morning had gone back a bit. There is, however, one good thing which has arisen from it. Mrs. Westenra was naturally anxious concerning Lucy, and has consulted me professionally about her. I took advantage of the opportunity, and told her that my old master, Van Helsing, the great specialist, was coming to stay with me, and that I would put her in his charge conjointly with myself. So now we can come and go without alarming her unduly, for a shock to her would mean sudden death, and this, in Lucy's weak condition, might be disastrous to her. We are hedged in with difficulties, all of us, my poor fellow, but, please God, we shall come through them all right. If any need I shall write, so that, if you do not hear from me, take it for granted that I am simply waiting for news, In haste, "Yours ever," John Seward DR. SEWARD'S DIARY 7 September. - The first thing Van Helsing said to me when we met at Liverpool Street was, "Have you said anything to our young friend, to lover of her?" "No," I said. "I waited till I had seen you, as I said in my telegram. I wrote him a letter simply telling him that you were coming, as Miss Westenra was not so well, and that I should let him know if need be." "Right, my friend," he said. "Quite right! Better he not know as yet. Perhaps he will never know. I pray so, but if it be needed, then he shall know all. And, my good friend John, let me caution you. You deal with the madmen. All men are mad in some way or the other, and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God's madmen too, the rest of the world. You tell not your madmen what you do nor why you do it. You tell them not what you think. So you shall keep knowledge in its place, where it may rest, where it may gather its kind around it and breed. You and I shall keep as yet what we know here, and here." He touched me on the heart and on the forehead, and then touched himself the same way. "I have for myself thoughts at the present. Later I shall unfold to you." "Why not now?" I asked. "It may do some good. We may arrive at some decision."He looked at me and said, "My friend John, when the corn is grown, even before it has ripened, while the milk of its mother earth is in him, and the sunshine has not yet begun to paint him with his gold, the husbandman he pull the ear and rub him between his rough hands, and blow away the green chaff, and say to you, 'Look! He's good corn, he will make a good crop when the time comes.' " I did not see the application and told him so. For reply he reached over and took my ear in his hand and pulled it playfully, as he used long ago to do at lectures, and said, "The good husbandman tell you so then because he knows, but not till then. But you do not find the good husbandman dig up his planted corn to see if he grow. That is for the children who play at husbandry, and not for those who take it as of the work of their life. See you now, friend John? I have sown my corn, and Nature has her work to do in making it sprout, if he sprout at all, there's some promise, and I wait till the ear begins to swell." He broke off, for he evidently saw that I understood. Then he went on gravely, "You were always a careful student, and your case book was ever more full than the rest. And I trust that good habit have not fail. Remember, my friend, that knowledge is stronger than memory, and we should not trust the weaker. Even if you have not kept the good practice, let me tell you that this case of our dear miss is one that may be, mind, I say may be, of such interest to us and others that all the rest may not make him kick the beam, as your people say. Take then good note of it. Nothing is too small. I counsel you, put down in record even your doubts and surmises. Hereafter it may be of interest to you to see how true you guess. We learn from failure, not from success!" When I described Lucy's symptoms, the same as before, but infinitely more marked, he looked very grave, but said nothing. He took with him a bag in which were many instruments and drugs, "the ghastly paraphernalia of our beneficial trade," as he once called, in one of his lectures, the equipment of a professor of the healing craft. When we were shown in, Mrs. Westenra met us. She was alarmed, but not nearly so much as I expected to find her. Nature in one of her beneficient moods has ordained that even death has some antidote to its own terrors. Here, in a case where any shock may prove fatal, matters are so ordered that, from some cause or other, the things not personal, even the terrible change in her daughter to whom she is so attached, do not seem to reach her. It is something like the way dame Nature gathers round a foreign body an envelope of some insensitive tissue which can protect from evil that which it would otherwise harm by contact. If this be an ordered selfishness, then we should pause before we condemn any one for the vice of egoism, for there may be deeper root for its causes than we have knowledge of. I used my knowledge of this phase of spiritual pathology, and set down a rule that she should not be present with Lucy, or think of her illness more than was absolutely required. She assented readily, so readily that I saw again the hand of Nature fighting for life. Van Helsing and I were shown up to Lucy's room. If I was shocked when I saw her yesterday, I was horrified when I saw her today. She was ghastly, chalkily pale. The red seemed to have gone even from her lips and gums, and the bones of her face stood out prominently. Her breathing was painful to see or hear. Van Helsing's face grew set as marble, and his eyebrows converged till they almost touched over his nose. Lucy lay motionless, and did not seem to have strength to speak, so for a while we were all silent. Then Van Helsing beckoned to me, and we went gently out of the room. The instant we had closed the door he stepped quickly along the passage to the next door, which was open. Then he pulled me quickly in with him and closed the door. "My god!" he said. "This is dreadful. There is not time to be lost. She will die for sheer want of blood to keep the heart's action as it should be. There must be a transfusion of blood at once. Is it you or me?" "I am younger and stronger, Professor. It must be me." "Then get ready at once. I will bring up my bag. I am prepared." I went downstairs with him, and as we were going there was a knock at the hall door. When we reached the hall, the maid had just opened the door, and Arthur was stepping quickly in. He rushed up to me, saying in an eager whisper, "Jack, I was so anxious. I read between the lines of your letter, and have been in an agony. The dad was better, so I ran down here to see for myself. Is not that gentleman Dr. Van Helsing? I am so thankful to you, sir, for coming." When first the Professor's eye had lit upon him, he had been angry at his interruption at such a time, but now, as he took in his stalwart proportions and recognized the strong young manhood which seemed to emanate from him, his eyes gleamed. Without a pause he said to him as he held out his hand, "Sir, you have come in time. You are the lover of our dear miss. She is bad, very, very bad. Nay, my child, do not go like that."For he suddenly grew pale and sat down in a chair almost fainting. "You are to help her. You can do more than any that live, and your courage is your best help." "What can I do?" asked Arthur hoarsely. "Tell me, and I shall do it. My life is hers' and I would give the last drop of blood in my body for her." The Professor has a strongly humorous side, and I could from old knowledge detect a trace of its origin in his answer. "My young sir, I do not ask so much as that, not the last!" "What shall I do?" There was fire in his eyes, and his open nostrils quivered with intent. Van Helsing slapped him on the shoulder. "Come!" he said. "You are a man, and it is a man we want. You are better than me, better than my friend John." Arthur looked bewildered, and the Professor went on by explaining in a kindly way. "Young miss is bad, very bad. She wants blood, and blood she must have or die. My friend John and I have consulted, and we are about to perform what we call transfusion of blood, to transfer from full veins of one to the empty veins which pine for him. John was to give his blood, as he is the more young and strong than me." - Here Arthur took my hand and wrung it hard in silence. - "But now you are here, you are more good than us, old or young, who toil much in the world of thought. Our nerves are not so calm and our blood so bright than yours!" Arthur turned to him and said, "If you only knew how gladly I would die for her you would understand. . ." He stopped with a sort of choke in his voice. "Good boy!" said Van Helsing. "In the not-so-far-off you will be happy that you have done all for her you love. Come now and be silent. You shall kiss her once before it is done, but then you must go, and you must leave at my sign. Say no word to Madame. You know how it is with her. There must be no shock, any knowledge of this would be one. Come!" We all went up to Lucy's room. Arthur by direction remained outside. Lucy turned her head and looked at us, but said nothing. She was not asleep, but she was simply too weak to make the effort. Her eyes spoke to us, that was all. Van Helsing took some things from his bag and laid them on a little table out of sight. Then he mixed a narcotic, and coming over to the bed, said cheerily, "Now, little miss, here is your medicine. Drink it off, like a good child. See, I lift you so that to swallow is easy. Yes." She had made the effort with success. It astonished me how long the drug took to act. This, in fact, marked the extent of her weakness. The time seemed endless until sleep began to flicker in her eyelids. At last, however, the narcotic began to manifest its potency, and she fell into a deep sleep. When the Professor was satisfied, he called Arthur into the room, and bade him strip off his coat. Then he added, "You may take that one little kiss whiles I bring over the table. Friend John, help to me!" So neither of us looked whilst he bent over her. Van Helsing, turning to me, said, "He is so young and strong, and of blood so pure that we need not defibrinate it." Then with swiftness, but with absolute method, Van Helsing performed the operation. As the transfusion went on, something like life seemed to come back to poor Lucy's cheeks, and through Arthur's growing pallor the joy of his face seemed absolutely to shine. After a bit I began to grow anxious, for the loss of blood was telling on Arthur, strong man as he was. It gave me an idea of what a terrible strain Lucy's system must have undergone that what weakened Arthur only partially restored her. But the Professor's face was set, and he stood watch in hand, and with his eyes fixed now on the patient and now on Arthur. I could hear my own heart beat. Presently, he said in a soft voice, "Do not stir an instant. It is enough. You attend him. I will look to her." When all was over, I could see how much Arthur was weakened. I dressed the wound and took his arm to bring him away, when Van Helsing spoke without turning round, the man seems to have eyes in the back of his head, "The brave lover, I think, deserve another kiss, which he shall have presently." And as he had now finished his operation, he adjusted the pillow to the patient's head. As he did so the narrow black velvet band which she seems always to wear round her throat, buckled with an old diamond buckle which her lover had given her, was dragged a little up, and showed a red mark on her throat. Arthur did not notice it, but I could hear the deep hiss of indrawn breath which is one of Van Helsing's ways of betraying emotion. He said nothing at the moment, but turned to me, saying, "Now take down our brave young lover, give him of the port wine, and let him lie down a while. He must then go home and rest, sleep much and eat much, that he may be recruited of what he has so given to his love. He must not stay here. Hold a moment! I may take it, sir, that you are anxious of result. Then bring it with you, that in all ways the operation is successful. You have saved her life this time, and you can go home and rest easy in mind that all that can be is. I shall tell her all when she is well. She shall love you none the less for what you have done. Goodbye." When Arthur had gone I went back to the room. Lucy was sleeping gently, but her breathing was stronger. I could see the counterpane move as her breast heaved. By the bedside sat Van Helsing, looking at her intently. The velvet band again covered the red mark. I asked the Professor in a whisper, "What do you make of that mark on her throat?" "What do you make of it?" "I have not examined it yet," I answered, and then and there proceeded to loose the band. Just over the external jugular vein there were two punctures, not large, but not wholesome looking. There was no sign of disease, but the edges were white and worn looking, as if by some trituration. It at once occurred to me that that this wound, or whatever it was, might be the means of that manifest loss of blood. But I abandoned the idea as soon as it formed, for such a thing could not be. The whole bed would have been drenched to a scarlet with the blood which the girl must have lost to leave such a pallor as she had before the transfusion. "Well?" said Van Helsing. "Well," said I. "I can make nothing of it." The Professor stood up. "I must go back to Amsterdam tonight," he said "There are books and things there which I want. You must remain here all night, and you must not let your sight pass from her." "Shall I have a nurse?" I asked. "We are the best nurses, you and I. You keep watch all night. See that she is well fed, and that nothing disturbs her. You must not sleep all the night. Later on we can sleep, you and I. I shall be back as soon as possible. And then we may begin." "May begin?" I said. "What on earth do you mean?" "We shall see!" he answered, as he hurried out. He came back a moment later and put his head inside the door and said with a warning finger held up, "Remember, she is your charge. If you leave her, and harm befall, you shall not sleep easy hereafter!" DR. SEWARD'S DIARY - CONTINUED 8 September. - I sat up all night with Lucy. The opiate worked itself off towards dusk, and she waked naturally. She looked a different being from what she had been before the operation. Her spirits even were good, and she was full of a happy vivacity, but I could see evidences of the absolute prostration which she had undergone. When I told Mrs. Westenra that Dr. Van Helsing had directed that I should sit up with her, she almost pooh-poohed the idea, pointing out her daughter's renewed strength and excellent spirits. I was firm, however, and made preparations for my long vigil. When her maid had prepared her for the night I came in, having in the meantime had supper, and took a seat by the bedside. She did not in any way make objection, but looked at me gratefully whenever I caught her eye. After a long spell she seemed sinking off to sleep, but with an effort seemed to pull herself together and shook it off. It was apparent that she did not want to sleep, so I tackled the subject at once. "You do not want to sleep?" "No. I am afraid." "Afraid to go to sleep! Why so? It is the boon we all crave for." "Ah, not if you were like me, if sleep was to you a presage of horror!" "A presage of horror! What on earth do you mean?" "I don't know. Oh, I don't know. And that is what is so terrible. All this weakness comes to me in sleep, until I dread the very thought." "But, my dear girl, you may sleep tonight. I am here watching you, and I can promise that nothing will happen." "Ah, I can trust you!" she said. I seized the opportunity, and said, "I promise that if I see any evidence of bad dreams I will wake you at once." "You will? Oh, will you really? How good you are to me. Then I will sleep!" And almost at the word she gave a deep sigh of relief, and sank back, asleep. All night long I watched by her. She never stirred, but slept on and on in a deep, tranquil, life-giving, health-giving sleep. Her lips were slightly parted, and her breast rose and fell with the regularity of a pendulum. There was a smile on her face, and it was evident that no bad dreams had come to disturb her peace of mind. In the early morning her maid came, and I left her in her care and took myself back home, for I was anxious about many things. I sent a short wire to Van Helsing and to Arthur, telling them of the excellent result of the operation. My own work, with its manifold arrears, took me all day to clear off. It was dark when I was able to inquire about my zoophagous patient. The report was good. He had been quite quiet for the past day and night. A telegram came from Van Helsing at Amsterdam whilst I was at dinner, suggesting that I should be at Hillingham tonight, as it might be well to be at hand, and stating that he was leaving by the night mail and would join me early in the morning. 9 September. - I was pretty tired and worn out when I got to Hillingham. For two nights I had hardly had a wink of sleep, and my brain was beginning to feel that numbness which marks cerebral exhaustion. Lucy was up and in cheerful spirits. When she shook hands with me she looked sharply in my face and said, "No sitting up tonight for you. You are worn out. I am quite well again. Indeed, I am, and if there is to be any sitting up, it is I who will sit up with you." I would not argue the point, but went and had my supper. Lucy came with me, and, enlivened by her charming presence, I made an excellent meal, and had a couple of glasses of the more than excellent port. Then Lucy took me upstairs, and showed me a room next her own, where a cozy fire was burning. "Now," she said. "You must stay here. I shall leave this door open and my door too. You can lie on the sofa for I know that nothing would induce any of you doctors to go to bed whilst there is a patient above the horizon. If I want anything I shall call out, and you can come to me at once." I could not but acquiesce, for I was dog tired, and could not have sat up had I tried. So, on her renewing her promise to call me if she should want anything, I lay on the sofa, and forgot all about everything. LUCY WESTENRA'S DIARY 9 September. - I feel so happy tonight. I have been so miserably weak, that to be able to think and move about is like feeling sunshine after a long spell of east wind out of a steel sky. Somehow Arthur feels very, very close to me. I seem to feel his presence warm about me. I suppose it is that sickness and weakness are selfish things and turn our inner eyes and sympathy on ourselves, whilst health and strength give love rein, and in thought and feeling he can wander where he wills. I know where my thoughts are. If only Arthur knew! My dear, my dear, your ears must tingle as you sleep, as mine do waking. Oh, the blissful rest of last night! How I slept, with that dear, good Dr. Seward watching me. And tonight I shall not fear to sleep, since he is close at hand and within call. Thank everybody for being so good to me. Thank God! Goodnight Arthur. DR. SEWARD'S DIARY 10 September. - I was conscious of the Professor's hand on my head, and started awake all in a second. That is one of the things that we learn in an asylum, at any rate. "And how is our patient?" "Well, when I left her, or rather when she left me," I answered. "Come, let us see," he said. And together we went into the room. The blind was down, and I went over to raise it gently, whilst Van Helsing stepped, with his soft, cat-like tread, over to the bed. As I raised the blind, and the morning sunlight flooded the room, I heard the Professor's low hiss of inspiration, and knowing its rarity, a deadly fear shot through my heart. As I passed over he moved back, and his exclamation of horror, "Gott in Himmel!" needed no enforcement from his agonized face. He raised his hand and pointed to the bed, and his iron face was drawn and ashen white. I felt my knees begin to tremble. There on the bed, seemingly in a swoon, lay poor Lucy, more horribly white and wan-looking than ever. Even the lips were white, and the gums seemed to have shrunken back from the teeth, as we sometimes see in a corpse after a prolonged illness. Van Helsing raised his foot to stamp in anger, but the instinct of his life and all the long years of habit stood to him, and he put it down again softly. "Quick!" he said. "Bring the brandy." I flew to the dining room, and returned with the decanter. He wetted the poor white lips with it, and together we rubbed palm and wrist and heart. He felt her heart, and after a few moments of agonizing suspense said, "It is not too late. It beats, though but feebly. All our work is undone. We must begin again. There is no young Arthur here now. I have to call on you yourself this time, friend John." As he spoke, he was dipping into his bag, and producing the instruments of transfusion. I had taken off my coat and rolled up my shirt sleeve. There was no possibility of an opiate just at present, and no need of one. and so, without a moment's delay, we began the operation. After a time, it did not seem a short time either, for the draining away of one's blood, no matter how willingly it be given, is a terrible feeling, Van Helsing held up a warning finger. "Do not stir," he said. "But I fear that with growing strength she may wake, and that would make danger, oh, so much danger. But I shall precaution take. I shall give hypodermic injection of morphia." He proceeded then, swiftly and deftly, to carry out his intent. The effect on Lucy was not bad, for the faint seemed to merge subtly into the narcotic sleep. It was with a feeling of personal pride that I could see a faint tinge of color steal back into the pallid cheeks and lips. No man knows, till he experiences it, what it is to feel his own lifeblood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves. The Professor watched me critically. "That will do," he said. "Already?" I remonstrated. "You took a great deal more from Art." To which he smiled a sad sort of smile as he replied, "He is her lover, her fiance. You have work, much work to do for her and for others, and the present will suffice. When we stopped the operation, he attended to Lucy, whilst I applied digital pressure to my own incision. I laid down, while I waited his leisure to attend to me, for I felt faint and a little sick. By and by he bound up my wound, and sent me downstairs to get a glass of wine for myself. As I was leaving the room, he came after me, and half whispered. "Mind, nothing must be said of this. If our young lover should turn up unexpected, as before, no word to him. It would at once frighten him and enjealous him, too. There must be none. So!" When I came back he looked at me carefully, and then said, "You are not much the worse. Go into the room, and lie on your sofa, and rest awhile, then have much breakfast and come here to me." I followed out his orders, for I knew how right and wise they were. I had done my part, and now my next duty was to keep up my strength. I felt very weak, and in the weakness lost something of the amazement at what had occurred. I fell asleep on the sofa, however, wondering over and over again how Lucy had made such a retrograde movement, and how she could have been drained of so much blood with no sign any where to show for it. I think I must have continued my wonder in my dreams, for, sleeping and waking my thoughts always came back to the little punctures in her throat and the ragged, exhausted appearance of their edges, tiny though they were. Lucy slept well into the day, and when she woke she was fairly well and strong, though not nearly so much so as the day before. When Van Helsing had seen her, he went out for a walk, leaving me in charge, with strict injunctions that I was not to leave her for a moment. I could hear his voice in the hall, asking the way to the nearest telegraph office. Lucy chatted with me freely, and seemed quite unconscious that anything had happened. I tried to keep her amused and interested. When her mother came up to see her, she did not seem to notice any change whatever, but said to me gratefully, "We owe you so much, Dr. Seward, for all you have done, but you really must now take care not to overwork yourself. You are looking pale yourself. You want a wife to nurse and look after you a bit, that you do!" As she spoke, Lucy turned crimson, though it was only momentarily, for her poor wasted veins could not stand for long an unwonted drain to the head. The reaction came in excessive pallor as she turned imploring eyes on me. I smiled and nodded, and laid my finger on my lips. With a sigh, she sank back amid her pillows. Van Helsing returned in a couple of hours, and presently said to me. "Now you go home, and eat much and drink enough. Make yourself strong. I stay here tonight, and I shall sit up with little miss myself. You and I must watch the case, and we must have none other to know. I have grave reasons. No, do not ask the. Think what you will. Do not fear to think even the most not-improbable. Goodnight." In the hall two of the maids came to me, and asked if they or either of them might not sit up with Miss Lucy. They implored me to let them, and when I said it was Dr. Van Helsing's wish that either he or I should sit up, they asked me quite piteously to intercede with the`foreign gentleman'. I was much touched by their kindness. Perhaps it is because I am weak at present, and perhaps because it was on Lucy's account, that their devotion was manifested. For over and over again have I seen similar instances of woman's kindness. I got back here in time for a late dinner, went my rounds, all well, and set this down whilst waiting for sleep. It is coming. 11 September. - This afternoon I went over to Hillingham. Found Van Helsing in excellent spirits, and Lucy much better. Shortly after I had arrived, a big parcel from abroad came for the Professor. He opened it with much impressment, assumed, of course, and showed a great bundle of white flowers. "These are for you, Miss Lucy," he said. "For me? Oh, Dr. Van Helsing!" "Yes, my dear, but not for you to play with. These are medicines." Here Lucy made a wry face. "Nay, but they are not to take in a decoction or in nauseous form, so you need not snub that so charming nose, or I shall point out to my friend Arthur what woes he may have to endure in seeing so much beauty that he so loves so much distort. Aha, my pretty miss, that bring the so nice nose all straight again. This is medicinal, but you do not know how. I put him in your window, I make pretty wreath, and hang him round your neck, so you sleep well. Oh, yes! They, like the lotus flower, make your trouble forgotten. It smell so like the waters of Lethe, and of that fountain of youth that the Conquistadores sought for in the Floridas, and find him all too late." Whilst he was speaking, Lucy had been examining the flowers and smelling them. Now she threw them down saying, with half laughter, and half disgust, "Oh, Professor, I believe you are only putting up a joke on me. Why, these flowers are only common garlic." To my surprise, Van Helsing rose up and said with all his sternness, his iron jaw set and his bushy eyebrows meeting, "No trifling with me! I never jest! There is grim purpose in what I do, and I warn you that you do not thwart me. Take care, for the sake of others if not for your own." Then seeing poor Lucy scared, as she might well be, he went on more gently, "Oh, little miss, my dear, do not fear me. I only do for your good, but there is much virtue to you in those so common flowers. See, I place them myself in your room. I make myself the wreath that you are to wear. But hush! No telling to others that make so inquisitive questions. We must obey, and silence is a part of obedience, and obedience is to bring you strong and well into loving arms that wait for you. Now sit still a while. Come with me, friend John, and you shall help me deck the room with my garlic, which is all the war from Haarlem, where my friend Vanderpool raise herb in his glass houses all the year. I had to telegraph yesterday, or they would not have been here." We went into the room, taking the flowers with us. The Professor's actions were certainly odd and not to be found in any pharmacopeia that I ever heard of. First he fastened up the windows and latched them securely. Next, taking a handful of the flowers, he rubbed them all over the sashes, as though to ensure that every whiff of air that might get in would be laden with the garlic smell. Then with the wisp he rubbed all over the jamb of the door, above, below, and at each side, and round the fireplace in the same way. It all seemed grotesque to me, and presently I said, "Well, Professor, I know you always have a reason for what you do, but this certainly puzzles me. It is well we have no sceptic here, or he would say that you were working some spell to keep out an evil spirit." "Perhaps I am!" He answered quietly as he began to make the wreath which Lucy was to wear round her neck. We then waited whilst Lucy made her toilet for the night, and when she was in bed he came and himself fixed the wreath of garlic round her neck. The last words he said to her were, "Take care you do not disturb it, and even if the room feel close, do not tonight open the window or the door." "I promise," said Lucy. "And thank you both a thousand times for all your kindness to me! Oh, what have I done to be blessed with such friends?" As we left the house in my fly, which was waiting, Van Helsing said, "Tonight I can sleep in peace, and sleep I want, two nights of travel, much reading in the day between, and much anxiety on the day to follow, and a night to sit up, without to wink. Tomorrow in the morning early you call for me, and we come together to see our pretty miss, so much more strong for my `spell' which I have work. Ho, ho!" He seemed so confident that I, remembering my own confidence two nights before and with the baneful result, felt awe and vague terror. It must have been my weakness that made me hesitate to tell it to my friend, but I felt it all the more, like unshed tears.

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Beware of Pity - Stefan Zweig

Oh what a book. What a book! What a book! Read the book.  The day after the US Presidential election my uncle and I went to a cafe, and as I walked to the table with the tea and scones every single table I passed was worrying about Trump and what is going to happen to us all.      Future historians of our epoch will one day record that in the year 1937 almost every conversation in every country of this distracted Europe of ours was dominated by speculation as to the probability or improbability of a new world war. Wherever people met, this theme exercised an irresistible fascination, and one sometimes had a feeling that it was not the people themselves who were working off their fears in conjectures and hopes, but, so to speak, the very air, the storm-laden atmosphere of the times, which, charged with latent suspense, was endeavoring to unburden itself in speech. I hope I am just paranoid and my feeling of connection with that other time and place is childish.. it is what it is I suppose. What must be shall be. The first chapter was probably the best first chapter of any book I have ever read. Do not read on. Spoilers. Do  not even google its name because the google results contain spoilers without you even needing to click a link. And do not read the introduction of the book, because it contains a summary of the entire plot and no real analysis. Never read introductions until afterwards, if they don’t tell you the entire story they will at the very least tell you the ending. 

Beware of Pity

Our anti-hero, the ring-tailed fool, dillydallies between two views. To be kind and self-sacrificing, or to be selfish and independent. 

Were people really made so kind and happy by seeing others display kindness and pity? If that were so, Condor was right; if that were so, anyone who made a single person happy had fulfilled the purpose of his existence; it was really worth while to devote oneself to others to the very limit of one’s strength, and even beyond. If that were so, every sacrifice was justified, and even a lie that made others happy was more important than truth itself.

Is pity incompatible with love? 

   Only now did I realize [...] why my pity so enraged her. Obviously she had realized with a woman’s clairvoyant instinct that pity is far too lukewarm and fraternal a feeling, and but a sorry substitute for real love.

From selfless:

Even if I had gone further than in all honesty I should have done, my lies, those lies born of pity, had made her happy; and to make a person happy could never be a crime.

To selfish:

For the first time I began to perceive that true sympathy cannot be switched on and off like an electric current, that anyone that identifies himself with the fate of another is robbed to some extent of his own freedom.

Perhaps in his selflessness he was dishonest and in his selfishness he was honest. At many points in the book people take an inexplicable liking to him, at one point he even notices and is puzzled himself. If he would only stop and see what a coward he is, or if someone would look past his gentlemanliness and his Aryan eyes and realize what he really is and point it out to him before it’s too late. 

Is it a crime to marry someone you don’t love to make them happy?

How often has it been committed?  

For vanity, too, inebriates; gratitude, too, intoxicates; tenderness, too, can blissfully confuse the senses.

Sometimes insightful, now blind: 

What a mercy, I thought, that the crippled, the maimed, those whom Fate has cheated, at least in sleep have no knowledge of the shapeliness or unshapeliness of their bodies. 

There is something so horrible about this. The man is so obsessed with this person’s disability that he can at no time think of the person without thinking of the problem. And he for some reason assumes that the person is equally plagued by it and never thinks of anything else. He assumes that because he has reduced them to nothing but a condition that this is truly all they are and they are aware of it. I’ve seen people say this book is a-political. Those people are blind! This way of thinking leads down a clear road to the years where 11 million people were killed in concentration camps because they were defined according to one and only one aspect of themselves, ranging from race to chronic illness  to sexuality to political belief.

The fact that the object of pity in this book is Jewish, like the author himself, can surely be no coincidence. The Herr Lieutenant is haunted by the idea that his family and friends might find out he is romantically associated with a “Jewess”. 

Narrow-minded person that he is, every single moment he is with her he pities her. He never forgets why she is sitting down. When she tries to show him her strength and perseverance, tries to show him that she can, in fact, walk, all he can see is weakness: 

She wanted, out of a kind of mysterious vindictiveness born of despair, to torture us with her torture, to arraign us, the hale and hearty, in the place of God.

She is constantly aware of his pity and it is a constant reminder to her of her situation. It destroys her:

A lame creature, a cripple like myself, has no right to love. How should I, broken, shattered being that I am, be anything but a burden to you, when to myself I am an object of disgust, of loathing. A creature such as I, I know, has no right to love, and certainly no right to be loved. It is for such a creature to creep away into a corner and die and cease to make other people's lives a burden with her presence.

On self-deception: 

The instinct of self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at the bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them nonexistent, and a warning such as mine against cheap optimism was bound to prove particularly unwelcome at a moment when a sumptuously laid supper was awaiting for us in the next room.

One should not always let the wish be father to the thought. Only a numskull is pleased at being a so-called “success” with women, only a dunderhead is puffed up by it.

On courage: 

During the war practically the only courage I came across was mass courage, the courage that comes of being one of a herd, and anyone who examines this phenomenon more closely will find it to be compounded of some very strange elements: a great deal of vanity, a great deal of recklessness and even boredom, but, above all, a great deal of fear — yes, fear of staying behind, fear of being sneered at, fear of independent action, and fear, above all, of taking a stand against the mass enthusiasm.     It always demands a far greater degree of courage for an individual to oppose an organized movement than to let himself be carried along with the stream — individual courage, that is, a variety of courage that is dying out in these times of progressive organization and mechanization. Even in the last war he had not met many men at the front who had either unequivocally acquiesced in or opposed the war. Most of them had been whirled into it like a cloud of dust and had simply found themselves caught up in the vast vortex, each one of them tossed about willy-nilly like a pea in a great sack. For the first time in my life I began to realise that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world.

Other interesting bits:

It seemed to him to be more important and sensible to become rich than to be regarded as rich  one might have thought he had read Schopenhauer’s wise paralipomena with regard to what one is or merely represents oneself to be).

Sometimes one is amazed that the good God should trouble to give the six or seven hundred roofs of a little town of this sort the background of a different sky and a different countryside. -

What a wonderful line. It says so much and so early on about the narrator.

It is only the immeasurable, the limitless that terrifies us. That which is set within defined, fixed limits is a challenge to our powers, comes to be the measure of our strength.

  There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul agains the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one at counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.

   Love is illimitable, all finiteness, all moderation, is repugnant, intolerable to it. In every sign of constraint, of restraint, on the part of the other it suspects opposition; any reluctance to yield utterly it rightly interprets as secret resistance. And there must have been a trace of embarrassment and confusion in my behaviour, of disingenuousness and gaucherie in what I said, for all my efforts were no match for her alert expectancy.

    For a young and inexperienced person almost invariably forms a picture of real life and experience that is a reflection of the world of which he has heard or read in books; before he has experienced life at first-hand he inevitably moulds his ideas of it on second-hand experience. Our decisions are to a much greater extent dependent on our desire to conform to the standards of our class and environment than we are inclined to admit. A considerable proportion of our reasoning is merely an automatic function, so to speak, of influences and impressions which have become part of us..   I felt like a murderer who has buried the corpse of his victim in a wood: the snow begins to fall in thick, white, dense flakes; for months, he knows, this concealing coverlet will hide his crime, and afterwards all trace of it will have vanished forever. And so I plucked up the courage and began to live again. Since no one reminded me of it, I myself forgot my guilt. For the heart is able to bury deep and well what it urgently desires to forget.  So often in fiction, films and TV more than books, people are, in the end, good or bad. This person, oh and I despise him, this person is both. He is so real. He’s insightful at times, but incredibly blind. Kind, but impossibly cruel and selfish overall. Honorable, but despicable. Brave, but as cowardly as they come.  

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• A black cat among roses, phlox, lilac-misted under a quarter moon, the sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock. The garden is very still. It is dazed with moonlight, contented with perfume. – Amy Lowell • A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors. – Charles Baudelaire • A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant – rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance – but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself. – Roberto Burle Marx • A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust. – Gertrude Jekyll • A garden is a grand teacher… above all it teaches entire trust. – Gertrude Jekyll • A garden is a symbol of man’s arrogance, perverting nature to human ends. – Tim Smit • A garden is a thing of beauty and a job forever. – Richard Briers • A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself. – May Sarton • A garden is an awful responsibility. You never know what you may be aiding to grow in it. – Charles Dudley Warner • A garden is the best alternative therapy. – Germaine Greer • A garden is to be a world unto itself, it had better make room for the darker shades of feeling as well as the sunny ones. – William Kent • A garden really lives only insofar as it is an expression of faith, the embodiment of a hope and a song of praise. – Russell Page • A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them. – Liberty Hyde Bailey • A garden was the primitive prison, till man with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it. – Charles Lamb • A good garden may have some weeds. – Thomas Fuller • A house though otherwise beautiful, yet if it hath no garden belonging to it, is more like a prison than a house. – William H. Coles • A modest garden contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library. – Henri Frederic Amiel • A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us. – Wendell Berry • Alfred Austin said, “Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.” – Alfred Austin • All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so. – Joseph Joubert • All gardening is landscape painting. – William Kent • All my hurts my garden spade can heal. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • An optimistic gardener is one who believes that whatever goes down must come up. – Leslie Hall • As a gardener, I’m among those who believe that much of the evidence of God’s existence has been planted. – Robert Breault • As long as you have a garden you have a future and as long as you have a future you are alive. – Frances Hodgson Burnett

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Garden', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_garden').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_garden img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Be your own politics, grow your own garden, and maybe you can help out more. – Rip Torn • But though an old man, I am but a young gardener. – Thomas Jefferson • By the time one is eighty, it is said, there is no longer a tug of war in the garden with the May flowers hauling like mad against the claims of the other months. All is at last in balance and all is serene. The gardener is usually dead, of course. – Henry Mitchell

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling] • Christians are like the several flowers in a garden that have each of them the dew of heaven, which, being shaken with the wind, they let fall at each other’s roots, whereby they are jointly nourished, and become nourishers of each other. – John Bunyan • Cultivate your own garden and let go of your tendency to examine and judge how others cultivate theirs. Catch yourself in moments of gossip about how others ought to be living and rid yourself of thoughts about how they should be doing it this way, or how they have no right to live and think as they do. Stay busy and involved in your own projects and pursuits. – Wayne Dyer • Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified? – Chuck Palahniuk • Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. – Ray Bradbury • Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace. – May Sarton • Friends are “annuals” that need seasonal nurturing to bear blossoms. Family is a “perennial” that comes up year after year, enduring the droughts of absence and neglect. There’s a place in the garden for both of them. – Erma Bombeck • Gardeners instinctively know that flowers and plants are a continuum and that the wheel of garden history will always be coming full circle. – Francis Cabot Lowell • Gardeners instinctively know that flowers and plants are a continuum and that the wheel of garden history will always be coming full circle. One lifetime is never enough to accomplish one’s horticultural goals. If a garden is a site for the imagination, how can we be very far from the beginning? – Francis Cabot • Gardeners, I think, dream bigger dreams than Emperor’s. – Mary Cantwell • Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything – except itself. – May Sarton • Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense. – Phyllis McGinley • Gardening is a kind of disease. It infects you, you cannot escape it. When you go visiting, your eyes rove about the garden; you interrupt the serious cocktail drinking because of an irresistible impulse to get up and pull a weed. – Lewis Gannett • Gardening is a labour full of tranquility and satisfaction; natural and instructive, and as such contributes to the most serious contemplation, experience, health and longevity. – John Evelyn • Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw. – Henry David Thoreau • Gardening is how I relax. It’s another form of creating and playing with colors. – Oscar de la Renta • Gardening is not a rational act. – Margaret Atwood • Gardening is the best therapy in the world. – C. Z. Guest • Gardening is the only unquestionably useful job. – George Bernard Shaw • Gardening requires lots of water… most of it in the form of perspiration. – Louise Erickson • Gardening simply does not allow one to be mentally old, because too many hopes and dreams are yet to be realized. – Allan Armitage • Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade. – Rudyard Kipling • Gardens… should be like lovely, well-shaped girls: all curves, secret corners, unexpected deviations, seductive surprises and then still more curves. – H. E. Bates • Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed. – Walt Whitman • God Almighty first planted a Garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man, without which buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks. And a man shall ever see, that when ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely, as if gardening were the greater perfection. – Francis Bacon • God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. – Francis Bacon • God the first garden made, and the first city Cain. – Abraham Cowley • How can you be content to be in the world like tulips in a garden, to make a fine show, and be good for nothing. – Mary Astell • I also know that we must cultivate our garden. For when man was put in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, to work; which proves that man was not born for rest. – Voltaire • I also like to garden. I grow things, vegetables, flowers… I particularly like orchids. I raise orchids. – Beau Bridges • I am the fonder of my garden for all the trouble it gives me, and the grudging reward that my unending labours exact. – Reginald Farrer • I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden. – Frances Hodgson Burnett • I appreciate the misunderstanding I have had with Nature over my perennial border. I think it is a flower garden; she thinks it is a meadow lacking grass, and tries to correct the error. – Sara Bonnett Stein • I came to these mediums through having the garden, and of course, people who have designed gardens have always worked in collaboration, and never made their own inscriptions. – Ian Hamilton Finlay • I cultivate my garden, and my garden cultivates me. – Robert Breault • I do not know the names of all the weeds and plants, I have to do as Adam did in his garden… name things as I find them. – Charles Dudley Warner • I don’t like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It’s just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess. – Walt Disney • I don’t take myself seriously any more. Sometimes I just garden in my knickers and platform shoes. – Kim Wilde • I don’t think we’ll ever know all there is to know about gardening, and I’m just as glad there will always be some magic about it! – Barbara Damrosch • I enjoy the cleaning up – something about the getting of things in order for winter – making the garden secure – a battening down of hatches perhaps… It just feels right. – David Hobson • I have a garden, and I’m passionately interested in young people. – Mary Wesley • I have a rock garden. Last week three of them died. – Richard K. Diran • I have always wanted to be a gardener, and I love the time I spend in my garden. – Pawan Kalyan • I just go in my back garden. It’s the only place where people don’t come and bother you. – Boy George • I like to go for a walk or swimming or in the garden when I can. It’s a busy kind of life, but I guess I’m lucky. – Brian May • I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed. – Jeanette Winterson • I look upon the pleasure we take in a garden as one of the most innocent delights in human life. – Marcus Tullius Cicero • I love being in my garden. I don’t plant a lot of exotic flora, but I do spend a lot of time outside doing manual labour. – Jacqueline Bisset • I love decorating my home. I’m a gardener too, so that’s usually something I have to play catch up with – Suzy Bogguss • I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose I would always greet in a garden. – Ruth Stout • I sit in my garden, gazing upon a beauty that cannot gaze upon itself. And I find sufficient purpose for my day. – Robert Breault • I suppose that for most people one of the darker joys of gardening is that once you’ve got started it’s not at all hard to find someone who knows a little bit less than you. – Allen Lacy • I think of marriage as a garden. You have to tend to it. Respect it, take care of it, feed it. Make sure everyone is getting the right amount of, um, sunlight. – Mark Ruffalo • I think this is what hooks one to gardening: it is the closest one can come to being present at creation. – Phyllis Grissim-Theroux • I travel the garden of music, thru inspiration. It’s a large, very large garden, seen? – Peter Tosh • I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs. – Joseph Addison • I wake up some mornings and sit and have my coffee and look out at my beautiful garden, and I go, ‘Remember how good this is. Because you can lose it.’ – Jim Carrey • If Everton were playing down the bottom of my garden, I’d draw the curtains. – Bill Shankly • If we don’t empower ourselves with knowledge, then we’re gonna be led down a garden path. – Fran Drescher • If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. – Marcus Tullius Cicero • If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden. – Frances Hodgson Burnett • If you would be happy all your life, plant a garden. – Nan Fairbrother • If you’ve never experienced the joy of accomplishing more than you can imagine, plant a garden. – Robert Brault • In almost every garden, the land is made better and so is the gardener. – Robert Rodale • In fine weather the old gentelman is almost constantly in the garden; and when it is too wet to go into it, he will look out the window at it, by the hour together. He has always something to do there, and you will see him digging, and sweeping, and cutting, and planting, with manifest delight. – Charles Dickens • In his garden every man may be his own artist without apology or explanation. Each within his green enclosure is a creator, and no two shall reach the same conclusion; nor shall we, any more than other creative workers, be ever wholly satisfied with our accomplishment. Ever a season ahead of us floats the vision of perfection and herein lies its perennial charm. – Louise Wilder • In order to live off a garden, you practically have to live in it. – Kin Hubbard • In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own. – Alice Walker • In the creation of a garden, the architect invites the partnership of the Kingdom of Nature. In a beautiful garden the majesty of nature is ever present, but it is nature reduced to human proportions and thus transformed into the most efficient haven against the aggressiveness of contemporary life. – Luis Barragan • It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves. – Robert Louis Stevenson • It is utterly forbidden to be half-hearted about gardening. You have got to love your garden whether you like it or not. – W. C. Sellar • It pleases me to take amateur photographs of my garden, and it pleases my garden to make my photographs look professional. – Robert Breault • It’s amazing to see places like Madison Square Garden on the schedule again. – Roger Taylor • I’ve always felt that you can’t do much wrong in a garden providing you enjoy it. – David Hobson • Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. – Oscar Wilde • Kind hearts are the gardens, Kind thoughts are the roots, Kind words are the flowers, Kind deeds are the fruits, Take care of your garden And keep out the weeds, Fill it with sunshine, Kind words, and Kind deeds. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Last night, there came a frost, which has done great damage to my garden…. It is sad that Nature will play such tricks on us poor mortals, inviting us with sunny smiles to confide in her, and then, when we are entirely within her power, striking us to the heart. – Nathaniel Hawthorne • Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. – Marcel Proust • May our heart’s garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers. – Nhat Hanh • My garden does not whet the appetite; it satisfies it. It does not provoke thirst through heedless indulgence, but slakes it by proffering its natural remedy. Amid such pleasures as these have I grown old. – Epicurus • Nature abhors a garden. – Michael Pollan • Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees That half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees, So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray For the Glory of the Garden, that it may not pass away! – Rudyard Kipling • Old gardeners never die. They just spade away and then throw in the trowel. – Herbert V. Prochnow • One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today. – Dale Carnegie • Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made By singing ‘Oh how wonderful’ and sitting in the shade, While better men than we go out, and start their working lives By grubbing weeds from garden paths with broken dinner knives. • People are always asking, “What’s the purpose of life?” That’s easy. Relieve suffering. Create beauty. Make gardens. – Dan Barker • Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. – Marianne Moore • Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get. – H. Jackson Brown, Jr. • Sadness is but a wall between two gardens. – Khalil Gibran • So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. – Jorge Luis Borges • Some men like to make a little garden out of life and walk down a path – Jean Anouilh • Some people might think our lives dull and uneventful, but it does not seem so to us. …it is not travel and adventure that make a full life. There are adventures of the spirit and one can travel in books and interest oneself in people and affairs. One need ever be dull as long as one has friends to help, gardens to enjoy and books in the long winter evenings. – D.E. Stevenson • Someone had told me about a house in Wandsworth, southwest London – 21 Blenkarne Road – with an incredible garden, so I went and had a look. I walked in and just said, ‘I want it.’ – Susannah York • St. Francis of Assisi was hoeing his garden when someone asked what he would do if he were suddenly to learn that he would die before sunset that very day. “I would finish hoeing my garden,” he replied. – Francis of Assisi • Successful gardening is doing what has to be done when it has to be done the way it ought to be done whether you want to do it or not. – Jerry Baker • Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness. – Stephen Fry • Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are. – Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin • The best way to garden is to put on a wide-brimmed straw hat and some old clothes. And with a hoe in one hand and a cold drink in the other, tell somebody else where to dig. – Texas Bix Bender • The country is making a big mistake not teaching kids to cook and raise a garden and build fires. – Loretta Lynn • The earth is my altar, the sky is my dome, mind is my garden, the heart is my home and I’m always at home – yea, I’m always at Om. – Eden Ahbez • The garden is a metaphor for life, and gardening is a symbol of the spiritual path. – Larry Dossey • The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway. – Michael Pollan • The great challenge for the garden designer is not to make the garden look natural, but to make the garden so that the people in it will feel natural. – Lawrence Halprin • The lesson I have thoroughly learnt, and wish to pass on to others, is to know the enduring happiness that the love of a garden gives. – Gertrude Jekyll • The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies. – Gertrude Jekyll • The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows. – Vita Sackville-West • The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before. – Vita Sackville-West • The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world. – Michael Pollan • The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. – Gilbert K. Chesterton • The weeds keep multiplying in our garden, which is our mind ruled by fear. Rip them out and call them by name. – Sylvia Browne • The wilderness is near as well as dear to every man. Even the oldest villages are indebted to the border of wild wood which surrounds them, more than to the gardens of men. There is something indescribably inspiriting and beautiful in the aspect of the forest skirting and occasionally jutting into the midst of new towns, which, like the sand-heaps of fresh fox-burrows, have sprung up in their midst. The very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams. – Henry David Thoreau • There are no green thumbs or black thumbs. There are only gardeners and non-gardeners. Gardeners are the ones who ruin after ruin get on with the high defiance of nature herself, creating, in the very face of her chaos and tornado, the bower of roses and the pride of irises. It sounds very well to garden a ‘natural way’. You may see the natural way in any desert, any swamp, any leech-filled laurel hell. Defiance, on the other hand, is what makes gardeners. – Henry Mitchell • There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder. – Alfred Austin • There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub. – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross • There is peace in the garden. Peace and results. – Ruth Stout • They can certainly expect to be very impressed with the technical aspects of the show, fooled and led up the garden path by the story and ultimately have a jolly good laugh! – Louise Jameson • To garden is to let optimism get the better of judgment. – Eleanor Perenyi • To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow. – Audrey Hepburn • Unemployment is capitalism’s way of getting you to plant a garden. – Orson Scott Card • We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so lifelike. – Evelyn Underhill • We were enclosed, O eternal Father, within the garden of your breast. You drew us out of your holy mind like a flower petaled with our soul’s three powers and into each power you put the whole plant, so that they might bear fruit in your garden, might come back to you with the fruit you gave them. And you would come back to the soul, to fill her with your blessedness. There the soul dwells like the fish in the sea and the sea in the fish. – St. Catherine of Siena • Well, being a jazz musician is not a rose garden! – Toots Thielemans • What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it. – Charles Dudley Warner • What is paradise, but, a garden, an orchard of trees and herbs, full of pleasure and nothing there but delights. – William Lawson • When your garden is finished I hope it will be more beautiful that you anticipated, require less care than you expected, and have cost only a little more than you had planned. – Thomas Church • Where would the gardener be if there were no more weeds? – Bill Vaughan • Wherever you have a plot of land, however small, plant a garden. Staying close to the soil is good for the soul. – Spencer W. Kimball • Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps. – Amos Bronson Alcott • Who loves a garden, still his Eden keeps, Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvests reaps. – Amos Bronson Alcott • Why try to explain miracles to your kids when you can just have them plant a garden. – Robert Breault • Won’t you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you. – Richard Brinsley Sheridan • Your family and your love must be cultivated like a garden. Time, effort, and imagination must be summoned constantly to keep any relationship flourishing and growing. – Jim Rohn • Your garden will reveal yourself. – Henry Mitchell

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Garden Quotes

Official Website: Garden Quotes

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• A black cat among roses, phlox, lilac-misted under a quarter moon, the sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock. The garden is very still. It is dazed with moonlight, contented with perfume. – Amy Lowell • A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors. – Charles Baudelaire • A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant – rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance – but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself. – Roberto Burle Marx • A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust. – Gertrude Jekyll • A garden is a grand teacher… above all it teaches entire trust. – Gertrude Jekyll • A garden is a symbol of man’s arrogance, perverting nature to human ends. – Tim Smit • A garden is a thing of beauty and a job forever. – Richard Briers • A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself. – May Sarton • A garden is an awful responsibility. You never know what you may be aiding to grow in it. – Charles Dudley Warner • A garden is the best alternative therapy. – Germaine Greer • A garden is to be a world unto itself, it had better make room for the darker shades of feeling as well as the sunny ones. – William Kent • A garden really lives only insofar as it is an expression of faith, the embodiment of a hope and a song of praise. – Russell Page • A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them. – Liberty Hyde Bailey • A garden was the primitive prison, till man with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it. – Charles Lamb • A good garden may have some weeds. – Thomas Fuller • A house though otherwise beautiful, yet if it hath no garden belonging to it, is more like a prison than a house. – William H. Coles • A modest garden contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library. – Henri Frederic Amiel • A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us. – Wendell Berry • Alfred Austin said, “Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.” – Alfred Austin • All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so. – Joseph Joubert • All gardening is landscape painting. – William Kent • All my hurts my garden spade can heal. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • An optimistic gardener is one who believes that whatever goes down must come up. – Leslie Hall • As a gardener, I’m among those who believe that much of the evidence of God’s existence has been planted. – Robert Breault • As long as you have a garden you have a future and as long as you have a future you are alive. – Frances Hodgson Burnett

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Garden', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_garden').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_garden img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Be your own politics, grow your own garden, and maybe you can help out more. – Rip Torn • But though an old man, I am but a young gardener. – Thomas Jefferson • By the time one is eighty, it is said, there is no longer a tug of war in the garden with the May flowers hauling like mad against the claims of the other months. All is at last in balance and all is serene. The gardener is usually dead, of course. – Henry Mitchell

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling] • Christians are like the several flowers in a garden that have each of them the dew of heaven, which, being shaken with the wind, they let fall at each other’s roots, whereby they are jointly nourished, and become nourishers of each other. – John Bunyan • Cultivate your own garden and let go of your tendency to examine and judge how others cultivate theirs. Catch yourself in moments of gossip about how others ought to be living and rid yourself of thoughts about how they should be doing it this way, or how they have no right to live and think as they do. Stay busy and involved in your own projects and pursuits. – Wayne Dyer • Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified? – Chuck Palahniuk • Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. – Ray Bradbury • Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace. – May Sarton • Friends are “annuals” that need seasonal nurturing to bear blossoms. Family is a “perennial” that comes up year after year, enduring the droughts of absence and neglect. There’s a place in the garden for both of them. – Erma Bombeck • Gardeners instinctively know that flowers and plants are a continuum and that the wheel of garden history will always be coming full circle. – Francis Cabot Lowell • Gardeners instinctively know that flowers and plants are a continuum and that the wheel of garden history will always be coming full circle. One lifetime is never enough to accomplish one’s horticultural goals. If a garden is a site for the imagination, how can we be very far from the beginning? – Francis Cabot • Gardeners, I think, dream bigger dreams than Emperor’s. – Mary Cantwell • Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything – except itself. – May Sarton • Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense. – Phyllis McGinley • Gardening is a kind of disease. It infects you, you cannot escape it. When you go visiting, your eyes rove about the garden; you interrupt the serious cocktail drinking because of an irresistible impulse to get up and pull a weed. – Lewis Gannett • Gardening is a labour full of tranquility and satisfaction; natural and instructive, and as such contributes to the most serious contemplation, experience, health and longevity. – John Evelyn • Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw. – Henry David Thoreau • Gardening is how I relax. It’s another form of creating and playing with colors. – Oscar de la Renta • Gardening is not a rational act. – Margaret Atwood • Gardening is the best therapy in the world. – C. Z. Guest • Gardening is the only unquestionably useful job. – George Bernard Shaw • Gardening requires lots of water… most of it in the form of perspiration. – Louise Erickson • Gardening simply does not allow one to be mentally old, because too many hopes and dreams are yet to be realized. – Allan Armitage • Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade. – Rudyard Kipling • Gardens… should be like lovely, well-shaped girls: all curves, secret corners, unexpected deviations, seductive surprises and then still more curves. – H. E. Bates • Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed. – Walt Whitman • God Almighty first planted a Garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man, without which buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks. And a man shall ever see, that when ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely, as if gardening were the greater perfection. – Francis Bacon • God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. – Francis Bacon • God the first garden made, and the first city Cain. – Abraham Cowley • How can you be content to be in the world like tulips in a garden, to make a fine show, and be good for nothing. – Mary Astell • I also know that we must cultivate our garden. For when man was put in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, to work; which proves that man was not born for rest. – Voltaire • I also like to garden. I grow things, vegetables, flowers… I particularly like orchids. I raise orchids. – Beau Bridges • I am the fonder of my garden for all the trouble it gives me, and the grudging reward that my unending labours exact. – Reginald Farrer • I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden. – Frances Hodgson Burnett • I appreciate the misunderstanding I have had with Nature over my perennial border. I think it is a flower garden; she thinks it is a meadow lacking grass, and tries to correct the error. – Sara Bonnett Stein • I came to these mediums through having the garden, and of course, people who have designed gardens have always worked in collaboration, and never made their own inscriptions. – Ian Hamilton Finlay • I cultivate my garden, and my garden cultivates me. – Robert Breault • I do not know the names of all the weeds and plants, I have to do as Adam did in his garden… name things as I find them. – Charles Dudley Warner • I don’t like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It’s just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess. – Walt Disney • I don’t take myself seriously any more. Sometimes I just garden in my knickers and platform shoes. – Kim Wilde • I don’t think we’ll ever know all there is to know about gardening, and I’m just as glad there will always be some magic about it! – Barbara Damrosch • I enjoy the cleaning up – something about the getting of things in order for winter – making the garden secure – a battening down of hatches perhaps… It just feels right. – David Hobson • I have a garden, and I’m passionately interested in young people. – Mary Wesley • I have a rock garden. Last week three of them died. – Richard K. Diran • I have always wanted to be a gardener, and I love the time I spend in my garden. – Pawan Kalyan • I just go in my back garden. It’s the only place where people don’t come and bother you. – Boy George • I like to go for a walk or swimming or in the garden when I can. It’s a busy kind of life, but I guess I’m lucky. – Brian May • I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed. – Jeanette Winterson • I look upon the pleasure we take in a garden as one of the most innocent delights in human life. – Marcus Tullius Cicero • I love being in my garden. I don’t plant a lot of exotic flora, but I do spend a lot of time outside doing manual labour. – Jacqueline Bisset • I love decorating my home. I’m a gardener too, so that’s usually something I have to play catch up with – Suzy Bogguss • I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose I would always greet in a garden. – Ruth Stout • I sit in my garden, gazing upon a beauty that cannot gaze upon itself. And I find sufficient purpose for my day. – Robert Breault • I suppose that for most people one of the darker joys of gardening is that once you’ve got started it’s not at all hard to find someone who knows a little bit less than you. – Allen Lacy • I think of marriage as a garden. You have to tend to it. Respect it, take care of it, feed it. Make sure everyone is getting the right amount of, um, sunlight. – Mark Ruffalo • I think this is what hooks one to gardening: it is the closest one can come to being present at creation. – Phyllis Grissim-Theroux • I travel the garden of music, thru inspiration. It’s a large, very large garden, seen? – Peter Tosh • I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs. – Joseph Addison • I wake up some mornings and sit and have my coffee and look out at my beautiful garden, and I go, ‘Remember how good this is. Because you can lose it.’ – Jim Carrey • If Everton were playing down the bottom of my garden, I’d draw the curtains. – Bill Shankly • If we don’t empower ourselves with knowledge, then we’re gonna be led down a garden path. – Fran Drescher • If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. – Marcus Tullius Cicero • If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden. – Frances Hodgson Burnett • If you would be happy all your life, plant a garden. – Nan Fairbrother • If you’ve never experienced the joy of accomplishing more than you can imagine, plant a garden. – Robert Brault • In almost every garden, the land is made better and so is the gardener. – Robert Rodale • In fine weather the old gentelman is almost constantly in the garden; and when it is too wet to go into it, he will look out the window at it, by the hour together. He has always something to do there, and you will see him digging, and sweeping, and cutting, and planting, with manifest delight. – Charles Dickens • In his garden every man may be his own artist without apology or explanation. Each within his green enclosure is a creator, and no two shall reach the same conclusion; nor shall we, any more than other creative workers, be ever wholly satisfied with our accomplishment. Ever a season ahead of us floats the vision of perfection and herein lies its perennial charm. – Louise Wilder • In order to live off a garden, you practically have to live in it. – Kin Hubbard • In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own. – Alice Walker • In the creation of a garden, the architect invites the partnership of the Kingdom of Nature. In a beautiful garden the majesty of nature is ever present, but it is nature reduced to human proportions and thus transformed into the most efficient haven against the aggressiveness of contemporary life. – Luis Barragan • It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves. – Robert Louis Stevenson • It is utterly forbidden to be half-hearted about gardening. You have got to love your garden whether you like it or not. – W. C. Sellar • It pleases me to take amateur photographs of my garden, and it pleases my garden to make my photographs look professional. – Robert Breault • It’s amazing to see places like Madison Square Garden on the schedule again. – Roger Taylor • I’ve always felt that you can’t do much wrong in a garden providing you enjoy it. – David Hobson • Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. – Oscar Wilde • Kind hearts are the gardens, Kind thoughts are the roots, Kind words are the flowers, Kind deeds are the fruits, Take care of your garden And keep out the weeds, Fill it with sunshine, Kind words, and Kind deeds. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Last night, there came a frost, which has done great damage to my garden…. It is sad that Nature will play such tricks on us poor mortals, inviting us with sunny smiles to confide in her, and then, when we are entirely within her power, striking us to the heart. – Nathaniel Hawthorne • Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. – Marcel Proust • May our heart’s garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers. – Nhat Hanh • My garden does not whet the appetite; it satisfies it. It does not provoke thirst through heedless indulgence, but slakes it by proffering its natural remedy. Amid such pleasures as these have I grown old. – Epicurus • Nature abhors a garden. – Michael Pollan • Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees That half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees, So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray For the Glory of the Garden, that it may not pass away! – Rudyard Kipling • Old gardeners never die. They just spade away and then throw in the trowel. – Herbert V. Prochnow • One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today. – Dale Carnegie • Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made By singing ‘Oh how wonderful’ and sitting in the shade, While better men than we go out, and start their working lives By grubbing weeds from garden paths with broken dinner knives. • People are always asking, “What’s the purpose of life?” That’s easy. Relieve suffering. Create beauty. Make gardens. – Dan Barker • Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. – Marianne Moore • Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get. – H. Jackson Brown, Jr. • Sadness is but a wall between two gardens. – Khalil Gibran • So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. – Jorge Luis Borges • Some men like to make a little garden out of life and walk down a path – Jean Anouilh • Some people might think our lives dull and uneventful, but it does not seem so to us. …it is not travel and adventure that make a full life. There are adventures of the spirit and one can travel in books and interest oneself in people and affairs. One need ever be dull as long as one has friends to help, gardens to enjoy and books in the long winter evenings. – D.E. Stevenson • Someone had told me about a house in Wandsworth, southwest London – 21 Blenkarne Road – with an incredible garden, so I went and had a look. I walked in and just said, ‘I want it.’ – Susannah York • St. Francis of Assisi was hoeing his garden when someone asked what he would do if he were suddenly to learn that he would die before sunset that very day. “I would finish hoeing my garden,” he replied. – Francis of Assisi • Successful gardening is doing what has to be done when it has to be done the way it ought to be done whether you want to do it or not. – Jerry Baker • Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness. – Stephen Fry • Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are. – Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin • The best way to garden is to put on a wide-brimmed straw hat and some old clothes. And with a hoe in one hand and a cold drink in the other, tell somebody else where to dig. – Texas Bix Bender • The country is making a big mistake not teaching kids to cook and raise a garden and build fires. – Loretta Lynn • The earth is my altar, the sky is my dome, mind is my garden, the heart is my home and I’m always at home – yea, I’m always at Om. – Eden Ahbez • The garden is a metaphor for life, and gardening is a symbol of the spiritual path. – Larry Dossey • The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway. – Michael Pollan • The great challenge for the garden designer is not to make the garden look natural, but to make the garden so that the people in it will feel natural. – Lawrence Halprin • The lesson I have thoroughly learnt, and wish to pass on to others, is to know the enduring happiness that the love of a garden gives. – Gertrude Jekyll • The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies. – Gertrude Jekyll • The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows. – Vita Sackville-West • The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before. – Vita Sackville-West • The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world. – Michael Pollan • The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. – Gilbert K. Chesterton • The weeds keep multiplying in our garden, which is our mind ruled by fear. Rip them out and call them by name. – Sylvia Browne • The wilderness is near as well as dear to every man. Even the oldest villages are indebted to the border of wild wood which surrounds them, more than to the gardens of men. There is something indescribably inspiriting and beautiful in the aspect of the forest skirting and occasionally jutting into the midst of new towns, which, like the sand-heaps of fresh fox-burrows, have sprung up in their midst. The very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams. – Henry David Thoreau • There are no green thumbs or black thumbs. There are only gardeners and non-gardeners. Gardeners are the ones who ruin after ruin get on with the high defiance of nature herself, creating, in the very face of her chaos and tornado, the bower of roses and the pride of irises. It sounds very well to garden a ‘natural way’. You may see the natural way in any desert, any swamp, any leech-filled laurel hell. Defiance, on the other hand, is what makes gardeners. – Henry Mitchell • There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder. – Alfred Austin • There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub. – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross • There is peace in the garden. Peace and results. – Ruth Stout • They can certainly expect to be very impressed with the technical aspects of the show, fooled and led up the garden path by the story and ultimately have a jolly good laugh! – Louise Jameson • To garden is to let optimism get the better of judgment. – Eleanor Perenyi • To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow. – Audrey Hepburn • Unemployment is capitalism’s way of getting you to plant a garden. – Orson Scott Card • We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so lifelike. – Evelyn Underhill • We were enclosed, O eternal Father, within the garden of your breast. You drew us out of your holy mind like a flower petaled with our soul’s three powers and into each power you put the whole plant, so that they might bear fruit in your garden, might come back to you with the fruit you gave them. And you would come back to the soul, to fill her with your blessedness. There the soul dwells like the fish in the sea and the sea in the fish. – St. Catherine of Siena • Well, being a jazz musician is not a rose garden! – Toots Thielemans • What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it. – Charles Dudley Warner • What is paradise, but, a garden, an orchard of trees and herbs, full of pleasure and nothing there but delights. – William Lawson • When your garden is finished I hope it will be more beautiful that you anticipated, require less care than you expected, and have cost only a little more than you had planned. – Thomas Church • Where would the gardener be if there were no more weeds? – Bill Vaughan • Wherever you have a plot of land, however small, plant a garden. Staying close to the soil is good for the soul. – Spencer W. Kimball • Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps. – Amos Bronson Alcott • Who loves a garden, still his Eden keeps, Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvests reaps. – Amos Bronson Alcott • Why try to explain miracles to your kids when you can just have them plant a garden. – Robert Breault • Won’t you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you. – Richard Brinsley Sheridan • Your family and your love must be cultivated like a garden. Time, effort, and imagination must be summoned constantly to keep any relationship flourishing and growing. – Jim Rohn • Your garden will reveal yourself. – Henry Mitchell

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[allenvooreef]

Year three of daily drawing - my experiences

Read about my first year HERE and my second year HERE

Wow! Three full years of daily drawing, all done. When I started out I didn’t even think I’d make it past the first week. I’m still baffled, to be honest. Time to look back on this third year, and on the challenge as a whole. I have a LOT of thoughts, let’s see if I can make some sense of them under the cut.

What was the plan? At the end of last year, I said this about my plans for 2018:

Do more studies, for real this time. I’ll be keeping a tally in my bullet journal of value, anatomy, landscape, portrait and material studies and aim to do at least twenty of each this year. Aside from that, I’m actually pretty happy with how my developement has been going this past year so I aim to just keep that up. I want to do at least one more year of dailies, because I just really like the number three and it means I’ll have over a thousand total. 

And how did that work out? Well, I made my study goal! 100 total, and 20 in each listed category. Though, as expected, I ended up making the bulk of them in the last two months to catch up. I think I learned a lot from doing those, but looking back, I feel like I only scratched the surface. See the way studies work is you copy first, then try to reproduce it without reference, then implement the techniques in an original artwork. I stopped at copying, meaning I learned about a third of what I could have if I had taken a bit more time. 

Something else I wanted to work on in 2018 was to stop letting these dailies cut into my sleep time. I set a timer on my phone for 8pm everyday to remind me to start drawing, and used my bullet journal to keep track of all the days I was in bed before midnight. While it definitely didn’t work *all* the time, I do feel like it made a significant difference. The feeling I got everytime I was in a late train home from band rehearsal and I realized I’d already made my daily earlier that day was priceless.

Time to quit? I already predicted I’d probably want to stop after my third year. Turns out that once I’d formed that thought in my mind, I suddenly started to *really* feel like quitting. I mean, I wasn’t about to quit before I’d reached the three year mark, I’m way too stubborn for that, but I did notice a significant drop in my motivation around April. I had an increasingly hard time coming up with things to draw, often lacked the mental energy for more ‘finished’ looking sketches, and overall started to feel like it was a chore instead of something I enjoyed. Near the end of the year I often spent over an hour just hovering my pen over my tablet before actually drawing anything. A sure sign that this challenge was no longer serving its purpose and it was time to stop.

Besides that, this year also brought along some pretty big life events for me, meaning I had little to no brain space and energy to spare for art for a while. Though forcing myself to draw through that exhaustion wasn’t fun, I’m relieved to notice that it didn’t kill my love for creating. If anything, it fueled my longing to make more elaborate artworks, to spend more than just an hour on something, to allow myself to let something sit for a few days before returning to it. 

An unexpected obstacle was a sudden bug in Photoshop, or my tablet, or both, that messed with my pen pressure. Meaning that for every 10 pen strokes I did, about 8 or 9 would come out as gross hard-angled black blobs. I have no idea what triggered this, and still no idea how to fix it (I use a pirated version of Photoshop so I can’t update it), so it meant that every drawing took at least twice the effort since I now spent over half my time ctrl+z ing until I could draw the line I intended. Seeing as my motivation was already dwindling, this certainly didn’t help in keeping these dailies fun to make.

Am I happy with the things I drew? Looking back on the things I drew in 2018, I think I’ve further solidified my workflow, having a clear preferred method of sketching and coloring. I sometimes tried turning off the line layers to see if it could work without, which was fun to see, but overall I think I stayed inside my comfort zone a lot (except for the studies). I don’t think I mind, though. Now that I know how I like to work, I can do it much more efficiently than I could before, and that’s a valuable time saver. I also focused on making my drawings look a bit less flat, approaching it as three-dimensional shapes rather than lines. There’s still a lot more work to be done in this department, but I’m happy with the steps I’ve taken so far!

What did I set out to learn, and did I? For 2018 specifically, it was ‘to make great strides in my mastery of anatomy, value, materials, portraits and landscapes’. As stated above, I feel like I haven’t nearly learned enough from the studies I did. Making these studies did give me more experience in a painterly workflow, and I noticed my eye for value and color getting sharper over time, but to really make the kind of progress I’d been looking for I’ll have to go the extra mile. Maybe I’ll get around to that now that I don’t feel obligated to post it all. 

What did I learn that I didn’t expect to? That even when I’d made a habit out of daily drawing, I can’t and shouldn’t go on forever. I thought the reason I’d quit eventually would be because I’d simply be bored with it. I don’t think I expected to have as much trouble finding the energy to keep it up, nor did I realize the time spent on these dailies meant less time spent on larger artworks. 

Looking back on the challenge as a whole:

What did I set out to learn, and did I?

1. To get over my fear of creating bad art I obviously didn’t 100% shake that feeling, but then again I’m starting to feel like I shouldn’t aim for that. As long as it’s not holding me back anymore, that bit of frustration when something doesn’t work as well as I hoped it would is the thing that’s going to drive me to keep improving. And looking back on how utterly stuck I was before starting this challenge, I’d say this goal has definitely been achieved. Now, I know creating something imperfect is always better than creating nothing at all, and I’ve also experienced that a lot of the time things work out better than I’d feared. 

2. To make better art Oh that definitely happened. I’ve improved way more in these past three years than in the three years before that. Some of the dailies I made in an hour are better than the artworks I’d spend multiple days on back then. As intended, the sheer amount of practice resulted in a better eye for cohesive proportions, and it allowed me to finally get comfortable with a certain style. Even though in hindsight I could have done way more to improve through this challenge, I’m very happy with the skill upgrade it did bring.

What did I learn that I didn’t expect to?

1. That I can actually do this It sounds silly, but trust me when I say I never *ever* actually believed I was going to last for longer than a week. I always thought I wasn’t the type of person who could keep up with resolutions. What I learned is that apparently I *am* stubborn enough to keep up with challenges, as long as I feel like I have something to prove to myself. And as long as I’m the one who set the rules. That way I can’t complain about them, after all! ;) 

2. To be self-indulgent There was a clear shift somewhere halfway through the challenge where I realized I had been holding off on drawing too much of the same thing, because I felt like my followers would be fed up with it. I felt like I wasn’t ‘legit’ when I was only drawing fan art. I realized that was holding me back, because now I was spending time and energy on figuring out the proper subject for my dailies before even putting pen to paper! The moment I let go of those expectations, and allowed myself to be as self-indulgent with my drawings as I’d like, my art improved. As did my love for art, and the response I got from you! 

Plans for 2019

I figured it was best for me not to jump right into a new challenge after this, so I’ve been spending my time just recharging. As I write this, it’s been 13 days since my last daily, and I haven’t felt the need to draw since. I’m taking it slow, getting a feel for where I stand now and what I’d like to learn next. I treated myself to a Schoolism subscription during their Winter Sale, meaning I have access to amazing course material all year, and I can’t wait to see how that will help me grow. 

I look forward to making sketches without ‘having to’ post them. Meaning I can copy art by other artists to learn from them without plagiarizing. Meaning I can decide to continue a sketch the next day, with fresh eyes. 

One thing I will still consistently do, is make a monthly Patreon illustration. I’ve rearranged the reward tiers to make the most out of the time I have, and I look forward to keep creating and improving with the help of my lovely Patrons.

I’m making a booklet with all the dailies in it, as well as some more in-depth reflection and tips & tricks. Partly because some of you expressed interest, and partly because I feel like it’s important for me to have a physical thing to show for all my efforts. I’ll let you know as soon as pre-orders open!

Right, I think that was about it! If you’re considering a daily drawing challenge and are wondering if it’s for you, feel free to message me if you have questions! If you decide to do daily drawings because of me (which is just... wow), I’d love it if you tagged me in one so I can check them out! 

I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for sticking with me through this challenge! Your enthusiasm encouraged me to keep going, and seeing your tags and comments in the mornings was one of the highlights of my day.

I’ll leave you with some links:

Check out every single daily in my daily drawing tag

If you’d like, you can support and be involved in my art journey through my Patreon

If this information was in any way useful to you, or you’d just like to make my day, you can buy me a coffee

Find me on twitter and instagram too!