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-Trees in Bloom-

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Fuck my pride. Fuck everything. I'm so desperately hungry for you

// Henry Miller, from 'A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller 1932-1953

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One day you’ll have whatever it is you’re now so confusedly seeking. That kind of calm that comes from knowing oneself and others. But you can’t rush the arrival of that state of mind. There are things you only learn when no one teaches them. And that’s how it is with life. There’s even more beauty in discovering it for yourself, in spite of the suffering.

Clarice Lispector, from "Gertrudes Asks for Advice" in The Complete Stories

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“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death–ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”

— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

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Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

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if you hold on to that yearning for too long it becomes indistinguishable from cowardice

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hermann hesse

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"Sometimes while I ride the subway I try to look at each person and imagine what they look like to someone who is totally in love with them. I think everyone has had someone look at them that way, whether it was a lover, or a parent, or a friend, whether they know it or not. It's a wonderful thing, to look at someone to whom I would never be attracted and think about what looking at them feels like to someone who is devouring every part of their image, who has invisible strings that are connected to this person tied to every part of their body. I think this fun pastime is a way of cultivating compassion. It feels good to think about people that way, and to use that part of my mind that I think is traditionally reserved for a tiny portion of people I'll meet in my life to appreciate the general public. I wish I thought about people like this more often. I think it's the opposite of what our culture teaches us to do. We prefer to pick people apart to find their flaws. Cultivating these feelings of love or appreciation for random people, and even for people I don't like, makes me a more forgiving and appreciative person toward myself and people I love. Also, it's just a really excellent pastime."

— Dean Spade, from his essay For Lovers and Fighters

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Technology is killing intuition. We have forgotten what it means to be primal, to be hunted and to hunt. As attention spans shorten, we are killing our instincts and losing touch with the kind of intelligence you can only form through bonding to nature. We are overwhelmed with that feeling of being watched that we don’t realize our power to put down our devices and watch the world back, the true world, the world of senses. I have to crawl my way back to what I discovered this past year, the year of fully inhabiting and honoring the body.

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i used to think life would never treat me well and now i’m like. life is good and bad and hurtful and loving and kind and uncaring and thoughtless and discerning and bountiful and unforgiving and cruel and holds its arms wide open waiting for me to either lean in or let go and i get to do that over and over and over again

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luminosity; death valley, california

instagram - twitter - website

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looking @ the notes on that ‘everyone needs to grow up’ article and i think the subtle point that a lot of the commentary on that post is missing is and what muva toni morrison was saying…..adulthood isn’t just ‘responsibility’—taking out ur trash and making ur bed—children can do those things…..adulthood is operating emotionally from an empowered place and not from the vulnerabilities and fears of ur childhood. to not get stuck in cynicism or escapism or to expect other adults to provide for u the way a parent should (which automatically disempowers u emotionally).

as we grow older, many of the very legitimate fears and self-protection mechanisms we developed to survive living under the brutal conditions we live under, worked for us as children, but they no longer serve us as adults. to be an adult is to cultivate urself, to understand what to keep and what to discard. it is an activity—a practice—a verb not a noun.

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In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world — a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexküll called the Umwelt — an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality. A tick’s Umwelt is limited to the touch of hair, the odor that emanates from skin and the heat of warm blood. A human’s Umwelt is far wider but doesn’t include the electric fields that sharks and platypuses are privy to, the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes and vampire bats track or the ultraviolet light that most sighted animals can see.

The Umwelt concept is one of the most profound and beautiful in biology. It tells us that the all-encompassing nature of our subjective experience is an illusion, and that we sense just a small fraction of what there is to sense. It hints at flickers of the magnificent in the mundane, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. And it is almost antidramatic: It reveals that frogs, snakes, ticks and other animals can be doing extraordinary things even when they seem to be doing nothing at all.

~ Ed Yong, NY Times Opinion, 6-21-22

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"Worst of all is that, having colonised almost every known corner of reality, capitalism convinces us that life itself is what’s awful. Which would be so much easier to believe, relinquishing us from the added strain of imagining what possibilities might lie beyond the existent. But some things can never be fully ground down, some truths – physiological rather than intellectual – never quite forgotten. As children, everything was so different: we promised ourselves we’d never become old, nor surrender our dreams. With the passing of time, though, those joyous days, in which all activity was but a modification of play, somehow receded into the distant past. Hammered out of us by the banality of routine, and the violence of constant stress, that youthful wisdom – the unashamed passion with which we approached every conceivable issue – slowly withered and died. As adults, most of us have totally forsaken the preciousness of life – not merely our own lives as individuals, but also of life itself. Yet it can always be rediscovered. Lying within each of us is a dormant truth, something so terrible, so revolutionary, that it threatens to demolish everything that makes the 21st century such a wretched affair: life is not merely something to get through. "

- Total Liberation