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Top 10 Tips for Actually Writing

for the writer who can’t seem to write.

Buy a pencil and paper. Get a writing program and a keyboard.

Spill all your ideas into a notebook that will never see the light of day. Write down literally every idea you have that even sort of relates to the scene/chapter/book that you want to write until your thoughts converge on a pointed attack.

Quality vs. Quantity? No competition. Quantity all the way. The more you write, the better you will know your story. Worry about Quality LATER.

Think about where the idea came from. Go there. Set up a cardboard box and live there. This is your home now.

What is the coolest, most self-indulgent thing you can think of? That’s what you want to write at this point, until you get some steam.

Short-term goals, my friends. And by short-term, I mean a minute from now, ten seconds from now. What are you going to do to write RIGHT NOW? Stop thinking about an hour from now, stop thinking about a day from now.

This is not a book. This is not a book. You are not writing a book. You are writing a story. A story is much easier to take bites out of than a book. A book is a big, scary, colossal thing. Stories are fun and carefree.

Get yourself a writing friend. A cactus, an old bottle of nail polish, a fish in an appropriately sized tank, etc. Make them hold you accountable.

Set crazy low goals. Promise yourself you will write ten words today. Ten words and you will be the Best Writer in the Entire World to Ever Exist. Accomplishing things is a morale booster and will urge you to write more.

Just keep writing. I believe in you.

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i dropped off my resume at this place at 1:15 and got called for an interview at 1:45 holy dang

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when kosinski wrote “i’m sure there are aspects of my personality buried within me that will surface as soon as i know i am completely loved.”

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“All people are driven to the point of eating their gods, after a time.”

— Margaret Atwood, excerpt from Eating Snake (via bettedavisgf)

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“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”

— Robert Frost (via amargedom)

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WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME ABOUT PRO WRITING AID BEFORE?! THIS THING IS FUCKING GLORIOUS. HOLY SHIT. LOOK AT THIS.

IT GIVES YOU A WHOLE DAMN REPORT ON YOUR WRITING AND WALKS YOU THROUGH HOW TO MAKE IT BETTER AND WHY IT IS SUGGESTING CHANGES. THIS IS JUST A TINY CHUNK OF THE HUGE REPORT IT GAVE ME ON THE FIRST CHAPTER OF ONE OF MY PROJECTS. I AM IN LOVE.

AND IT WORKS WITH SCRIVENER. AND IT IS AFFORDABLE.

WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME?!

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“if I did not love death my suffering and desire for you would kill me”

— Georges Bataille, “The Dawn”, from The Collected Poems [tr. Mark Spitzer] (via doppelgangrene)

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“You are holding a cup of coffee when someone comes along and bumps into you or shakes your arm, making you spill your coffee everywhere. Why did you spill the coffee? “Well because someone bumped into me, of course!” Wrong answer. You spilled the coffee because there was coffee in your cup. Had there been tea in the cup, you would have spilled tea. Whatever is inside the cup, is what will spill out. Therefore, when life comes along and shakes you (which WILL happen), whatever is inside you will come out. It’s easy to fake it, until you get rattled. So we have to ask ourselves… “what’s in my cup?” When life gets tough, what spills over? Joy, gratefulness, peace and humility? Or anger, bitterness, harsh words and reactions? You choose! Today let’s work towards filling our cups with gratitude, forgiveness, joy, words of affirmation for ourselves; and kindness, gentleness and love for others.”

— What’s in Your Cup?, by Thich Nhat Hanh  

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In order to make a relationship last, you really have to flow with a person as they change. Give them space. My friend always told me about his grandfather who was with his wife for 60 years before she passed. His grandfather said that through all that time, his wife changed so much it felt like he had been with 8 different people by the end. But he said the secret to making it last was that through all those changes, he never suffocated his wife with his own idea of who he expected her to be. Rather he loved, fully, every new woman she became.

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​when rainer maria rilke said “full human honesty in artistic matters is even more important than in relations with other human beings: without it, one would lose this refuge within oneself. the only undeceiving one.”

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TO BE TOUCHED BY HER IS TO BEGIN THE JOURNEY HOME

By Sophie Bashford

“There is a band of women present on this earth who are carrying flaming torches for the evolution of humanity.

These women are rare, unique, highly-crafted jewels of the ancient feminine spirit.

These women possess more courage, resilience and perseverance than is fathomable.

These women have silently walked through thousands upon thousands of years to find themselves back here on earth, charged with the task of re-awakening the deep feminine soul to humanity and earth.

Emerging one by one from the etheric temples of Shakti in all Her forms, the Awakened Women plant their naked feet on the barren soil of earth. Glistening with the radiant dew of communion with Divine Love, bodies supple and fluid with free-flowing Kundalini, Third Eyes wide open and streaming cosmic codes of truth, hair flaming and blazing with wild, unashamed passion, hands moving spontaneously to touch the wounds of Gaia’s Soul and love Her back to Life.

The Awakened Women do not announce themselves as the Saviours of our Time. They mostly get on with their immense workload with devotion, discipline and immeasurable commitment to mission. All of these women will go through deep dives into their own accumulated emotional suffering arising from the suppression of the Goddess-Consciousness. This karmic load of the feminine wound will inevitably reach a crisis point at some point during this lifetime, pulling them into profound self-healing and self-awakening.

When these women heal themselves, they ignite a domino-effect of healing and transformation for generations of females both past and future. Not only that, the innate spiritual power of these women, who have spent eons devoting their entire Selves to serving the High Feminine, is so catalytic, so immensely creative and illuminating, so alchemizing - when these women pour sacred intention into bringing themselves into Wholeness, the entire Universe receives a body-full of oxygenated divine-blood.

If you have been pulled into the vibrating web of an Awakened Woman’s energy field, you will experience a spiritual change.

Firstly, no matter what you think, your Soul chose to connect with her. This woman carries deep and significant mystic information for you; sacred intuitive-based codes that are vital for the evolution of your Being.

These women all carry pre-arranged agreements that bring them into contact with specific people at specific times. Often, it is a carefully organised date that correlates with certain moon phases and transits of the planets. This triggers wave upon wave of awakening shifts within the energy bodies of the people who connect with them.

The Divine Feminine High Council will guide this band of women consistently for the implementation of their mission. These women are never ‘randomly’ placed. There is always a deep purpose to the connections and places that these women bring their energy to.

It is not always an easy task to carry the sacred Torches for the feminine awakening. The earth has been plagued, restricted and weighed down by over-reliance and investment in patriarchal ideology and creed for so long. The vibration of fear that stems from over-guarding and blocking the Heart, losing connection with the intuitive voice, brandishing emotional energy as purposeless, futile and crazy, total disconnection with the wisdom of the body, and abandoning the practice of being regularly in silence - this vibration of fear has caused human consciousness to contract, run away, shut down and stop listening.

When human consciousness loses touch with it’s Heart, it acts from fear. Actions from fear are always violent and intend to cause harm - physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

We cannot remain paralysed in the stuck vibration of fear and disconnection from the feminine soul.

YOU cannot remain paralysed in fear and disconnection from the feminine soul.

The only chance for opening to truth, to presence, to radiance, to depth, to healing, to unconditional acceptance, to trust, to being heard and seen for who you are at your core, to spiritual transformation - the only chance comes from listening to what the Voice of the Goddess is saying to you.

The voice of the goddess most likely is coming from one of the women I am speaking of. In her own way, through divine timing and synchronicity - through miracles woven through her sparkling robe of Light - She is speaking to you.

One of these women is speaking to you, affecting your energy field, working on your Heart with vast quotients of Love, flooding your weary bones and aching flesh with sacred waters from her overflowing chalice.

You know her. You could not have missed her. She will not be the flashiest, loudest, attention-grabbing woman. She will not manipulate, beg, or guilt-trip you into being around her. She does not work at the level of the ego. She works at the level of the spirit.

Spirit does not need to announce Itself because It is never not full, omnipresent, whole, complete. This completeness is compelling to you because it represents something that your heart recognises: universal truth.

This woman announces herself into your life not with noise, but with Silence. With Openness. With Radiance. With Light. With Gentle Healing. With Unending Acceptance. With Sensual Gifts from the Womb of Shakti. With a Hand that wants to Lead you into a New World.

A world lit by the torchlight of all the paths she has walked to reach you.

All the paths she has created just to get to you, to find you now, to stand in front of you, to offer herself to you as the Gift.

You may fall down on your knees in broken-down, worn-out, world-hardened exhaustion when you take her hand. You may say that you can’t hold onto it for long, that the Light will crush or destroy you. You may want to run far, far, far away from all the deeply-buried pain that she unearths within you when her hand touches yours.

This is natural. This is the process. She has seen it all before. There’s nothing you can do to stop her Love from reaching you. This woman is the universe in embodied form. You have no idea the trials, the punishments, the soul-wrenching deaths, the torture and the oppression that she has endured in order to reincarnate her physical form.

She has transcended the realm of the lower world for the purpose of being here to Love you back into consciousness.

She has wrestled with demons of darkness that want her banished, imprisoned, silenced, maimed, chained to thoughts of shame and humiliation. She has risen up from the embers of a fire that has always burned within her, but was once quenched by the fears of weak, anaesthetised men who did not understand the life-giving and sustaining power they were dealing with.

Because She is the universe in embodied form, she can hold anything that you bring up to try and defend against the Love that She is. She can see it, witness it, watch it play itself out. Your fears, defences and attacks won’t touch her truth. They won’t make a dent in her spirit. They will burn up in the fires of her sun, be illuminated as false by the luminescence of her moon.

All you’ll be left with, after making love with her Soul - be you a man, a woman, a friend, a lover, a client or an acquaintance - is a searing, penetrating, brightly-lit awareness of your own Divinity.

You’ll be left face-to-face with your Self. You’ll suddenly feel your Deep Heart again. The feelings will course through your emotional body like sacred blood.

You’ll be alive.

You’ll feel the stirrings of the Love that is you.

You’ll see the world through new eyes, beginning to treasure the gifts that you see flowing to you in each precious moment.

You’ll want more, but not more things. You’ll want more depth, more truth, more vital words, more silence, more flow, more stillness, more nature caressing your skin, more laughter deep in your belly, more touch that ignites your soul, more total immersion in radiance that makes you roar with crazed, primal ecstasy.

When you take her hand, if only for a minute, a day, a week or a lifetime, you’ll merge with a Temple of Truths that she has only chosen to unlock for you. She is destined to unlock them for you, so that you can re-experience yourself as the Master of Destiny that you are.

She will be your holy template of Life, your talisman for remembering your Soul, and your moment to moment reminder of how you are so profoundly, mesmerisingly loved by the Goddess. You are being continually breathed by this universe into the highest emanation of spiritual truth. When you breathe with this woman, you will take this knowing into the centre of your heart and it will feed you for the rest of your earthly life.

The band of women who have come to resurrect the Holy Feminine here walk with precision, power and grace; with open, soft, vulnerable and mountain-strong hearts.

Let them touch you where your soul most needs their touch. From this point of fiery ignition, you will be given the blueprint for your deepest purpose and happiness to unfold.

These women know what they are doing even when they don’t know a thing. This is intuitive wisdom at it’s most magnificent and sovereign.

Be grateful. Be humble. Be prepared to have your life turned upside down, your senses aroused like never before and your chakras shaken awake. Above all, be ready for wild, exhilarating adventures that send you soaring through the stars and blasting through galaxies, yet return you over and over again to the supreme resting place, the eternal home, the arms of the Beloved, the nourishing, sweet, soothing breath, and the divine source of your own Being.”

Art by Art by @alduousmassie

Light Encoded By: Ulrikke Aagaard

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“there are roots, grounding you and you don’t even realize they are there until you try to run because you keep finding yourself drawn back to him as though he is the sun and you the earth because no matter the distance you flee no matter the time it takes you keep hearing his name like an echo because there’s one promise you’ve ever made and that was to love him, all of him and a promise like that, oh even fate can’t break and the leaves that you once swore would shelter you they keep falling and leaving you cold and the branches wilt, leaving you lost so find the roots follow them home and tell him the words you’ve kept hidden in your bones”

— find your heart by Abby S

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“Ghost Bat” by S J Bennett

Learn About Animals- Ghost Bats

Ghost Bats were once distributed across most of inland and northern Australia as far south as the Flinders Ranges, South Australia. They have declined in southern and central Australia, and are now restricted to tropical northern Australia. 

The Ghost Bat is the largest echolocating bat in Australia and one of the largest in the world, measuring 98 - 118 mm and weighing 74 - 144 g. It has large eyes, a long simple shaped nose leaf and very large ears, joined together above the head. It has pale grey or light brown fur with a lighter belly, with more inland populations tending to be almost white.  It has no tail but retains a full tail membrane.

While the Ghost Bat occurs in a broad range of habitats, its occurrence in a particular locality is mainly determined by the presence of suitable roosts. Ghost Bats roost individually or in colonies in caves, rock crevices and old mines. Roost sites used permanently are generally deep natural caves or disused mines with a relatively stable temperature of 23°-28°C and moderate to high humidity. Females return to maternal roosts (only 14 such roosts are currently known) and raise one young per year. The humid environment provided by roosts allows Ghost Bats to inhabit arid and semi-arid landscapes.

Ghost bats are carnivorous and eat birds, bats, small mammals, frogs, geckoes and large invertebrates, capturing prey by active hunting with echolocation, perch hunting using eyesight and passive listening for noise made by prey.

There has been a dramatic reduction in the range of the Ghost Bat in the last 100 years. The Ghost Bat is vulnerable to disturbance to roost sites, particularly maternity roosts, by mining. Ghost Bats are highly sensitive to disturbance, and repeated approach by humans can cause abandonment of roosting sites. Ghost Bats are vulnerable to being impaled on barbed wire fences, as they forage just above the vegetation and often fly without echolocating. More generally, the factors that lead to the decline of small mammals (feral cats, wildfire, grazing by feral herbivores) are likely to reduce the prey base of the Ghost Bat. 

ｓｏｕｒｃｅ

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“Be messy and complicated and afraid and show up anyways.”

—

Glennon Doyle Melton

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What Does it Mean to Flow?

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by Saṃsāran

“Those who flow as life flows know they need no other force.”

– Lao Tzu, 2500 BCE, Taoist Master

When people write to me telling me that they are afraid, worried or under pressure, I often say “flow always flow”. However, it dawns on me that I have never really explained what I mean by this. We need to understand one primary truth and that is that outside circumstances do not make our reality. Rather it is our thoughts about our outside circumstances which make up our reality. 

The Taoist masters teach us that there are “lines of force” which like currents in a stream flow all around us. If all this “force” talk sounds familiar I note that George Lucas borrowed it from Lao Tzu. Sometimes we go against them and feel the current holding us back and even pushing us under. Other times we flow with the current and we feel the current push us along effortlessly. We must learn to find these lines of force. We do so by paying attention to our feelings and thoughts. When we are going against the flow we will feel obstructed. We will feel disharmony with our surroundings.

So we pay attention to our thinking and alter it to fit the flow. So we pay attention to our thinking and alter it to fit the flow. If we think “things have never been worse” then this is true. If we think “this is impossible” then it is. It is true to us. There is no objective reality at least not one perceptible to human beings. All reality is subjective for us. ;

So, what does this mean? It means that we can learn, with practice, not to engage our external circumstances in a negative way. We can observe but do so in a detached way. You see all things pass. Our difficult circumstances pass. Most of our fears are of imagined frightening futures which rarely ever come to pass and even when they do we find that just as we have dealt with our past troubles we can deal with those which do arise. The key to learning to do this is in the dual techniques of one pointed concentration and self observation.

So, we flow. We detach. We let things flow around us like we are a stone in a river. We stand detached. We remain calm. We train ourselves not to engage. Then when the worst happens we can deal with it with determined calm. Our minds are clear. Fear does not turn our bowels to water and our knees to brittle twigs. We stand like the stone. We deal with the problem and then, having done so, we let it go again.

We must let it go. It’s like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home.

– Buddhist Proverb