weltenwellen:

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

treasureislandpdf:

for love, and the resilience it gives to us all

warsan shire, ‘backwards,’ mary oliver from ‘the ponds,’ house of life, from ‘the lord of the rings: the two towers,’ dir. peter jackson, philip larkin, ‘an arundel tomb,’ images from miscellaneous sources

thebluesthour:

“Then gradually the blue-bells came, blue as water standing thin in the level places under the trees and bushes, flowing in more and more, till there was a flood of azure, and pale-green leaves burning, and tiny birds with fiery little song and flight. Then swiftly the flood sank and was gone, and it was summer.”

— D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow

kxowledge:

Mary Oliver, Peonies

moonlit-grimoire:

fatimafares123:

Now YouTube has a habit of recommending me the weirdest stuff recently, but today i got this on my recommendations

And about halfway through listening to this, I went and read the comments, literally I could not stop reading I was there for hours, here are some of my favorites

First off, Oliviaalee’s channel is a godsend for writing. My favorites right now are:

Give them a try here

Also…honorable mention

piperpancakes:

piperpancakes:

piperpancakes:

piperpancakes:

Living in DC right now is really fun because you’ll go to the grocery store for the first time in over a week, see a white man buying tiki torches, and instantly decide that you don’t actually need eggs or milk or fresh produce and hightail it 

Living in DC right now is really fun because you’ll clock in at your place of work, which happens to be across the street from one of the city’s largest synagogues, and you’ll see four white bald men with american flag neck buffs as masks and black hoodies walk towards it and you will, for a moment, question whether people are about to die and debate what exactly it is you need to do about it

Living in DC right now is really fun because my family has decided to make the choice to stay in the city and stockpile groceries for the next two weeks. An estimated 20% of the city will be leaving to shelter elsewhere for the week of the inauguration. Any other time in US history, an inauguration draws in Washingtonians and Americans from across the continent. It is supposed to be a celebration of democracy. Instead, we have empty houses and a city preparing for violence waged by non-residents while our streets and our homes pay the cost.

Living in DC is really fun right now because you’ll get woken up at 6:17 am by the sound of humvees driving down your block. They are on their way to secure one of the dozens of streets, bridges, and highways that are being shut down to keep out white supremacists. A soldier in uniform waves good morning while you get your usual order from Dunkin’ Donuts. He has kind eyes behind the mask. You wonder who he voted for.

shanastoryteller:

in the sixth months after graduating from college, with my very expensive degree from a good college, i ate nothing but bread. i worked at a bakery / cafe / restaurant and got half off one meal per shift but it was still too expensive even then. but at the end of every night we would throw out all the bread loaves that hadn’t sold, which was most of them, every night. we would fill up ten boxes to give away to a shelter and then we could take anything we could carry, and i couldn’t afford a half off deconstructed sandwich, but i could fill the cabinets of my apartment with bread. everyone who worked there was just like me, subsisting on discarded, overpriced bread. 

(when the managers’ backs were turned i was taught to leave the trashbags of bread behind the dumpster rather than inside it, because it was locked after everyone left to prevent people from stealing from it. we would say we were going out to stack chairs and instead stack prepackaged salads prepared that morning in the narrow space between wall and dumpster, but that’s not what this is about.)

we were working valentine’s day, a little bit miserable about it, because customers are somehow worse on a holiday about love ,and even if we were single we didn’t want to be here, and most of us had people we’d rather be spending the day with, and the snappish, hardass manager was working that day, and everyone could not wait for the day to be over. 

we had a boxes of those bakery tissue sheets around and i was twisting it in my hands and i thought about how the first night my uncle spent with my aunt he had to get up early for work but didn’t want to wake her and the whole thing hadn’t been planned, exactly, so he (a roofer by trade and a golden glove boxer by sport) went into the kitchen and took some paper towels and twisted them between his big, scarred hands until it formed a sweeter shape and when my aunt work up it was to a paper towel rose on her pillow. 

so i used a couple sheets of bakery tissue to make a rose and walked up to my coworker who stared at me with a rictus smile and i gave it to her, trying not overthink if it was a weird thing to do. her smile slipped and she asked “you made this?” holding it carefully, like it wasn’t something her two year old son could have made with his pudgy hands, and i shrugged and got more milk from the back. 

then another coworker held the steamer too long when frothing milk, not on accident but because he was irritated, so i rolled another rose and tucked it in his apron pocket as i walked by. then it was just one more of us up front and it was nothing, thirty seconds of twisting paper to take the stack of cookies out of her hands and hand her a tissue paper rose, her lined face lifting into a grin as she proudly tucked it into the chest pocket of her shirt and i may as well have been standing in front of the ovens for how hot my face felt. 

it was such a silly thing to do, i felt ridiculous, giving away hastily constructed tissue paper roses on valentine’s day, clumsy artful garbage. then one of the servers walked by and noticed and so i made her one too, and then other servers came by, leaning over the glass, and complimenting the flowers with big eyes, and i laughed and made more, still not sure if it was sincere, but even if it wasn’t, i figured making them one and handing it over was better than saying no. 

then i went to the back again and the dishwasher yelled out “where”s mine? what about us?” and he was too sweet to ever be anything less than sincere, so someone kept an eye on the door to the manager’s office as i stood in the sweltering kitchen and rolled clumsy tissue paper roses, enough for everyone 

and by the time the day ended, everyone had one, everyone wore one, tucked in their shirt or their apron or stuck in their hair or taped to the top of their pen. everyone was a little less miserable, smiling like we were all on in on the joke, although i don’t think any of us knew the punchline 

this story doesn’t have a punchline either. i just sometimes think of how much better some crumpled tissue paper made things and think that it can be that easy, sometimes, if we’re sincere and don’t overthink it too much

ardora:

“are you hungry?” is one of the most honest question you may ask someone, but it’s also one of the most private (intimate) one, a question that nothing can cover its nakedness. and saying “yes,” as an answer is like showing your wound – a gap inside you that needs to be filled – to an other.

esztow:

llleighsmith:

i love the taste of crunchy salt and vibrant lemon and the freshness of mint, i love the bitter taste of coffee with a hint of sweet oat milk and cinnamon, i love the smell of springtime, the fresh flower blooms and tender seedlings, the burst of colors painting into fields. i love sitting in the warmth of the sun for hours until my body melts. i love the deep breath of a new day where i may continue being. i am so thankful to move and breathe and be and love.

It is so wonderful when u can see again how beautiful life is

liriostigre:

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

howelljenkins:

howelljenkins:

i think benjamin alire saenz has more words in him than all of us combined

I bet you could sometimes find all the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand / The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain / But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry / I wondered if my smile was as big as hers. Maybe as big. But not as beautiful / My words weren’t any use in the face of the terrible wind that was escaping from my heart. I guess it was from my heart. It hurt so bad. Why did it hurt so bad? / God, I was beginning to hate this hope inside me / I hated God for giving me a heart. What good were they? Hearts? Having one got me exactly where? / sometimes, anger is a virtue. As long as you’re not making someone bleed / I think of their anger as a wind. And that wind took them away. From me / The guy tears me up. Talking does not heal you. / I lost myself somewhere. And that’s a very sad thing. Losing yourself is sad and heartbreaking. / And there are days when storms hover / Over my house, their brooding just this side of rage

llleighsmith:

i’m so thankful we’re alive to smell flowers and touch saltwater and get chilled in the breeze and take deep breaths and make foods warm with love and dance and laugh and move and wake up and dig our hands in dirt and eat strawberries and draw mindlessly and remember and sing and joke and walk down the same street again and again and make meaning. we are so lucky we get to be and feel and keep going

macrolit:

“Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.”

— Hannah Arendt