- Australian Cattle Dog Mix. Want More? Follow:http://dogsandpupsdaily.tumblr.com/

I don’t think self-neutrality should always be treated as a stepping stone on the way to a commodified form of self-love. Sometimes, perhaps, self-neutrality is enough on its own, and might even be more helpful.

Example:

“I feel worthless” doesn’t need to become “I have value.” Instead, it would honestly be healthier to realize that “value” is a vague concept with little to no bearing on your right to exist.

“I’m useless,” doesn’t need to become “I have potential.” Who honestly gives a fuck if you have potential, except for people who want to use that potential for their own gain? We don’t exist to be a vessel for potential. We exist merely because we were born to exist.

“My life has no purpose,” doesn’t mean you need to find an all-consuming passion to give your life meaning. Life doesn’t really need to have a grand meaning, that’s just something human beings decided. You can still live a fulfilling life just by focusing on what you like now.

“I’m nobody.” Why do you need to “be someone” in the first place?? Everyone is always trying to be somebody, what’s so bad with just enjoying yourself and your friends and good food and laughs, without any expectation of being a person that others can identify and judge?

Conclusion: Self-love can have many benefits, but sometimes it has foundations in toxic productivity culture, capitalistic ideals, and an unhealthy pressure for us to be socially and financially valuable. In those situations, it’s best to just throw away the whole suitcase and realize that you don’t need to be judging your existence based on made-up ideals.

Water

“There is something sweet in this September air. Something familiar but new. Something light and easy. Something good.”

n.c. // september sweetness

“Million Dollar Highway” | San Juan Mountain Range, Colorado

(On seeing a therapist)

“I say that publicly because I think it’s really important to take the stigma away from mental health. … My brain and my heart are really important to me. I don’t know why I wouldn’t seek help to have those things be as healthy as my teeth. I go to the dentist. So why wouldn’t I go to a shrink?”

Canyonlands National Park in Utah is a showcase of geology. In each of the park’s districts, visitors can see the remarkable effects of time and erosion on a landscape of sedimentary rock. For millions of years, rock was broken down and carried here by wind and water, creating deposits that eventually became distinct rock layers. Many of the rock’s layers were deposited near sea level, but after a long period of uplift, the average elevation is now over 5,000 feet above sea level. As this area gradually rose, rivers that once deposited sediment on the lowlands began to remove it from the emerging plateau. The Green and Colorado rivers carved into the geologic layer cake, exposing buried sediments and creating the canyons and rock spires of Canyonlands that amaze us now. Photo by Randy Smythe (www.sharetheexperience.org). #ICYMI We’re looking back on your favorite posts of 2020. This display of incredible geologic formations really rocked our feeds this year.  #Top10of2020

by  kertipahk

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward is a sweeping and harsh tale of a family in the days leading up to a hurricane that Esch’s often-drunk father is certain will be the big one. He wants to prepare, but Esch and her brothers are worried about other things—Randall is preoccupied about basketball camp this summer, and Junior follows his siblings around as Skeetah frets over prized fighting pitbull China and her new puppies, and Esch tries to hide her pregnancy from her family and from Manny, the father.  

Salvage the Bones is a difficult and harsh novel. When I was reading it, I had the vague sense that I didn’t like it—it has a slow start—and yet when it was done, I felt the novel and its characters hanging on me like humidity, like a mist of sweat holding onto my skin. The twelve days leading to Katrina are full of a pregnant, heavy anticipation that doesn’t actually much heed the hurricane—until the final days, only Esch’s father is worried about what is to come. The National Book Award–winning novel exposes Katrina’s horrors by making us fall in love with the poverty-stricken, motherless family that is haunted by its past; by letting us grow accustomed to Skeetah’s stubborn obsession with his dogs and Esch’s stubborn and strong persistence. The drama of the tale seems to weigh most on Esch’s pregnancy or the health of Skeetah’s puppies, and in precisely that way does the novel catch the real point of the hurricane striking: no one was ready, even those who wanted to be ready. We know the hurricane that is coming, and we know what it will do as readers, and yet we too are so caught up in the drama that we aren’t ready for Katrina when she arrives. I have my nitpicks with this novel, but it has stuck with me, and kept me thinking days after I finished it.