if you’re struggling lately, i hope this reaches you.
we will be okay. you will be okay. you will grow and evolve and heal. you will enjoy life again even if it’s not the same as it was the last time you were happy. you will live your life not feeling stuck. you will do more than survive. you will thrive.
i just want a warm soup and a hug :( tired of sitting at my desk and studying
No :c
“I’m not everything I want to be, but I’m more than I was, and I’m still learning.”
— Charlotte Eriksson, Everything Changed When I Forgave Myself
The following are excerpts from a letter of advice she sent to a 17-year-old aspiring author by the name of Leonard W., whom she had taken under her wing as creative mentor.
I like to live always at the beginnings of life, not at their end. We all lose some of our faith under the oppression of mad leaders, insane history, pathologic cruelties of daily life.
Older people fall into rigid patterns. Curiosity, risk, exploration are forgotten by them. You have not yet discovered that you have a lot to give, and that the more you give the more riches you will find in yourself. It amazed me that you felt that each time you write a story you gave away one of your dreams and you felt the poorer for it.
You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings.
It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.
Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications.
Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.
If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.
finally back from chicago! would be happy to share insight from my first conference if people are interested :)
枝垂桜 // Weeping cherry blossoms
Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance
by mothmanfan19
Magnolias are so ancient plants that almost every other plant and insect who came to being around the same time as them has gone extinct by now. They are the loneliest plants in this world. Does anybody understand how much grief it gives me that the symbolic flower of Kuras is magnolia.
Gregory Orr, Here