There Are Books Out There - Many Good - That Cater To Your Extremely Esoteric Interests. #never Kill

"A beautiful life is not stumbled upon, it is built. It is chosen. It is nurtured over the years. A beautiful life is made from the heart, not the head. It is not one we can rationalize our way into, it’s one that must be felt. A beautiful life is not one that is immediately comfortable, but one grown through the acknowledgement of what is worth being uncomfortable for. It is not one that is easy, it is one that is worth it. 

A beautiful life is composed of the things our 90-year-old selves would have wished we’d done with the years in which we were so young but didn’t realize, before the decades piled up and passed us by and we came to find how little time even the luckiest among us have. It is made of all the little whispered prayers they’d have for us as they looked back, the same way we imagine our younger selves now and wish we could impart and instill so much guidance, so often leaning in the direction of — go where your heart already calls you, move toward the truth you already know.


A beautiful life is made with someone who not only makes you fall in love with them, but makes you fall in love with the person you become because of them. The kind of human being they push and inspire you to be. The kind of person who loves you as you are while still holding space for your growth. The kind who would carry you down the steps if you could not walk anymore, who would hold your hand until the last minute of the last hour, with whom you could have nothing, but it would still feel like everything. 

Happiness is not how your life appears, it is the quality of your connection to it. How deeply and intimately those bonds run. How much you truly cared about what you were doing and the people around you and the memories you made and how bravely you put your heart into your days, rather than hiding yourself away and wondering if you could make things appear full on the surface, while it all sits empty just beneath."

Brianna Weist - THE PIVOT YEAR

Shop Catalog

The Pivot Year

This is the year you change your life. There's a saying that when the moment comes, you don't need words on a page, you need new thoughts i

at the start of every month everyone reblogs some insane poetry that’s like “august has arrived and again I swallow my bones in the burning sun” and every time I’m like damn that makes no sense. but kind of true.

“My creative writing professor told me to stop writing about love. I asked him why and he said, “Because you have turned it over and over in your hands, felt every angle, every fault, every inch, every bruise. You have ruined it for yourself.” I spent the next 3 weeks writing about science and space. Stars exploding. Getting sucked into a black hole. How much I wished I could sleep inside of that nothingness without being annihilated. What an exploding star would taste like. If it would make our stomachs glow like fireflies, or tingle and shake like pop rocks under our tongue. My creative writing professor told me that those poems weren’t what he was looking for. He tells me to stop writing about outer space. Stop writing about science. Again, I ask him why. Again, he says, “You have ruined it for yourself.” I spend the next three weeks writing about my mother, how we are told we can’t make homes inside of other human beings, but the foreclosure sign on my mother’s empty womb tells me that women who give birth know a different, more painful truth. My creative writing professor tells me I am both talented and hopeless, that everything I write is both visceral and empty, a walking circus with no animals inside but a beautiful trapeze artist with a broken hip selling popcorn in the entrance-way. He tells me to stop writing about my mother. I don’t ask why. I pick up my books and my notepad and I leave his office with my war stories tucked under my tongue like an exploding star, like the taste of the last person I ever loved, like my mother’s baby thermometer, and I do not look back. We are all writing about our mothers, our lovers, the empty space that we will never be able to breathe in. We are all carrying stones in our pockets and tossing them back and forth in our hands, trying to explain the heaviness and we will never stop writing about love, about black holes, about how quiet it must have been inside the chaos of my mother’s belly, inside the chaos of his arms, inside the chaos of the spaces in every poem I have ever written. None of this is ruined. Do not listen to them when they tell you that it is.”

— Caitlyn Siehl, “My Creative Writing Professor Told Me to Stop Writing About Love” (via alonesomes)

Chema Mendez aka Mendez Mendez (Dominican, b. Dominican Republic, based Bavaro, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic) - Growing, Digital Art

Ibrahim Nasrallah, “Palestinian,” trans. Huda Fakhreddine

not sure if anyone is interested in this but here is a list of the most joyfully vital poems I know :)

You're the Top by Ellen Bass

Grand Fugue by Peter E. Murphy

Our Beautiful Life When It's Filled with Shrieks by Christopher Citro

Everything Is Waiting For You by David Whyte

Lawrence Ferlinghetti Is Alive! by Emily Sernaker

Instructions for Assembling the Miracle by Peter Cooley

Barton Springs by Tony Hoagland

Footnote to Howl by Allen Ginsberg

Song of the Open Road by Walt Whitman

Tomorrow, No, Tomorrower by Bradley Trumpfheller

At Last the New Arriving by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

To a Self-Proclaimed Manic Depressive Ex-Stripper Poet, After a Reading by Jeannine Hall Gailey

In the Presence of Absence by Richard Widerkehr

Chillary Clinton Said 'We Have to Bring Them to Heal' by Cortney Lamar Charleston

Midsummer by Charles Simic

Today by Frank O'Hara

Naturally by Stephen Dunn

Life is Slightly Different Than You Think It Is by Arthur Vogelsang

Ode to My Husband, Who Brings the Music by Zeina Hashem Beck

The Imaginal Stage by D.A. Powell

Lucky Life by Gerald Stern

Beginner's Lesson by Malcolm Alexander

Presidential Poetry Briefing by Albert Haley

A Poem for Uncertainties by Mark Terrill

On Coming Home by Lisa Summe

G-9 by Tim Dlugos

Five Haiku by Billy Collins

The Fates by David Kirby

Upon Receiving My Inheritance by William Fargason

Variation on a Theme by W. S. Merwin

Easy as Falling Down Stairs by Dean Young

Psalm 150 by Jericho Brown

Pantoum for Sabbouha by Zeina Hashem Beck

ASMR by Corey Van Landingham

A Welcome by Joanna Klink

From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee

At Church, I Tell My Mom She’s Singing Off-Key and She Says, by Michael Frazier

"to be, or not to be"

to be seen without performing. to be heard without screaming. to be missed without disappearing. to be enough without proving it. to be held without falling apart. to be understood without explaining. to be wanted without conditions. to be. to be.

— Devin Kelly, Ordinary Plots substack