“A Capitalist Society Requires A Culture Based On Images. It Needs To Furnish Vast Amounts Of Entertainment

“I have grown weary of talking about life as if it is deserved, or earned, or gifted, or wasted. I’m going to be honest about my scorecard and just say that the math on me being here and the people who have kept me here doesn’t add up when weighed against the person I’ve been and the person I can still be sometimes. But isn’t that the entire point of gratitude? To have a relentless understanding of all the ways you could have vanished, but haven’t? The possibilities for my exits have been endless, and so the gratitude for my staying must be equally endless.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib, from “On Times I Have Forced Myself Not to Dance,” in A Little Devil in America

"Westerners have told the history of Hawai’i as an inevitable if occasionally bittersweet triumph of Western ways over ‘primitive’ Hawai’ian ways... To know my history, I had to put away my books and return to the land. I had to feel again the spirits of nature and take gifts of plants and fish to the ancient altars. I had to begin to speak my language with our elders and leave long silences for wisdom to grow. But before anything else, I had to learn the language like a lover, so that I could rock with her and lie at night in her dreaming arms."

- HAUNANI-KAY TRASK, A HISTORY WRITTEN IN BONE

Atikah Karim by Damien Fry for Blanc Magazine, May 2021

“No relationship can truly grow if you go on holding back. If you remain clever and go on safeguarding and protecting yourself, only personalities meet, and the essential centers remain alone. Then only your mask is related, not you. Whenever such a thing happens, there are four persons in the relationship, not two. Two false persons go on meeting, and the two real persons remain worlds apart.”

— Osho, Intimacy: Trusting Oneself and the Other (via minuty)

Fragrance circle used by Drom, a global scent company founded in Germany in 1911.

Quilters. Photographs by Henry Groskinsky (1971)

It matters because I gave it meaning bitch

“The earth turned to bring us closer, it spun on itself and within us, and finally joined us together in this dream.”

— Eugenio Montejo, from “The Earth Turned to Bring Us Closer,” The Trees: Selected Poems (Salt Publishing, 2004)

Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score