Being Compassionate To Yourself Involves Making It A Discipline To Do The Things That You Love, No Matter

Vicente Aleixandre, ed. by Lewis Hyde, from A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems; “The Explosion”

[Text ID: “I devoted myself to one endless afternoon. / I’ve loved you every moment of that afternoon.”]

Dozens of Historic Mexican Cookbooks Are Now Available Online

The University of Texas San Antonio's vast collection makes traditional Mexican and Mexican-American cooking accessible

The oldest Mexican cookbook in the University of Texas at San Antonio’s (UTSA) collection was never meant for public consumption. Handwritten in 1789 by Doña Ignacita, a woman who probably served as the kitchen manager for a well-to-do family, the manuscript includes recipes for such specialties as “hidden vegetable stew,” or potaje escondido, and an orange-hued soup called zopa de naranja.

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“I’ve had students in tears going through these, because it’s so powerful to see that connection with how their family makes certain dishes and where they originated,” UTSA Special Collections Librarian Stephanie Noell tells Atlas Obscura. “I want anybody with an internet connection to be able to see these works.”

hooks likes to talk about “seasons of life,” and help her students learn to make choices that are not absolute—I am a this or a that forever—but that go along with the season. So, what would bell hooks like to do with her next season, this season of balancing and appreciating the earth? “I would like to spend more time than I already am helping individuals resolve the difficulties in their lives through love,” she says. “I would like to bring the work of mindfulness and awareness to everyday struggles. The most important field of activism, particularly for black people, is mental health. Activism does not need to be some kind of organized ‘against’ protest. When my students say they want to change the world, I espouse an inward to outward movement. If you feel that you can’t do shit about your own reality, how can you really think you could change the world? And guess what? When you’re fucked-up and you lead the revolution, you are probably going to get a pretty fucked-up revolution.”

hooks loves houses. She likes to renovate them and make them beautiful, and when it comes to summing up what she’s about, that’s the image she chooses. “For a house to be truly beautiful it has to have a strong foundation,” she says. “For us, that means finding the ground of our being, the place where we discover ourselves. Our foundation of self-invention does not preclude community. In genuine community there is lots of difference. We all make our contribution from a place of difference, not sameness. It is difficult to find the place where difference can exist in a context of harmony, where it is not necessary to dominate, but that is our foundation, the ground of our being. It’s where we start.”

i-D

The Elevator Issue, no. 191, October 1999

Hanif Abdurraqib interviewed by Ruth Awad: Joy Is Not Promised to You

Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

Matthew Dickman, from “Montpelier” [ID in ALT]

“We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

“The less love you put into things the more they resemble one another. The same goes for stories, everyone knows them by heart, but when someone tells them with love, I don’t know, they seem new…that’s what I think anyway.”

— Andrés Neuman, Traveller of the Century (trans. Nick Caistor & Lorenza Garcia)