“sharing Is Not Simply About Morality, But Also About Pleasure. Solitary Pleasures Will Always Exist,

Yet I am in love with words. They are doves falling out of the ceiling.

“Be careful of words, even the miraculous ones. For the miraculous we do our best, sometimes they swarm like insects and leave not a sting but a kiss. They can be as good as fingers. They can be as trusty as the rock you stick your bottom on. But they can be both daisies and bruises. Yet I am in love with words. They are doves falling out of the ceiling. They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap. They are the trees, the legs of summer, and the sun, its passionate face…” — Anne Sexton, a fragment from “Words”, from the book “The Awful Rowing Toward God” (Houghton Mifflin Co; March 1, 1975) (via Alive on all Channels)

220 Scents

This is a companion resource to Words To Describe Scent.

Arguably our most evocative sense, the sense of smell is an underused tool in writing descriptions and settings. Nothing transports me into the book I’m reading as effectively as the memory of some familiar scent, or some distant one awoken from the deepest parts of my brain. This is simply a list of recognizable scents, categorized by the “type” of scent or the kind of environment where it might be found:

(1) Natural scents are those that your character may expect to find in relatively undeveloped areas like while hiking a mountain, on a quest through a dark forest, or during an epic faceoff with their arch nemesis on a beach in the rain. These may also be found in more developed areas like a local park, and even in a peaceful oasis in a highly industrial area.

(2) Fruit/Vegetable scents are useful in many settings, so your character doesn’t have to work on a farm to use this list – though it certainly would come in handy for a farm setting! Our characters encounter these scents in the homes of loved ones, in inns where they rest for the night during a long journey, and while running through the palace orchard to warn the King of an impending attack.

(3) Florals, Herbs & Spices – perhaps the most fragrant and versatile category. Floral descriptions may be used for bouquets at an old flame’s wedding, or for a lover’s perfume left over on the pillow. Your character may encounter herbs & spices anywhere from a busy street market to a witch’s brew in an isolated mountain house.

(4) Industrial scents are those, in general, associated with humans, civilization, and development. These will typically be found in cities or wherever there are people. You may also notice that most of these would be generally considered unpleasant. That’s not to say pleasant scents don’t exist where there is development, just that the development itself usually doesn’t smell great. The beautiful scents from any of the other four categories can be, and often are, found in developed areas… especially those of the last category:

(5) Food! Your character’s favorite café, their mother’s kitchen when they were a child, the lunch their best friend used to share with them, the last Christmas meal at their ex-lover’s home, the cocktail they were drinking when they met their arch nemesis – the list is endless and endlessly evocative.

Use wisely and enjoy!

“As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”

— From the essay ‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury’ in Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

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.”

Google Docs

Slow Fashion Brands - Compiled by Rebecca

Slow Fashion Brands BRANDS:,Website:,Price Range,Notes:,BST / used options:,Sizes up to:,Customizations? Linen basics in soft hues Not Perf

one of my “special interests” in the past couple of years has been exploring fast fashion vs. slow fashion. it has been a long journey trying to find clothes that actually 1) fit me 2) look good 3) are made from material that is not actively shoving plastic in the ecosystem 4) involve ethical labor, fair trade, fairly compensated, etc

before i did this research, i really had no clue about fabrics or fashion brands. i used to think i had zero interest in fashion, in fact.

i grew up wearing walmart and thrift store clothes, and when i went to college i bought clothes from target and asos. something started to shift a little bit when i found vintage resellers on etsy and ebay… those clothes were so unique. but a lot of the vintage clothes were polyester blends, stiff, and would fall apart as easily as my asos clothes. i would leave them hanging in my closet and never wear them. i would wear the same old t shirts and jeggings every day. i felt like it was impossible to ever wear comfortable clothes, or ever feel good in clothes, so why bother?

it started with linen. linen is very comfortable and pretty sustainable. i was amazed that i didn’t feel the urge to rip my clothes off when i wore linen. lightbulb number one.

a friend let me borrow a nooworks dress, and i went to the store and got some overalls. wow. overalls. lightbulb number two. holy shit, you can wear overalls. you know how people say “not binary or non-binary but a secret third thing.” that’s overalls.

i realized i loved the bonkers prints that nooworks had, and all of it was soft, and made ethically. it was a higher price point than i was used to, which gave me pause. but then you realize: we’re not supposed to be buying dumb clothes every other weekend. and isn’t a slightly higher price point for soft clothes that you won’t want to tear off your body worth it?

so i started my research. i made a spreadsheet. the prices can be all over the place across brands, so i made a column for prices. sizes can be all over the place too – people always ask me “where is the plus size slow fashion?” it’s there. just look at the size column. people say “isn’t it better to buy secondhand?” yeah, it is. i have many links to secondhand sources.

if you have any suggestions or additions please let me know, it is a living document.

“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)

Clarence River Floodplain, Northern NSW Australia [OC] 2587 x 3449 - Author: Stu_Murphy_Artist on Reddit

Rainer Maria Rilke, "You who never arrived." The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

polynesians: have oral history that references a faraway land of andes-like mountains in the east, cultivated sweet potato (a plant native to central america, not the pacific), literally call sweet potato by the same word used by the quechua and aymara people indigenous to the andes, left physical remains on islands a few km off the coast of chile, have genetic links with native south americans

white academics: hmmm it's very doubtful polynesians contacted south america.. they probably just stopped permanently at easter island for some reason after systematically navigating the entire south pacific. the sweet potatos floated to them across the ocean