“No Relationship Can Truly Grow If You Go On Holding Back. If You Remain Clever And Go On Safeguarding

learning to take your life seriously - ask polly

I’ll stay in Today by Chukwu Adaeze

Moss PNGs.

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Mai Masri - Frontiers of Dreams and Fears (2001)

“If you give children a vocabulary that’s large enough and complex enough to express their emotions and their ideas, you give them access to complex feelings and emotions in themselves. So that if you talk to a teenager and all they can say about how they feel is BAD, and they haven’t got, you know, a larger vocabulary for lonely, abused, insecure, frightened…I mean there’s this huge panoply which…I remember when my daughter was just telling me that she just felt bad, I bought her a thesaurus. I said, “Look up, is it sort of over lonely, or is it insecure…and look up under lonely, you’ll find two hundred words for lonely. Which one?” But what that does is that it makes you feel that there’s this huge complexity of emotions and there are words for all of them. If you want children to feel less frustrated and less disenfranchised and less unable to even feel comfortable with their own emotions, you’ll have to give them a vocabulary that’s as complicated as their inner lives. And one of the things we see in children is this incredibly reduced capacity for reporting their inner lives to the exterior world. One of the things is just teaching them poems, just teaching them to memorize poems in school, they don’t have to interpret them, if they just internalize the language of the poem, the complexity of the emotion in the poems…” -Jorie Graham, in a conversation

being compassionate to yourself involves making it a discipline to do the things that you love, no matter how many times you attempt to convince yourself that it’s no use. being compassionate with yourself involves sitting down and writing, even when you feel insecure about the work you’re producing. being compassionate with yourself involves taking a walk outside because you haven’t had any fresh air the whole day. being compassionate with yourself involves committing yourself to learning something new even if it hasn’t gone well many times before. being compassionate with yourself is about committing to the discipline of self-betterment and healing.

"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

ولأنه يعلم أنَّ عينيه تربكاني .. يُطيل النظر “

I don’t have a guidebook for love. One day it’s a flower I wear on my jacket, on another, it’s a dagger hidden in our bed, on another, it’s a flame that sears. Still, on another, it’s a sugar cube dissolving sweetly on my tongue.

Nizar Qabbani, tr. by Nayef al-Kalali, from Republic of Love: Selected Poems; “Give Me Love, Turn Me Green”