i read somewhere... 25 december 2019...

before i disappear into my own festive embrace in the kitchen (cooking up a festive feast) and on the sofa, by the tree (for the yearly treat)... i am spreading some positivity, warmth and love, today and everyday from this day forward. <3 span="">

with my festive special 'i read somewhere':

"Surround yourself with people whose eyes light up when they see you and who have no agenda for your reform.

Change yourself in the way you want everyone else to change

Love your enemies in case your friends turn out to be jerks

Write a love letter to your evil twin during a lunar eclipse

Dream up wilder, wetter, more interesting problems

Change your name every day for a thousand days

Exaggerate your flaws till they turn into virtues

Kill the apocalypse and annihilate Armageddon

Brag about what you can't do and don't have

Bow down to the greatest mystery you know

Make fun of people who make fun of people

Scare yourself with how beautiful you are

Pretend your wounds are exotic tattoos

Sing anarchist lullabies to lesbian trees

Commit a crime that breaks no laws

Sip the tears of someone you love

Give yourself another chance

Play games with no rules

Relax and go deeper

Mock your fears

Drink the sun".

Fall in love with your life over and over... <3 span="">

I wish you all a wonderful time with your selves and loved ones.
Keep warm, keep safe and remember the ones who have less than you or nothing at all.
Think of those who will never see festivities because of wars and displacement.
Think of those who are ill.
Think of those who have departed this realm.

And remember how fortunate you are for being healthy, alive, prosperous, loved and loving.

Keep swimming and keep the aspidistra flying; we have work to do in the bettering of our world.

In peace and love. 

i read somewhere... 7 november 2017...

i read somewhere:

"Every day, you have to wade through a relentless surge of soul-less facts.
The experience tends to shut down your sense of wonder.

Every day, you're over-exposed to cynical narratives that have been sucked free of delight and mystery. That's why you have to make such strenuous efforts to keep your world enchanted."

"The punk ethic is rebellious. It transgresses
conventional wisdom through "a cynical absurdity that's redeemed by being hilarious." Brian Doherty.
In the hippie approach, on the other hand, the prevailing belief is "love is all you need." It seeks a
"manic togetherness and all-encompassing acceptance that are all sweet and no sour; inspiring but also soft and gelatinous." Ah, but what happens when punk and hippie merge? Each moderates the extreme of the other, yielding a tough-minded lust for life that's both skeptical and celebratory."

“This is a massive awakening. We’ve already seen an awakening taking place in the last few years. It will intensify. We’ve seen marvellous demonstrations in a variety of different cities... I think that we have to have a real sense of commitment to being a hope in such a bleak moment. And we can turn things around.”

Apply all this as you wish and create your own revolution to ripple through universally. The time is now, now is the time. 

an angel departed...

missed, but never forgotten... my love for maya is eternal and i'm grateful and fortunate for her words... 

Maya Angelou on Identity and the Meaning of Life

by Maria Popova

“Life loves the liver of it. You must live and life will be good to you.”

The light of the world has grown a little dimmer with the loss of the phenomenal Maya Angelou, but her legacy endures as a luminous beacon of strength, courage, and spiritual beauty. Angelou’s timeless wisdom shines with unparalleled light in a 1977 interview by journalist Judith Rich, found in Conversations with Maya Angelou (public library) — the same magnificent tome that gave us the beloved author’s conversation with Bill Moyers on freedom — in which Angelou explores issues of identity and the meaning of life.

Reflecting on her life, Angelou — who rose to cultural prominence through the sheer tenacity of her character and talent, despite being born into a tumultuous working-class family, abandoned by her father at the age of three, and raped at the age of eight — tells Rich:

I’ve been very fortunate… I seem to have a kind of blinkers. I just do not allow too many negatives to soil me. I’m very blessed. I have looked quite strange in most of the places I have lived in my life, the stages, spaces I’ve moved through. I of course grew up with my grandmother: my grandmother’s people and my brother are very very black, very lovely. And my mother’s people were very very fair. I was always sort of in between. I was too tall. My voice was too heavy. My attitude was too arrogant — or tenderhearted. So if I had accepted what people told me I looked like as a negative yes, then I would be dead. But I accepted it and I thought, well, aren’t I the lucky one.

She later revisits the question of identity, echoing Leo Buscaglia’s beautiful meditation on labels, as she reflects on the visibility her success granted her and the responsibility that comes with it:

What I represent in fact, what I’m trying like hell to represent every time I go into that hotel room, is myself. That’s what I’m trying to do. And I miss most of the time on that: I do not represent blacks or tall women, or women or Sonomans or Californians or Americans. Or rather I hope I do, because I am all those things. But that is not all that I am. I am all of that and more and less. People often put labels on people so they don’t have to deal with the physical fact of those people. It’s easy to say, oh, that’s a honkie, that’s a Jew, that’s a junkie, or that’s a broad, or that’s a stud, or that’s a dude. So you don’t have to think: does this person long for Christmas? Is he afraid that the Easter bunny will become polluted? … I refuse that… I simply refuse to have my life narrowed and proscribed.

To be sure, beneath Angelou’s remarkable optimism and dignity lies the strenuous reality she had to overcome. Reflecting on her youth, she channels an experience all too familiar to those who enter life from a foundation the opposite of privilege:

It’s very hard to be young and curious and almost egomaniacally concerned with one’s intelligence and to have no education at all and no direction and no doors to be open… To go figuratively to a door and find there’s no doorknob.

And yet Angelou acknowledges with great gratitude the kindness of those who opened doors for her in her spiritual and creative journey. Remembering the Jewish rabbi who offered her guidance in faith and philosophy and who showed up at her hospital bedside many years later after a serious operation, Angelou tells Rich:

The kindnesses … I never forget them. And so they keep one from becoming bitter. They encourage you to be as strong, as volatile as necessary to make a well world. Those people who gave me so much, and still give me so much, have a passion about them. And they encourage the passion in me. I’m very blessed that I have a healthy temper. I can become quite angry and burning in anger, but I have never been bitter. Bitterness is a corrosive, terrible acid. It just eats you and makes you sick.

Painting by Basquiat from Angelou's 'Life Doesn't Frighten Me.' Click image for more.

At the end of the interview, Angelou reflects on the meaning of life — a meditation all the more poignant as we consider, in the wake of her death, how beautifully she embodied the wisdom of her own words:

I’ve always had the feeling that life loves the liver of it. You must live and life will be good to you, give you experiences. They may not all be that pleasant, but nobody promised you a rose garden. But more than likely if you do dare, what you get are the marvelous returns. Courage is probably the most important of the virtues, because without courage you cannot practice any of the other virtues, you can’t say against a murderous society, I oppose your murdering. You got to have courage to do so. I seem to have known that a long time and found great joy in it.

The totality of Conversations with Maya Angelou is a powerful portal into the beloved writer’s soul. Complement it with Angelou on home, belonging, and (not) growing up, her children’s verses about courage illustrated by Basquiat, and her breathtaking reading of “Phenomenal Woman.”

love letters

The Proud Surrender: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Love Letters to Edith Wynn Matthison

by Maria Popova

“This is not meekness, be assured; I do not come naturally by meekness.”

No other form of human communication measures up to the mesmerism of anexquisite love letter, especially one that defies the romantic conventions of its age, like the stirring missives exchanged betweenVirginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, orEleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok.

In 1917, during her final year at Vassar College — which she had entered at the unusually ripe age of 21 — Edna St. Vincent Millay met and befriended British silent film actress Edith Wynne Matthison, fifteen years her senior. Taken with Matthison’s fierce spirit, majestic beauty, and impeccable style, Millay’s platonic attraction quickly blossomed into an intense romantic infatuation. Edith, a woman who made no apologies for relishing life’s bounties, eventually kissed Edna and invited her to her summer home. A series of disarmingly passionate letters followed. Found in The Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay (public library), these epistolary longings capture that strange blend of electrifying ardor and paralyzing pride familiar to anyone who’s ever been in love.

Writing to Edith, Edna cautions of her uncompromising frankness:

Listen; if ever in my letters to you, or in my conversation, you see a candor that seems almost crude, — please know that it is because when I think of you I think of real things, & become honest, — and quibbling and circumvention seem very inconsiderable.

In another, she pleads:

I will do whatever you tell me to do. … Love me, please; I love you. I can bear to be your friend. So ask of me anything. … But never be ‘tolerant,’ or ‘kind.’ And never say to me again — don’t dare to say to me again — ‘Anyway, you can make a trial’ of being friends with you! Because I can’t do things that way. … I am conscious only of doing the thing that I love to do — that I have to do — and I have to be your friend.

In yet another, Millay articulates brilliantly the “proud surrender” at the heart of every materialized infatuation and every miracle of “real, honest, complete love”:

You wrote me a beautiful letter, — I wonder if you meant it to be as beautiful as it was. — I think you did; for somehow I know that your feeling for me, however slight it is, is of the nature of love. … nothing that has happened to me for a long time has made me so happy as I shall be to visit you sometime. — You must not forget that you spoke of that, — because it would disappoint me cruelly. … I shall try to bring a few quite nice things with me; I will get together all that I can, and then when you tell me to come, I will come, by the next train, just as I am. This is not meekness, be assured; I do not come naturally by meekness; know that it is a proud surrender to you; I don’t talk like that to many people.

With love,

Vincent Millay

i was sent this. in secret, meaning i picked it up... and it touched me. and it made me cry. for many reasons. love letters are beautiful and poignant and so important... i wish to write and to be written to... i share here with all of you, but really, this post is dedicated to one person only, who will know and understand... x