I Deal So Incredibly Well With Change!!! My Natural Reaction To It Is Just So Positive!!!! I Really Take

the way ivan aivazovsky looks at the sea…i think…i think that’s what love looks like.

oh, i am finally old enough to know why my parents took so long to grab their coats. why they would ask us to get ready to go only to sit down for another round of coffee. what would i tell myself, at 10 years old? it’s okay. sit down with them too. take in the extra hour with your friend and her family. when you get home, write down every moment in your diary. one day you will be older and you will be waving goodbye to your best friend, and you will turn the key to start your beat up little car engine, and you will look back over your shoulder. her hair will be blowing in the wind and she will be beautiful and you will be, for a moment, struck by all of it. what you will feel is so wide and nameless that it will engulf you. and you will think of being 14 and kicking her under the table in math every time you wanted to whisper something behind the teacher’s back. you will think about how long the days felt, and how you could hold her hand whenever you wished, but you didn’t. and you will think about all of the people you could have lingered with. and you will wish, more than you have ever felt a wish, that the universe just gave you that - more time to linger. more time to say - i love you. i know i need to leave, but i don’t want to leave you. and when i go, i am leaving a piece of my heart that lingers too. 

one more round of coffee. the days are so short, and you are so lovely.

Actually life is beautiful because the sound I make while trying to breathe around hot food sounds like my dog trying to eat an apple. When I yawn my cat tries to put his face in my mouth like a little dentist man and when he yawns I put my finger in his obligate-carnivore trapzone and we both know he will not hurt me. When I do not fold my clothes, they do not hold it against me.

I am demonstrably sad, and lonely, and full of fear. But there are other people who will hold my hand, who will point out the hawk overhead, who will give you That Look in a public place. The other day at a coffee shop a child said "look! It's snowing!" so all of us strangers went to go look out the windows. It wasn't the first snow and it won't be the last but wasn't it lovely like that?

How wonderful to live in a world where birds and frogs both say beep! How wonderful to have an ocean of beautiful sharks with their dinosaur teeth! How wonderful the moon and her changing face, how wonderful the bees and their dancing to communicate, how wonderful shrimp and their forbidden layers of vision! How wonderful, you, and what you will give the world! The way we love things enough to spend entire blogs devoted to them? How people will let me explain my Pokemon team to them? How we will both jump at the scare in the movie, how we laugh so loudly, how it feels to give someone your baking? How wonderful to be alive. I am sorry for forgetting.

This is the process of getting better. With wonderful people and wonderful strangers and wonderful friends: I am getting better, slowly. Thank you, whoever you are. In some way, you've been wonderful, and left a wonderful place in the world to ripple out to me. In some small way - isn't it beautiful - I promise, you've been helping.

The best drawing advice I can give to anyone who wants to improve quickly is to use cheap notepad paper and ballpoint pens. I know it's tempting to buy the cool fancy supplies but then you'll feel pressured to not waste them. Use garbage materials and burn through them with zero thought. Only use pen because it forces you to commit and stops you from second guessing your lines and redrawing them over and over. Learn how to use your mistakes and then learn how to get it right the first time. I took numerous art classes and nothing taught me more than buying a big pack of Bics and legal pads and sketching anything that came to mind without hesitation. Fill a few pages everyday with the first thing that comes to mind. Don't rip out pages you don't like, just flip to the next page and try again. Watch yourself improve. If you really want to be a good artist, you need to learn how to draw from the ground up without relying on quality materials.

"Yes, Think" – Ruth Stone

Mother, said a small tomato caterpillar to a wasp, why are you kissing me so hard on my back? You’ll see, said the industrious wasp, deftly inserting a package of her eggs under the small caterpillar’s skin. Every day the small caterpillar ate and ate the delicious tomato leaves. I am surely getting larger, it said to itself. This was a sad miscalculation. The ravenous hatched wasp worms were getting larger. O world, the small caterpillar said, you were so beautiful. I am only a small tomato caterpillar, made to eat the good tomato leaves. Now I am so tired. And I am getting even smaller. Nature smiled. Never mind, dear, she said. You are a lovely link in the great chain of being. Think how lucky it is to be born.

Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947 - 1963

“writers & lovers” is killing me

i exist, i exist, i exist

kačka chmelíková // holly warburton // ? // image from pinterest // letters to a young poet by rainer maria rilke

just a little guy grocery shopping