“You are not lost. You are here. Stop abandoning yourself. Stop repeating this myth about love and success that will land in your lap or evade you forever. Build a humble, flawed life from the rubble, and cherish that. There is nothing more glorious on the face of the earth than someone who refuses to give up, who refuses to give in to their most self-hating, discouraged, disillusioned self, and instead learns, slowly and painfully, how to relish the feeling of building a hut in middle of the suffocating dust.” — Heather Havrilesky, Ask Polly

this tumblr text post:

“To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.” — Mary Oliver

From an interview with Kazu Makino:

Instructions On Not Giving Up, Ada Limon:

And this poster by Yumi Sakugawa

“You have to believe, in your heart, that even if you don’t work hard and exercise and think positive thoughts and make new friends and march triumphantly into the future, you are still enough. You will always have bad days. Being broken doesn’t make you a loser. You can crumble, and you will still be enough. Make that your religion moving forward. You are here to feel this moment. You are not here to become someone better. You are not here to impress or compete. You are not here to prove yourself. You are here to savor this life. Let down your guard. You are already enough. Believe it.” — Heather Havrilesky

“The first feminist gesture is to say: “Ok. They’re looking at me. But I’m looking at them.” The act of deciding to look, of deciding that the world is not defined by how people see me, but by how I see them.” -Agnès Varda

lyrics from the song Grow by The Oh Hellos:

“The world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.” — Mary Oliver

“The way Rilke describes colours—their intercourse within a painting, a single colour’s evolution through history—that’s how one might also describe words: their interaction and interplay within a poem, a single word’s history from one age to another, punctuated by contributions of individual authors. His eyes trained by Cézanne, Rilke reaches out to language for words that would express the nuances of colour, and the biography of blue spills out into the realm of language: a barely-blue, a blue dove-gray, a densely quilted blue, an ancient Egyptian shadow-blue, a waxy blue, a self-contained blue, a wet dark blue, a listening blue, a thunderstorm blue, a bourgeois cotton blue, a light cloudy bluishness, a juicy blue, and, in van Gogh’s landscapes, full of revolt, Blue, Blue, Blue.”

For context here is a picture

I lived in Alaska for two years and I will never get over the sheer overwhelming bigness of it. 

Nights where the sky is clear you can see clusters of stars or the Northern Lights dancing. When the lights are rippling especially strong and fast you can hear a static crackle in the air. When the moon is out after it’s snowed, you don’t need flashlights to see. Everything glows and glimmers like polished quartz.  

But when the sky is clouded over so you can’t see the stars, you can kind of almost sense the mountains towering over you and helping to block out the light, these giant monoliths acting like this void darker than your soul. I’ve never experience night like Alaska night. 

Everything is big, the mountains, the sky, the valleys.