made of stardust

forgive me for the times i forget how good it is to be alive

Joan Didion writes, in On Keeping a Notebook, that the purpose of keeping a notebook, or a journal for that matter, isn’t because you simply want keep a personal record of things; but because you want to remember the person you were at that specific moment. we write things down on our notebook/journal/diary (whichever one of those you keep) because we want to remember. we want to remember what specific people meant to us on a particular day or hour. or minute. we want to remember our first impression of something (or of doing that something), possibly of someone, too. sometimes we think we’ll “always remember” important events: “I’ll make a mental note of that” etc etc. but in reality everything is fleeting. so Didion says write it down. keep a journal. that way, people, places, and certain events will always be there in case you ever want to come back to them sometime in the future. but also so that they don’t ever haunt you.

Sorry to break it to you but you literally have to face your fears and slaughter them. Otherwise you will live a small life that you do not want. You literally have to view your biggest fears and attack them head on. You have to fall into the abyss to find your way out. The easy path does not exist. There is no get out of jail free card. You have to allow yourself to die a spiritual death over and over again in order to reinvent yourself into the person you are actually supposed to be. And you have to be painfully honest with yourself and the people around you. It’s horrible but it’s truly the only way.

@sleepinmoons

I learnt something today that I think is just beautiful. My grandmother was a very sick woman and pretty much housebound for the last of her life.  She derived great pleasure from watching her neighbour’s backyard chickens.  She adored these chickens.  Every time I called, she had new chicken drama to tell me—think Linda Belcher and the raccoons.   It turns out that at some point, their neighbour was no longer able to have chickens because due to a disability he could no longer afford to keep them.  My grandfather, upon learning this, immediately used his spending money to keep the neighbour in both chickens and chicken feed so that my grandmother would have chickens to watch since my grandfather didn’t have time to keep chickens at their home. He did this for ten years, guys.  TEN YEARS he secretly funded his neighbour’s backyard chickens so that my grandmother would have chickens to watch every day until the day she died.   That’s true love.