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i'm listening to gathering moss, by robin wall kimmerer, and she is talking about a very odd job she was consigned to do, where an eccentric millionaire recuited her to consult on a "habitat restoration". when she arrives, the job they actually want her to do is to tell them how to plant mosses on the rocks in his garden. he wants it to look like a specific, beautiful wild cliff in the woods nearby, with centuries-old beds of moss growing thick and strong. she tells him it is impossible. such a thing would take decades to accomplish.

later, she is called back to look at the progress of the moss garden and is amazed by the thick, well-established mosses. how did they do it? she asks.

then they take her out to the woods and show her that they have been blasting huge chunks of rock out of the cliff, packaging them in burlap, and moving them to the owner's garden.

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You don’t owe your parents a relationship.  We’re coming up on the holiday season right now, which means a lot of you are currently dealing with the overwhelming anxiety of having to spend a lot of time with families who mock, belittle and degrade you for the person you are and the life you choose to lead. Quite a few of you are sitting in dorm rooms or apartments, staring at your suitcases and boarding passes and wondering why you have to keep spending time and money and energy to go see parents and relatives who never seem to approve of anything you do.  And the honest answer is, you don’t.  As adults, a lot of us feel like we have to give our parents as much of our time, attention and energy as they want, because we think we “owe” them for raising us. They might belittle you for your appearance, criticize your job or make horrible comments about your partner. They might list off all the things they had to give up in order to raise you, and make you feel like you need to lead your life a certain way to “repay” them for their lost dreams. Many of us feel like we have a duty to keep coming back for more of this, even if we consistently walk away from these interactions feeling drained and worthless. But the truth is, we don’t have to keep enduring this. And we don’t owe abusive people anything, no matter how they might be related to us.  The fact that your parents successfully avoided going to prison for child neglect does not give them an unlimited license to treat you poorly. Potty-training you 22 years ago does not give them the right to call you homophobic slurs now. They are the ones who made the decision to have you and raise you, knowing that children don’t come with guarantees; no parent has the right to demand that their child turn out straight, abled, cisgender, wealthy, highly educated, or that their child follows the specific life plan laid out by the parents. Children are their own people who follow their own path in life, and if your parents can’t accept that, they are the ones who are kidding themselves - not you.  When you reach adulthood, your parents have to figure out how to have an adult relationship with you. Period. It is no longer their role to discipline you or make you ask for “permission” to do the things you want to do. That time is over - now, the two of you need to find a way to build a relationship built on mutual respect, appropriate boundaries, and recognition of autonomy. Your parents can give you guidance, advice, comfort, protection, support and voice their concerns, but you are not their pet, their plaything or their punching bag. If you are able to build a relationship that involves gratitude for the effort they put into raising you, that’s a wonderful thing - but you are not expected to endure continued abuse as a show of “gratitude”. Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide who you want in your life, and in what capacity. If you can put up with your family during the holidays, that’s great. If you’d rather spend the holidays with a family you built out of friends, that’s great too. You have a right to happy, healthy relationships, and you don’t owe anybody your sanity and self-esteem, no matter how many times they changed your diaper. 

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So Chidi has a girlfriend (who I LOVE might I add), they’ve restablished the whole JasonxJanet ship which means only one thing:

THIS IS THE UNIVERSE WHERE WE GET ELHANI IT’S GO PEOPLE THERE’S NO OTHER OPTIONS FOR THEM NOW EVERYONE’S PAIRED OFF

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“And somedays I miss everyone - who has ever left, all at once.”

— Donte Collins

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“there’s so much I haven’t told her lately, about how quickly my soul is aging, how it feels like a basement I keep filling with everything I’m tired of surviving.”

— Philip Schultz, from The God of Loneliness: Selected and New Poems; “It’s Sunday Morning in Early November,”  

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“The problem with the past is that it lasts forever. Ten years from now I will still be lying on my bed trying to write this poem.”

— Kelly Jones, “The Gift of Forgetting,” published in IDK Magazine

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everything, in a place we knew, every thing, we knew, little and large and mine and ours, except horror, all of it, everything could flame up that quickly, could flare and be gone.

— Camille T. Dungy, from “this beginning may have always meant this end,” published in Poetry

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“In this space right here that we have made for each other, you can say anything and I will not abandon you. Unwrap the worst things you have done. Watch me hold them up to the light and not even flinch.”

— Trista Mateer

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I want to tremble, soften, convince myself  a better day is coming.

— Liz Worth, from “New math,” The Truth Is Told Better This Way

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“Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.”

—Toni Morrison, born on this day in 1931.

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My creative writing professor told me to stop writing about love. I asked him why and he said, “Because you have turned it over and over in your hands, felt every angle, every fault, every inch, every bruise. You have ruined it for yourself.” I spent the next 3 weeks writing about science and space. Stars exploding. Getting sucked into a black hole. How much I wished I could sleep inside of that nothingness without being annihilated. What an exploding star would taste like. If it would make our stomachs glow like fireflies, or tingle and shake like pop rocks under our tongue. My creative writing professor told me that those poems weren’t what he was looking for. He tells me to stop writing about outer space. Stop writing about science. Again, I ask him why. Again, he says, “You have ruined it for yourself.” I spend the next three weeks writing about my mother, how we are told we can’t make homes inside of other human beings, but the foreclosure sign on my mother’s empty womb tells me that women who give birth know a different, more painful truth. My creative writing professor tells me I am both talented and hopeless, that everything I write is both visceral and empty, a walking circus with no animals inside but a beautiful trapeze artist with a broken hip selling popcorn in the entrance-way. He tells me to stop writing about my mother. I don’t ask why. I pick up my books and my notepad and I leave his office with my war stories tucked under my tongue like an exploding star, like the taste of the last person I ever loved, like my mother’s baby thermometer, and I do not look back. We are all writing about our mothers, our lovers, the empty space that we will never be able to breathe in. We are all carrying stones in our pockets and tossing them back and forth in our hands, trying to explain the heaviness and we will never stop writing about love, about black holes, about how quiet it must have been inside the chaos of my mother’s belly, inside the chaos of his arms, inside the chaos of the spaces in every poem I have ever written. None of this is ruined. Do not listen to them when they tell you that it is.

Caitlyn Siehl, “My Creative Writing Professor Told Me to Stop Writing About Love”  (via 7-weeks)

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Solidarity is not the same as support. To experience solidarity, we must have a community of interests, shared beliefs and goals around which to unite, to build Sisterhood. Support can be occasional. It can be given and just as easily withdrawn. Solidarity requires sustained, ongoing commitment.

Bell Hooks (via theproblackgirl)

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Rest in power, comrade. We’ll miss you.

In Memory of Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018)

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Is there time in the unconscious?

Carla Freccero (via coocoolah)

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Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.

Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (via books-n-quotes)