sadsongbird

[sadsongbird]

embarrassment has good bones

[sadsongbird]

I'm in a very Pre-Raphaelite mood lately 💘

[sadsongbird]

Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Between the World and Me

Text ID: The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free.

[sadsongbird]

Emily Dickinson, from a letter to F.S. Cooper written c. February 1876

[sadsongbird]

if you want to experience life more deeply you have to find more beauty. stop training yourself to dismiss, to mock, to assume the worst all the time — when you do this you build walls between yourself and the world. and after a while you stop feeling the warmth of it entirely.

beauty requires openness. it asks you to let things reach you, to soften enough to be moved. it’s not naive to see beauty everywhere—it’s a skill, a form of intelligence, a kind of quiet bravery. because it is so much easier to critique than to create, to detach than to engage, to dismiss than to love.

let yourself be affected. let yourself find things beautiful and let that be enough. life is not asking you to be cool, sitting on the sidelines and nitpicking everything. it’s asking you to see life and experience it fully.

[sadsongbird]

February Mood

[sadsongbird]

Preparations for the season of love & a tiny shrine for Aphrodite 💝

[sadsongbird]

“Saint Valentine is past. Lovers, to bed; ‘tis almost fairy time.”

— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

[sadsongbird]

[sadsongbird]

upstream, mary oliver; gravity and grace, simone weil; journal of a solitude, may sarton

[sadsongbird]

When Cleopatra welcomed Mark Antony to her bedroom, the floor was covered in a foot and a half of such petals. Did they use the floor, and make love in a swamp of soft, fragrant, shimmying petals? Or did they use the bed, as if they were on a raft floating in a scented ocean?

Cleopatra knew her guest. Few people have been as obsessed with roses as the ancient Romans. Roses were strewn at public ceremonies and banquets; rose water bubbled through the emperor’s fountains and the public baths surged with it; in the public amphitheaters, crowds sat under sun awnings steeped in rose perfume; rose petals were used as pillow stuffings; people wore garlands of roses in their hair; they ate rose pudding; their medicines, love potions, and aphrodisiacs all contained roses. No bacchanalia, the Romans’ official orgy, was complete without an excess of roses. They created a holiday, Rosalia, to formally consummate their passion for the flower. At one banquet, Nero had silver pipes installed under each plate, so that guests could be spritzed with scent between courses. They could admire a ceiling painted to resemble the celestial heavens, which would open up and shower them in a continuous rain of perfume and flowers. At another, he spent the equivalent of $160,000 just on roses—and one of his guests smothered to death under a shower of rose petals.

— Diane Ackerman, ‘Smell: Roses’ A Natural History of the Senses

[sadsongbird]

Salma Deera, "Salt"

[sadsongbird]

misting rose water on my skin. simmering vanilla bean and nutmeg on the stove. air cleanse with palo santo. spritzing lavender hydrosol on the linens. hanging fresh sprigs of eucalyptus in the shower. pretty scents all around me.

[sadsongbird]

One real benefit of reading I rarely hear anybody mention is how much more interesting life becomes when you read a lot. It depends what you’re reading, of course, but most (good) books will teach you something you didn’t already know, and even if you have to give the book back to the library, you get to take that much with you. A lot of people talk about things they wish they’d studied in school–I’ve done it, too–but it’s a nice consolation prize that you can always pick up a book and learn something new. And as that library in your brain collects more volumes, everything around you gains new resonances, new context, and new connections which make your lived experience richer. In quarantine alone I’ve read about religion and politics and history and evolution and computer science and astrophysics without even leaving my house and it’s already a more interesting world. 

[sadsongbird]

“a community without romance risks being brutish and crass, superficial and brittle, cruel and even muderous. . . i don’t mean just romantic romance. i don’t just mean erotic romance. . . i mean the romance that allows us to soften our voices when we see each other.”

maya angelou, 1998

[sadsongbird]

eat delicious things in every sense. savor novels that unravel slowly, like decadent meals for the mind. let sunlight kiss ur skin, bask in its warmth like an endless summer. hold close the people who make you feel alive, kiss them tenderly, love them fiercely. laugh at bad jokes, the kind that make you roll ur eyes but secretly smile. plant basil on your windowsill, water it with care, breathe in its fragrance as you stir it into your meals. be unafraid to indulge in beauty, to notice it everywhere and to consume it greedily. there is no virtue in starving yourself of joy, no wisdom in rationing delight.

[sadsongbird]

Hate that when I say I like the color pink ppl automatically think electric pink … like what about dusty pink ….. do you not gaf ab dusty pink …. Give her her respect