#like it cannot possibly be meaningful or sacred

[mswyrr]

"platonic soulmate" sounds, to me, an awful lot like doing all the work of being someone's wife and then not getting all the benefits - someone to hold you when you're sad or sick or just need a cuddle, someone to do half the chores, someone who makes you feel special, makes you laugh, takes care of you, listens to you and takes your feelings seriously, who takes your side, who puts the time and effort and love in to learn to fuck you just right

i'm not sure how it's more "feminist" and "pure" to imagine a woman getting a raw deal like that. or why another man or woman (if she's queer) would put up with her giving all of that wife-y care and time and passion (for minimum 14-16+ hours out of 24, six days a week) and energy away to a "platonic soulmate"

how is that more feminist than a woman wanting and then getting what she wants and all the pleasures and costs that come with it? why is only paying the cost and not getting the full deal inherently purer?

anyway here's Wonderwall Sappho (translated by Anne Carson)

because I prayed this word: I want

[mapofsouthdakota]

Caffeine, chemistry and Caleb III

Synopsis: The café was supposed to be just another coffee shop. For a law student who enjoys her morning coffee and a shy newbie still learning the ropes, it should have been nothing more than part of the daily routine… But then there’s Caleb.

Details: 1500 words. Pt 3 is up at em! Non-MC!Reader as the law student POV. Expect flirting, hot af barista Caleb, jealousy and plenty of banter with the newbie barista. Today Caleb surprises you… kind of. And the MC, who knows where she is? Mystery, indeed… Poll below! The last one… me thinks heeeeh.

Parts: initial one shot, part 1, newbie POV, part 2, part 4, part 5, part 6

Tags: @gavin3469 @unstablemiss @i-messed-up-big-time @mipov101

Your Honor, he’s smirking again | Pt. 3

The law library is supposed to be sacred ground. Hushed reverence. Paper rustling. People highlighting like their lives depend on it.

But your laptop screen is currently filled with… apples.

Literally. Just—apple images. Cross-sections. Vintage posters. Pages of orchard trivia.

And your notes? They’ve completely devolved.

Exhibit A: Apple juice (Caleb’s drink of choice. Unexpected. Possibly romantic.)

Exhibit B: Apple charm on chain. Small. Worn. Too meaningful to be aesthetic.

Exhibit C: The way he said, “I just have a thing for apples.” With a grin like a sealed affidavit.

Tapping your pen against your teeth, you stare down your own handwriting. You’ve written “Who is she?” in the margin no less than six times. Circling each one harder than the last.

The charm wasn’t random. You know it. It was the kind of thing someone gives you when they mean it. And Caleb? Caleb doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to wear things without meaning.

You click open another tab. Type: “Apple symbolism in relationships.”

You’re mid-scroll on an article called ‘What Your Favorite Apple Says About Your Soulmate’ (Red Delicious apparently equals “overcommitted and delusional”—rude)

It’s the push you need. You close your laptop, shove it into your bag, and make a snap decision to change the scene.

Because obviously, the most rational way to break your obsession with Caleb… is to go sit directly in his workplace.

——————————————————————————

The café is quiet when you arrive—except for the simmer of K-pop in the background. You knew the newbie was into that kind of music (not that you’re judging, though you definitely are, just a little).

The newbie catches sight of you and gives a small, almost imperceptible nod from behind the counter—equal parts “welcome back” and “still spiraling, huh?”

You nod back: Of course you’re spiraling.

Behind the counter, the newbie shrugs—same, but in their own way. A silent acknowledgment. Two members of the same tragic club.

You pick your usual table, set down your things, and open your laptop again.

Two minutes later, you’re back on apple symbolism. Like you never left.

Your phone buzzes.

newbie: stop i can feel it from here

You glance around. One earbud in, apron on, their usual slouch behind the counter. They catch your eye for half a second, then immediately look back down like they weren’t just watching you.

You message back:

You: the charm’s an apple, right?? it has to mean something… do people wear apple charms for fun???

newbie: i dunno. i’m not the fruit feelings department.

You stare at your screen. Then back at them.

The newbie moves to wipe down a table as you approach—clearly already clean, but it gives them something to do with their hands. You try to look casual. You are not.

“Hypothetical question,” you say, voice pitched at normal human volume. “Has Caleb ever dated someone who… also had a weird fruit obsession?”

They glance at you. “Hypothetical?”

You nod. “Purely academic. Research purposes. National interest.”

Newbie gives you a look like I cannot believe I am complicit in this. Then sighs. “You mean like… an apple girl?”

You freeze. “She’s real?”

“I mean—no,” they say quickly, eyes flicking toward the espresso machine like it might save them. “I don’t think there’s a her. Or… if there is, she’s not, like, around. Never been around here, at least…”

You squint. “But?”

They shift their weight, fingers tugging at the edge of their sleeve. “It’s just… the necklace? It’s always there. Like—always.”

They glance at you, voice dropping a little. “He’ll swap out rings, change outfits, wear different earrings sometimes—but that chain? Never leaves his neck.”

Another pause. Then, softer: “It’s like it’s part of him.”

There’s a flicker of something hesitant—like regret, or just shyness. “Sorry. That’s all I’ve got. I just… notice stuff.”

You try not to let your face do anything dramatic.

“That’s fine,” you say. “It’s fine. Just… taking mental notes.”

They nod slowly. “You look like you asked for peace of mind and got a busy signal.”

You raise an eyebrow. “Hey, that’s rude. Accurate. But rude.”

Then the bell above the door rings.

And you know it’s him. The shift in atmosphere gives it away before you even turn.

Caleb walks in like he owns the lighting—hair ruffled, a worn athletic zip-up hugging his frame just right, one strap of a backpack slung over his shoulder, and a grin in place like it was designed by a committee and unanimously approved.

Your eyes flick straight to his chest. But the jacket’s zipped, collar popped just enough to block the spot where the chain usually peeks out.

You squint. Casually. Or as casually as someone hunting for emotional evidence can look.

Nothing.

Just soft cotton, a flash of silver from a ring on his hand—but no charm. No dog tag. No apple.

It feels like someone ripped a page out of your evidence binder for a class case prep.

“Golden Girl,” he calls, spotting you. “Back again. You really can’t resist a good caffeine felony.”

You open your mouth to shoot something back, but he’s already striding over, apron in one hand, and—

“Hey, actually,” he says, slowing near your table, “I need a legal opinion.”

You blink. “Excuse me?”

“I’ve got this customer,” he says, eyes too bright. “Keeps showing up. Possibly addicted to me. Definitely judging my apple juice innovations.”

Your stomach flips. “Sounds serious.”

“Oh, it is.” He pulls out the chair across from you and sits down like it’s the most natural thing in the world. “Might have to take legal action. Or hire a very competent defense attorney.”

“You’d need one,” you say. “Because that drink was a crime.”

He leans forward just slightly, eyes glinting. “Maybe I’m hoping you’ll prosecute me.”

Your thoughts immediately call for a recess. Indefinitely.

“Are you… asking for a mock trial date?”

He shrugs. “I prefer to think of it as… study support. Mutual interest. Also, I brought cookies.”

Caleb reaches into his backpack and pulls out a small paper bag like a magician pulling a rabbit—casual, practiced, unfairly charming. “Bribery,” he says, voice low and amused. “Very illegal. But effective.”

You’re laughing before you can stop yourself. “Fine. But if I catch even one apple reference in your opening statement—”

“You’ll what?” he says, tilting his head. “Sentence me to flirtation?”

You groan. “That was terrible.”

“That was golden, Golden Girl.”

Your phone buzzes under the table.

newbie: get a room. or i’m calling HR

You glance toward the counter.

They’re watching you over the espresso machine, one eyebrow raised, tongue piercing catching the light as they chew their lip to keep from laughing.

You fire back:

You: enjoy your floor mop. i’m cross-examining the emotionally unavailable hot guy.

You look up. Caleb is watching you, still leaning forward like he’s waiting for your verdict.

Then, with one lazy motion, he unzips his jacket.

And there it is.

The chain catches the light as the fabric shifts. The dog tag resting against his chest, and just beside it, the apple charm. Small. Still there.

Definitely still there. Damn.

Your want to bite your lip.

Instead you pick up one of the cookies. Take a bite. Chew slowly.

Then narrow your eyes at him, mid-chew.

“You baked these, didn’t you?”

Caleb raises a brow, smug. “Maybe.”

You shake your head, still chewing. “Unbelievable. I can taste the real butter.”

He laughs. “That good?”

You point at the cookie like it personally betrayed you. “I hate how good this is.”

“You’re welcome,” he says, all lazy confidence, one hand propping up his jaw like this is fun for him.

You chew like it’ll help quiet the spike of jealousy and tension in your chest. You straighten yourself, back to normal.

“Well,” you say. “I suppose I could consult. For a fee.”

“Oh yeah?” His grin sharpens. “What’s your rate?”

You lift an eyebrow. “Tell me who the apple charm’s from.”

He stills—just for a beat.

Then he smiles again. Slower. Warmer. Almost… fond.

“Dangerous question,” he murmurs.

“Try me.”

He doesn’t answer. Just pulls out his own notebook—small, leather-bound, lived-in—and flips it open to a blank page.

“Fine,” he says, voice warm, a little too casual. “Let’s make this a real trial. You ask your questions. I’ll take the stand.”

It’s a joke. Maybe. But there’s something in the way he says it. In the way he doesn’t look away.

And for a second, you think—he wants to be known.

Which might be worse than anything you imagined about the apple girl.

Because now you’re not just spiraling.

You’re falling.

You open your mouth, ready to press him further—channeling your inner attorney, zeroing in on the charm. But you don’t get the chance.

There’s a sharp crash from behind the counter.

You both turn.

The newbie stands frozen mid-shift, holding half of a shattered glass in one gloved hand, the other covered in foam and regret.

Caleb’s on his feet in a heartbeat, already crossing the room. “Hey, you okay?” he says, all soft and low as he crouches down beside them.

He pats their back gently—steady, reassuring—then starts gathering the mess, hands careful around the broken pieces like he’s done this before.

“Don’t worry about it,” he murmurs. “Happens to everyone.”

You catch the newbie’s eyes over his shoulder. Wide, guilty, and very clearly saying: Sorry.

You blink once, then give a tiny, resigned nod back: It’s fine. I’m coming back.

And you both know it’s true.

——————————————————————————

Part 4

——————————————————————————

Writer’s note: Writing this is my perfect drug. Caleb flirting + the law student snapping back = pure brain bliss. I LOVE THEM. Final poll time (24hrs only!): are we yeeting the MC out of the universe or letting her stay? The arc works either way but… I gotta say, keeping her? Chef’s kiss. Superior flavor, in my humble chaotic opinion. And Red Delicious does not mean overcommitted and delusional it’s just my sad sense of humor. Okey then, thank you for reading 🫶🏻

[bardic-tales]

Day 10 | Day 12

31 days of FF 7 Headcanons: Day 11 - Favorite Place on the Planet

We’re diving into one of the more evocative and deeply personal parts of Bianca’s journey: her favorite place on the Planet. While most characters might find solace in the familiar or the serene, Bianca’s sanctuary lies in the most unlikely of places: the North Crater. What begins as a cursed landmark becomes a sacred monument to her pain, rebirth, and willpower.

This piece explores how Bianca turns desolation into divinity, forging a home from ruin, where she and Sephiroth can exist beyond judgment. It's a story about finding beauty in the broken, and how sometimes, the most meaningful places are the ones we create for ourselves from the ashes of who we were.

Possible Trigger Warnings: abduction, body horror, captivity, emotional trauma, existential dread, experimentation, medical abuse, memory loss, psychological abuse, PTSD, self-perception issues, violence

Bianca’s favorite place on the Planet isn’t some bustling city or tranquil Grassland. It is the North Crater, a location most would consider desolate, cursed, or irredeemably ruined. But to Bianca, it is a sacred wound carved into the world, much like herself. It is where she awakens after her escape from Shinra’s labs, cradled in Sephiroth’s arms and delivered from one form of torment into another.

The Crater becomes a place of rebirth: painful, violent, and far removed from the world she once knew. It is here that she begins to reclaim her agency, not in the safety of civilization, but within the jaws of chaos itself. This space becomes hers not because it is gentle, but because it understands her in a way nothing else on the Planet ever could.

Using the fragmented remnants of her reality-warping abilities, Bianca builds a storybook cabin amid the jagged terrain, surrounded by conjured trees and impossible flora. Her own contradiction was carved into the Crater’s desolate landscape. It is a sanctuary born not of peace, but of will. The flowers do not grow naturally. She forces them into bloom through sheer desire. Every vine that curls along the scorched stone is proof of her defiance against a world that tried to consume her.

In this false Eden, Bianca and Sephiroth live as two divine exiles, creators of a realm divorced from the Planet’s judgment, as he works to bring forth his grand schemes. Her magic reshapes the Crater, not to heal it, but to remind it -- and, ultimately, herself -- that destruction can also give way to twisted, beautiful rebirth.

This self-made home is more than a dwelling. It is a manifestation of her trauma and transformation. The North Crater represents the cosmic grief she carries: where the Planet bleeds and where Jenova's legacy festers. Yet Bianca doesn’t flee from this decay. She embraces it. It becomes her cathedral, her sanctuary, and her battlefield. In constructing something beautiful in a place so ruined, she claims power over the very cycle of ruin that once dominated her life. To her, comfort is not found in safety, but in control. And it is here where she controls everything: time, space, memory, and matter, as she works to master her own powers with Sephiroth's help.

In contrast, Nibelheim is a location she cannot bring herself to revisit. It is where her fall began, where her failure to save Sephiroth—both from Shinra and from his own awakening—still echoes like ash in her lungs. Nibelheim is haunted. Not by ghosts. No. But by potential.

She is haunted by what could have been if she had acted sooner, if fate had bent just slightly in their favor. Her memories of Nibelheim are scorched by fire, betrayal, and guilt. Nibelheim is just another corpse in her past, buried under the soot of what was lost.

Thus, Bianca’s favorite place is not one remembered. It is one created. The cabin in the North Crater is a contradiction, much like she is: a cradle of beauty and ruin, gentleness forged from violence. It is the only place on the Planet where she feels untouchable, not because she is safe, but because it is hers in a way nothing else ever was. It is where she and Sephiroth write their own mythology, free from the expectations of gods, men, or fate.

@themaradwrites @shepardstales @megandaisy9 @watermeezer

@prehistoric-creatures @creativechaosqueen @chickensarentcheap

@inkandimpressions @arrthurpendragon

[brendanelliswilliams]

Some Thoughts on Ancestral Inheritance

I have long felt that one of the many signs of our collective cultural illness (and cultural orphanhood) in the contemporary West—particularly in North America—is that most of us have no sense of where we really come from. I don’t mean where we were born, of course, but what specific people-groups and landscapes we’re descended from. Generally speaking, Americans invest little to no interest in this sort of inquiry, and, in my view, are greatly diminished thereby.

I once heard the half-Scottish, half-Cherokee author and psychiatrist, Lewis Mehl-Madrona, refer to a way of introducing oneself to others that incorporates some detail about where one actually comes from as an ‘indigenous introduction’: a way that folks from most indigenous cultures around the world might be likely to introduce themselves, especially in a formal context—that is, by naming the people and communities they are descended from, and, with equal weight of importance, the Land(s) that their people hail from, where the bones of their ancient ancestors are buried and have merged with the soil for countless generations. This kind of ancestral memory was so important to my own Gaelic ancestors that in ancient times folks would frequently recite entire lineages of ancestry at public feasts and other important gatherings, often connecting individuals with certain divinized ancestors—sometimes human, sometimes not. This was seen as a way to express a healthful pride in one’s ancestry, and also in some cases to make a claim for why one should be listened to or accorded a place of trust, honor, or authority in the assembly.

In many indigenous cultures, the question of ‘authority’ is a crucial one. What, for instance, gives one authority to claim a certain title, or to pursue a vocational role that would significantly affect the lives of other people in the tribe, or of the communitas at large (i.e., of the human and other-than-human communities in a specific place)? Naturally, each culture answers this question differently, but as one example of how this kind of thing might be approached: in Diné culture, possessing some soil or stones (and/or other natural objects) from a certain sacred place in the landscape grants one the authority to speak with the spirits and ancestors in prayer: a crucial thing for all, without which life cannot proceed harmoniously. Likewise, in Diné, Hopi, and other Southwestern indigenous cultures it is considered a duty to be able to introduce oneself by naming the four clans one is most directly descended from (traced from the grandparents on both the maternal and paternal sides). Traditionally, whenever one introduces oneself to a new person or group of people, one offers the names of these four clans from which one has descended, so that the person or group right away knows something deeper about the one they’re relating with.

In any animistic worldview, knowing where on the Land one’s people are from is crucial, too, because it says something meaningful about the inheritance that person is carrying—not just from genetic and epigenetic memory, via the human (and possibly non-human) ancestors, but also from the living Land herself.

All this relates to the indispensable practice in more or less all animistic cultures of honoring the ancestors. In some cultures, ‘ancestors’ is a fairly broad category, but at very least it includes the human beings in our direct lineages of descent, all those because of whom we are who we are, here and now, in the present form in which we find ourselves.

It goes without saying that almost no one in our contemporary North American social environment asks about these kinds of things, and no one speaks this way when meeting others (in fact, to many people it would probably seem rude or outlandish to do so). In part this no doubt relates to the fact that very few of us are indigenous to this Land, and indigenous American cultures are tragically now a minority within the greater population. Most of us, in other words, are not descended from this Land, and nor were our ancestors—human or otherwise. Whether European, African, Asian, or anything else, our origins lie in another landscape, and many of us are unfortunately not in touch with that fact at all, or with the Land(s) we are actually descended from. (This certainly doesn’t mean that we can’t also feel profoundly connected to the American landscape; I certainly do��at least to certain parts of it. And it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t also honor the Land we’re actually standing on, and engage with her and all her inhabitants relationally, wherever we happen to be. We should absolutely and unequivocally do so!)

I have sometimes introduced myself in a (broadly) indigenous way to students, for example at the beginning of a workshop or class that I’m teaching, but I almost never have the occasion to do so in general life when meeting new folks (unless those folks happen to be indigenous Americans), simply because it would seem bizarre and totally out of place in the minds of most Westerners for me to introduce myself in that manner. This is unfortunate, but it’s the plain reality. Notwithstanding, I’ve been thinking recently that perhaps I should attempt to do this kind of introduction a bit more frequently, and encourage others to do the necessary research and reflection that would allow them to do likewise, should they wish to.

In this spirit, I have decided to begin using the traditional spelling of my name more often, i.e., as it is rendered in my ancestral language of Gàidhlig (Scottish Gaelic). I will not do this everywhere (for instance in my published writing, only because at this point it would likely be unnecessarily confusing to people in that context), but I am beginning to do it in a host of other places where it seems to make sense, including here on the ‘inter-webs’.

So, this is how I would formally introduce myself in Gàidhlig—anns an Ghàidhlig (agus A’Chuimris):

An t-Athair Urramach Brèanainn Èilis Mac Uilleim, à Naomh Anna

Oighreachd shinnsireil: Mac Greumach à Lothian, Alba; Mac Glasain à Inbhir Nis, Alba; Ò Beòllàin à Slideach agus an Clàir, Connacht, Èirinn; Mac Uilleim à Monmouth, A’ Chuimrigh

Agus anns an t-A’Chuimris (and in Welsh): Y Parchedig Tad Brenhin Elisedd Ap Gwilym

This honors the clannan (‘clans’) from which I am directly descended, both matrilineally and patrilineally, in their original spellings in Gàidhlig, and names the ancestral Lands of each clann. It also gives my full name and religious title in Gàidhlig, and states where I was born (Naomh Anna: St. Anne). Oighreachd shinnsireil means literally, ‘ancestral inheritance’, or, ‘what is received from the ancestors’, and can refer to material inheritance, but also to lineages of descent. I like this double-valence of meaning because what we principally receive or ‘inherit’ from our ancestors is our particular shape of life in a given incarnation, derived to a meaningful degree from their epigenetic memories, their genetic tendencies, and a spiritual connection to the sacred Lands from which they hail. We also, of course, receive their names and stories. All this, it seems to me, is our true inheritance.

I can’t help but think that a completely different mindset and culture than what is normative today throughout the West would result from being taught (or learning) to think of oneself firstly in relation to who and where one comes from, rather than first and foremost imagining oneself as an isolated agent somehow moving through the world apart from all those threads of what I sometimes call the breacan a bhith (‘tartan/weaving of life/being’), which actually constitute a large portion of who we are in this lifetime.

I would say that to understand and honor this reality of interbeing reflects a broadly indigenous (and certainly an animistic) worldview: an interpretive lens of relationality, interdependence, and holism, rather than isolationism and consumption. And we could reasonably say that this relational way of thinking and being reflects an inherently anti-colonial worldview, because by its very nature it resists the reductionism, materialism, selfishness and egoic isolationism that modern Western thought and social practice have enforced on so many cultures the world over, not only to the destruction of the latter, but to the everlasting shame and interior erosion of the former.

If one wished to take this worldview a step further, one could begin to incorporate the notion that plants and animals and all living beings on this Earth are also in some meaningful sense our ancestors and our spiritual siblings. It is possible to engage deeply with these concepts and begin to integrate them, both ideationally and practically. (This is something I have explored at some length elsewhere, e.g., in my book, Seeds from the Wild Verge.)

A deeper and more life-giving way of seeing can indeed be learned, even if we were never taught to think in such a way when we were children. It is never too late to revisit the underlying, foundational assumptions in our minds and redress them in a way that might yield a more fruitful mode of thinking and moving in the world. Perhaps a mode in which our starting point for conceptualizing our lives and the world around us begins not with us as individuals, but with a collective, a commonage, a family of being from which our own lives have arisen and to which, by duty of honor, we owe an immense debt of gratitude.

It takes time and effort to do this work, but one can absolutely transmute their way of thinking about self and other, relationship to the Land and the ancestors and all other living things, into a vision that is holistic, realistic, and generative. It is my feeling and experience that, if one is truly open and desirous of this transmutation, no amount of corrosive, capitalistic, dominator ideology and past conditioning can prevent its unfoldment. That much, at least, I feel confident in definitively stating. And I think this is so because it is actually natural for us to relate to the world in a holistic and relational way; what is unnatural is the corrosive conditioning placed around our necks by the materialistic, self-focused, reductionistic, alienating dominator ideologies that have so thoroughly shaped our thoughts and actions for so long in the Western world.

And the process of liberating ourselves from all this can begin with some very simple things like learning to make an ‘indigenous introduction’, as described above, or going out into the natural world around where one lives—preferably alone and undistracted—to spend some time really getting to know the plant and animal species one shares that part of the world with, experiencing and reflecting on their different qualities and gifts of beauty, and on the ways in which they contribute to one’s own life and well-being, even though one ordinarily wouldn’t be aware of it.

These kinds of simple practices, if done with sincerity and intentionality, can be the beginning steps on a journey toward greater wholeness and the reclamation of our own ancestral inheritance—and, at some level, as Irish poet Seán Ó Ríordáin once put it, of ‘[our] own mind and [our] own true shape.’

Mòran beannachdan air an t-slighe (‘Many blessings on the way’),

An t-Athair Brèanainn

[adrianodiprato]

+ "Time and silence are the most luxurious things today." ~ Tom Ford

Sacred

There is a truth in those words by Tom Ford that feels almost unsettling. In a world driven by urgency, where every second is accounted for, the true luxury is found in what we often avoid—time, not filled but embraced; silence, not uncomfortable but sacred. These are not just fleeting indulgences but portals to something deeper, something necessary for the human spirit to flourish.

Silence isn’t just the absence of noise; it’s a presence. A sacred pause where the world slows down enough for you to feel it—to truly sense life unfolding around you. In the quiet, we meet ourselves without distraction. In that stillness, we are reminded that the rush toward something greater often pulls us further from what is most meaningful.

"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven." (Ecclesiastes 3:1)

These ancient words remind us that time is sacred. Every moment, every pause has a purpose beyond our understanding. Time, in its essence, is not a commodity to be consumed, but a sacred rhythm woven into the fabric of our existence. There is a time for silence, a time for reflection, a time to simply be.

In this age of instant gratification, silence feels like rebellion. Time spent in contemplation can seem like a luxury we cannot afford. But what if the opposite were true? What if it is the noise that’s the distraction, and silence is where we begin to truly hear? What if it is in the unscheduled moments that we find the clarity to see beyond the illusion of success we chase?

Time, as we know it, is a construct—a human attempt to hold onto what is fleeting. But time, in its essence, is not something to be held. It cannot be bought or owned, only honoured. It’s not a metric for productivity but a space for possibility. And in that possibility, we find grace.

We often ask ourselves what we are doing with our time as if it’s a currency to spend. But perhaps the real question is, how are we being in our time? What are we allowing it to reveal? Because time, when left unforced, is the great revealer. It shows us the sacred pauses that carry the most meaning, the moments we too often overlook in our race toward some imagined destination.

There is a kind of courage required to sit in that silence, to not fill it with distractions or goals. To let time unfold as it will, and to trust that in the stillness, something profound is happening—something unseen, but deeply transformative.

The constant measuring of time, of life, of success, reduces us to mere consumers of moments, instead of participants in the miracle of them. Our fixation on control blinds us to the mystery of life unfolding right before us. Time, when treated as a commodity, becomes a burden. But when it is recognised as a gift, it becomes the space in which we truly live.

Imagine a world where we measure success not by the hours we fill but by the moments we allow ourselves to experience fully. A world where silence is not seen as emptiness but as fullness—the place where our deepest truths emerge, unbidden and unmeasured.

This is the grace of time. It is not for the taking, but for the receiving. And silence is the language it speaks in. The quiet moments, the sacred pauses—they are the heartbeats of our existence, whispering to us to slow down, to listen, to be.

What if, instead of constantly chasing after more, we began to honour what already is? What if we allowed ourselves to live in the rhythm of time, to be carried by its current instead of trying to outpace it?

There is a freedom in that surrender—a grace that fills the spaces we often rush through. In that surrender, we don’t lose time; we finally meet it. And it is in those moments of meeting, of embracing the luxury of time and silence, that we discover what is truly real.

Adriano Di Prato is a best-selling author, broadcaster, and the Campus Director at LCI Melbourne, a progressive art, design + entrepreneurship private institute of higher education.

[pet-genius]

The Death Eaters as a Cult - Part 1

This is a very lightly edited old Reddit post, that I'll publish in parts because the whole thing is like 7000 words. Analyzing Voldemort, the DE and their dynamics, Dumbledore and Harry in comparison, and individual Death Eaters. Hope you like it!

Some say Voldemort is a cartoon villain, or wizard Hitler. I think he is very realistic, and that the focus on his political aspirations ignores interesting aspects of him. I cannot prove that JKR had cults in mind when she wrote Voldemort and his followers, but this is how I read them. It’s nearly impossible to define a cult, so, for the purpose hereof, I’m going with “a group dedicated to the worship of a person”. Many cult leaders in real life present themselves merely as “god’s voice” or “the messiah”, but Voldemort specifically didn’t bother to hide behind a power higher than himself.

Tom Riddle comes from humble beginnings, like many cult leaders - he’s raised in an orphanage. He already has delusions of grandeur, only in this case they’re not delusions, because he really is magic, which makes it all the more dangerous. Look how he reacted to discovering he was a wizard, and how Harry did.

Immediately following the revelation that Lily and James did not die in a car crash, and that Harry is famous, and that he survived an attempt at his life by the worst wizard in history:

Hagrid looked at Harry with warmth and respect blazing in his eyes, but Harry, instead of feeling pleased and proud, felt quite sure there had been a horrible mistake. A wizard? Him? How could he possibly be? He’d spent his life being clouted by Dudley, and bullied by Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon; if he was really a wizard, why hadn’t they been turned into warty toads every time they’d tried to lock him in his cupboard? If he’d once defeated the greatest sorcerer in the world, how come Dudley had always been able to kick him around like a football?

“Hagrid,” he said quietly, “I think you must have made a mistake. I don’t think I can be a wizard.”

Heart-breaking. Harry doesn’t believe he can be special, he blames himself for the way he’s treated.

This is Tom Riddle:

“I know that you are not mad. Hogwarts is not a school for mad people. It is a school of magic.”

There was silence. Riddle had frozen, his face expressionless, but his eyes were flickering back and forth between each of Dumbledore’s, as though trying to catch one of them lying. “Magic?” he repeated in a whisper.

“That’s right,” said Dumbledore.

“It’s... it’s magic, what I can do?”

“What is it that you can do?”

“All sorts,” breathed Riddle. A flush of excitement was rising up his neck into his hollow cheeks; he looked fevered. “I can make things move without touching them. I can make animals do what I want them to do, without training them. I can make bad things happen to people who annoy me. I can make them hurt if I want to.”

His legs were trembling. He stumbled forward and sat down on the bed again, staring at his hands, his head bowed as though in prayer.

“I knew I was different,” he whispered to his own quivering fingers. “I knew I was special. Always, I knew there was something.”

His megalomania and violent nature are already apparent, as is his preternatural control of his magic. It also hints at rudimentary legilimency.

Dumbledore spells out that young Tom Riddle equated magic with immortality and liked to collect trophies, and that Tom Riddle liked being special, as he resents the name Tom for being too common; he already lives behind a mask and only shows his true face in shock. This, and not Dumbledore’s magical prowess, is what always scared Tom. Voldemort knew Dumbledore knew what he was. That was the only tactical advantage Dumbledore had.

It’s also one of JKR’s strokes of brilliance: Dumbledore saw Tom for what Tom was, and others never did until it was too late, not because he was that clever, but because he knew from experience. Dumbledore had allowed himself to fall for a charismatic but heartless man before, and it took Ariana dying to slap him awake. Dumbledore knows good people can be led astray: It happened to him. It has nothing to do with intelligence or “goodness”. Gellert was able to give Albus exactly what Albus lacked, stuck at home taking care of Ariana: the promise of freedom and a bright future, and the companionship of an equal. Albus fell for it, despite warning signs that should have been obvious.

Later, we know Tom is chosen by a wand of yew and phoenix feather. Both yew and phoenix are associated with immortality; yew trees are very long-lived. Compare this to Harry’s wand, holly and phoenix feather: both these characters will experience death and rebirth, except Tom Riddle’s wand tree is yew, and Harry’s is holly.

From Wikipedia: “The Christian church commonly found it expedient to take over existing pre-Christian sacred sites for churches. It has also been suggested that yews were planted at religious sites as their long life was suggestive of eternity, or because, being toxic when ingested, they were seen as trees of death.” Also from Wikipedia: “Christians have identified a wealth of symbolism in the holly tree’s form. The sharpness of the leaves help to recall the crown of thorns worn by Jesus; the red berries serve as a reminder of the drops of blood that were shed for salvation; and the shape of the leaves, which resemble flames, can serve to reveal God's burning love for His people.”

The two orphans’ wildly different views of death are also apparent in their wand trees. Voldemort will murder to attain his goals; Harry will sacrifice himself. That the phoenix feather came from Fawkes is also meaningful - Dumbledore taught both magic in some capacity, but he never could defeat Voldemort, because they’re too alike. One of Harry’s advantages in this battle is the integrity of his soul, which cannot be compromised.

Next, Tom Riddle is sorted into Slytherin. For a child who is already prone to megalomania, the house values bring out the worst in him, and under Slughorn, he grows into a manipulative, cunning, ruthless young man. I’m not blaming Horace for Tom being a psychopath, but some of the particular ways his psychopathy manifested in seem to have been directly due to Slughorn’s influence. Slughorn is a blood-supremacist, who was convinced Tom must come from fine stock. Slughorn tests drinks for poison using house elves; Tom Riddle tests the effectiveness of his Horcrux’s protection on Kreacher. Slughorn emphasizes the importance of connections and outright praises Tom for knowing more than he needs to, and encourages an attitude of “it’s only wrong if you get caught.” But Slughorn, prejudiced and cunning as he is, is not violent - he is academically curious about Horcruxes, but he finds them repugnant. Tom’s heart is not so faint - at the point of asking Slughorn about Horcruxes, the diary is already a horcrux, and Tom has already murdered his father. This is how Dumbledore describes Tom’s original gang, who were the proto-Death Eaters:

As he moved up the school, he gathered about him a group of dedicated friends; I call them that, for want of a better term, although as I have already indicated, Riddle undoubtedly felt no affection for any of them. This group had a kind of dark glamour within the castle. They were a motley collection; a mixture of the weak seeking protection, the ambitious seeking some shared glory, and the thuggish gravitating toward a leader who could show them more refined forms of cruelty. In other words, they were the forerunners of the Death Eaters, and indeed some of them became the first Death Eaters after leaving Hogwarts. Rigidly controlled by Riddle, they were never detected in open wrongdoing, although their seven years at Hogwarts were marked by a number of nasty incidents to which they were never satisfactorily linked, the most serious of which was, of course, the opening of the Chamber of Secrets, which resulted in the death of a girl. As you know, Hagrid was wrongly accused of that crime.

Dumbledore explains what motivated people to join Tom: some were afraid, some ambitious, some cruel. He controlled his so-called friends, and already started framing others for his own crimes (Hagrid’s framing was followed by Morfin’s and Hokey the house elf’s).

This is followed by Tom’s attempt to become a teacher (Dumbledore spells out his motivations: He is attached to the school, he wants to study its magic, and he already wants to build himself an army). He is denied, oddly chooses to work for Borgin and Burkes, a choice fueled by the desire to trace down more items to make into Horcruxes. Through the memory of the meeting with Heptzibah Smith, we see that Tom was definitely charming when he needed to be, and knew how to make people feel good. He did not use magic to trick her into showing him her precious locket and cup: he used muggle manipulation - flattery, making an old and forlorn lady feel valuable, perhaps even flirting with her (she’s certainly flirting with him). He was pleasant enough that Ms. Smith eagerly looked forward to his visits - but as she showed him her treasures, he was caught off guard by hearing about his mother and how she sold the locket, and she saw him for what he was, although she quickly fell into denial. Sadly, she was murdered two days later.

Why rely on Horcruxes to gain immortality? Tom must have known about Nicholas Flamel and the Philosopher’s Stone, and the Horcruxes require someone else to perform the resurrection ritual. Either making the Stone is so hard that it would deter Tom (unlikely), or he already expected to rely on followers who would find him and revive him - he certainly seems to have expected his followers to have searched for him earlier. Maybe Horcruxes were appealing because they require murder. In any case, this is followed by the memory of Tom asking Dumbledore for the DADA job again, a decade later. Tom has spent a decade gathering followers, and he has already changed his name to Lord Voldemort. This is reminiscent of real life cult leader David Koresh, and the leaders of the Children of God, Aum Shinrikyo, etc. The meeting between Voldemort and Albus is interesting, because it’s clear that Dumbledore had tried to teach Tom about the power of love:

“The old argument,” he said softly. “But nothing I have seen in the world has supported your famous pronouncements that love is more powerful than my kind of magic, Dumbledore.”

“Perhaps you have been looking in the wrong places,” suggested Dumbledore.

This did not help. Tom never learned - how could he? At 16, he was already a murderer - who could love him now for who he was? He could never be truly loved, and he could never truly love another, and he underestimated the power of love for his entire life, leading to his downfall - twice (were that it was so simple in real life).

Voldemort is trying to obfuscate the nature of the relationship, like all cults - they never admit this is what they are.

“I am glad to hear that you consider them friends,” said Dumbledore. “I was under the impression that they are more in the order of servants.”

“You are mistaken,” said Voldemort.

But LV can’t lie to Dumbledore, who changes the subject. He denies him the DADA job again, and the curse is placed on the job. LV’s ascent is due to begin in a few years. Hagrid tells the story:

Anyway, this — this wizard, about twenty years ago now, started lookin’ fer followers. Got ’em, too — some were afraid, some just wanted a bit o’ his power, ’cause he was gettin’ himself power, all right. Dark days, Harry. Didn’t know who ter trust, didn’t dare get friendly with strange wizards or witches...

Voldemort isn’t just interested in immortality. He wants complete control. He wants everyone fearing him - even fearing his name. He has people isolated and distrustful, fearing for their lives.

But we know his reign of terror was dreadful - what I’m interested in is the way he treated his own followers. We know little about how he treated them in the first war, but we do have what Sirius had to say about Regulus’s fate:

From what I found out after he died, he got in so far, then panicked about what he was being asked to do and tried to back out. Well, you don’t just hand in your resignation to Voldemort. It’s a lifetime of service or death.

We know the real story of Regulus’s disappearance, and it’s different. Kreacher tells us that Regulus died in the Horcrux cave - but more telling is that Regulus forbade Kreacher from telling his parents what had happened to him. Why did he feel the need to do that? This suggests that Regulus knew LV destroyed traitors’ families, which is a tactic used in cults and other abusive dynamics. We know LV would leverage Draco’s welfare against Lucius for his failure in the Department of Mysteries, too. We know also that instead of going to Dumbledore, or to his own brother, Regulus chose death – unless he was really dumb, and I don’t think he was, he must have been manipulated into believing that was his only option, or his world made no sense after his faith had shattered. So many people never readjust to life outside the cult.

Voldemort “dies” about two years after that, having successfully recruited about 400 followers (“the death eaters outnumbered us the Order 20:1” - Lupin). We can’t say if all these people were genuine Death Eaters or people who had been Imperiused or otherwise coerced, or allies like Narcissa, but that coercion is used to recruit shows that Voldemort did not take his own followers’ ambitions and wishes into account. People who use outright coercion don't suddenly draw the line at manipulation.

[star-maiden]

Oracle of November - Healing and Personal Growth

Theme: What is needed for your highest growth and healing?

Hello and welcome! This week we are seeing a bit of a change with my readings! (Don’t worry. I will still do the Tarot Forecast). With everything that has been happening in the world recently, I think many of us are noticing a shift in energy. People are fearful, worried, anxious, angry, and all the shades of feeling that come in between. This week, I was inspired to do this oracle reading focusing on the themes of healing, self care and what we need to focus on to become the best, brightest version of ourselves. I asked Spirit to share messages that we needed to hear at this time to support our highest growth and healing, and in general help us handle everything that is happening in the world in a healthy and supportive way. As with all of my readings for the collective, these messages are meant for a wide range of people, life paths and situations. It is general outlook advice. As such, you may find that not everything resonates with you completely, and that is ok. Please take only what resonates and leave the rest. You will also want to check your sun, moon and rising signs for the message or messages that are meant for you. I sincerely hope that these messages will serve your highest and greatest good, and assist you in making wise, informed decisions. May you be safe and supported at all times!

⭐ Another deviation from my usual modus operandi this week is that instead of my tarot cards, I will be using an oracle deck. This is fairly unusual for me because I tend to only use my oracle deck in private readings for myself or with clients. However, I feel that this particular oracle is best suited to the task of providing us with the messages that will be most supportive at this time. If you guys like the oracle reading, I may start doing a monthly oracle for the collective. Please let me know if you would be interested in seeing that! This deck is the Starseed Oracle by Rebecca Campbell and Danielle Noel.

General Message: The general message for the entire collective at the moment is The Void. Stop. Embrace Winter. The Great Cosmic Womb. The message of this card tells us to surrender to the unknown. Trust that just because we do not have all the answers and cannot see every little thing that is happening beneath the surface, it doesn’t mean that something is not at work. We will all be best served by taking a sacred pause at this time. Rest, replenish and prepare ourselves to move forward in action again when the time is right.

♈ - Aries: The Great Severing. Mars energy. Anger. Conflict. Softening to love. For you this month, Aries, I am sensing that there is a rift that needs to be mended. This may be a conflict with loved ones or acquaintances, or it may be an internal conflict that you have been struggling with. This card is one of shadow work and confronting anything in our lives that make it difficult to feel connected to love, and supported in our work/daily lives. This card is appearing to tell you that it’s ok to feel the way that you do, even if the emotions may seem negative. In order to move away from hurt and anger, we have to go through the experience and process of feeling these things. Whatever is coming up for you, acknowledge it, process your feelings by allowing the experience. It doesn’t make you “weak” or incapable in any capacity, it makes you human. Still, do not feel ashamed of your reaction to difficult emotions. Wanting to hide away, to close your heart off and to protect yourself from further pain is normal. However, when this happens, it’s important for you to acknowledge what is happening and consider the reasons why. Do what you need to do to move through the experience of your emotions. It may be that you need some time for yourself, or that you need to talk to someone you trust, or even that you need to seek professional support. All of this is perfectly ok. Take care of yourself, Aries.

♉ - Taurus: Soul Plan. The Fated Life Vs the Destiny Life. Taurus, right now you need to remember your roots and your strength. What was it about your character, personality or spirit that has carried you so far already?  You have wandered away from yourself, and have not been standing in your power. This card is telling you that you have not lost your strength, but rather you have forgotten. Sometimes, when we find ourselves in unfamiliar situations, or on a path to which the destination is unclear, we experience doubt and fear. This is ok to feel, but don’t let it rob you of your agency. You are being called to remember the strength of your soul and the inspiration of your spirit. What can you accomplish when you lead from a place of love, rather than an illusion created by fear?  

♊ - Gemini: Messenger. Sirius Energy. Bringing Harmony and Balance. The message for you this month, and the way that you can support your highest growth and healing right now rests in the power of your voice. This is the power of your mind and your words to create and communicate. It may even be that you are not the one in need of healing at this time, but that you are being called to act as a mediator for someone else. The message of this card is that there are certain souls on this planet who are here to spend their lifetimes uplifting the collective energy, and to be the guardians of balance and harmony. Their life path or purpose, in this sense, is to help the collective recognize the connections that tie us together. This includes connections between people, people and the planet, with spirit and the divine. It is possible that you are one of these souls tasked with holding this frequency of pure love. There may be a special calling or work that you feel drawn to, or you could simply be meant to live your life with great love and intention, leading by example. This month, consider how you can create balance in your life? Who does this benefit? How does creating balance take care of you? Be sure not to create this balance at the detriment of your own well being, though.

♋ - Cancer: Loosen Your Grip. Coping Mechanisms. Destiny. Addictions. Let God In. This card is appearing to let you know that there is something, a feeling, habit or idea, that you have been holding onto too tightly. It is likely that you have used this thing as a coping mechanism; as a way to distract yourself from the things that are not going well in your life, or to cover a vulnerable aspect of yourself. This is not supportive for you, and has become a hindrance to your growth and happiness. It is time to let go, and to trust yourself and the experience you are having now. You are strong and capable, and can meet any challenge with grace and ease. Do not let fear tell you otherwise. Call in support if you need to. The oracle book says this: “Loosening your grip doesn’t mean that what you are clinging to will go away. It may. Or it might stay. But you can be sure that what is for you will find you.” Take this time to let go of anything that is not serving you, or that is destructive in any way. Letting go is part of the healthing process.

♌ - Leo: Star Bathing. Light Body. Crystal Grid. Transmission. Activation. I’m hearing a question for you, Leo. Spirit is saying “Where do you shine?”. In what ways do you feel most inspired to show up in the world? In what ways do you feel stifled? This card is asking you to consider what has been going on recently in your life. Is there anything that makes you feel especially drained, or reluctant? If so, it could be that it is not meant for you and needs to be let go. It could also mean that you are spending too much time focusing on outward actions, and not enough time doing things that are meaningful and restorative for you. Evaluate your feelings and energy levels. Take things slow. Is there anything that needs to change?

♍ - Virgo: Earth School. Life Lessons. Soul Growth. Study. Higher Learning. There is something that you need to learn, a karmic lesson perhaps. What has been showing up for you again and again? Virgo, pay attention to any patterns that may appear in your life right now. This is a sign that you need to pay special attention to these areas as it is time to mend them. This card also asks you to consider your perspective on any difficulties that show up in your life right now. You may find them easier to handle if you think of them as opportunities for growth, rather than “getting something wrong”. This month, consider: How are you being called to grow and learn?

♎ - Libra: Earth Pulsing. Pulse of the Mother. Slow Down. Time in Nature. Wow, Libra! Spirit’s message for you came through so clear! This month, you need to focus on self care. If you have recently found yourself in a cycle of “go, go, go” and are feeling a bit tired, then it’s time to rest. It’s time for you to reconnect with nature, with yourself, with the earth energy. When you take time for yourself, you allow for stagnant energy to fall away, and open yourself up to receiving more energies of love and inspiration from the universe.

♏ - Scorpio: You’re not for Everyone. Embrace Your Weirdness. Face Your True North. The message of this card tells you that you shouldn’t try to fit in or conform to anyone’s perception of who you are. Rather, you should focus on being true to yourself, and showing up in the world in a way that makes you happy. Sometimes, this is difficult for others to accept. Most often, it is the people who are closest to us that carry the strongest opinions of who we should be, and it can sometimes result in conflicts and disbelief whenever we uncover a side of ourselves that was previously hidden. Others may not agree with our choices or styles, but this is ok. We need to learn to be ok with each other's differences, and if someone cannot accept you for who you are, then it is a waste of your time and energy to try and convince them otherwise. In life, there will always be people who don’t like you because you don’t fit in the box that they have created to categorize and understand the world around them. This isn’t your fault or problem to fix. For every person that dislikes you, there is also someone else who will love you fiercely and stand up for you should you need it. Seek out these people. Don’t waste your time and gifts trying to make someone else see your worth. If they can’t see it already, it’s their loss.

♐ - Sagittarius: You are Not Alone. Isolation. Physical Connection. Community. With this card, Sagittarius, I am hearing that perhaps you have been spending too much time in your head. You may have withdrawn into yourself to deal with something, or to protect yourself from pain or conflict. In fact, many people find it deeply nourishing and healing to pull back from the buzz of the world, go within and rest. It is a great tool of self care, and a wonderful way to take care of ourselves when we feel overwhelmed. However, we can also spend too much time alone. If we stay withdrawn to the point that we are completely isolated from everything and everyone around us, then this can also be draining and damaging. Right now, it may not be safe for you to venture out and you’ll want to consider your personal health and safety when making decisions. One great tool that we have is technology. If you have been feeling isolated and alone, reach out on social media or to your friends via technology. How can you reach out to the people in your life to feel more supported?

♑ - Capricorn: Forge. Don’t Follow. Be the leader you wish you had. This month, Capricorn, you are being called to heal and mend something that happened in the past. This may be something that happened to you or to someone around you. Pave a new path forward by leading by example. Is there something that occurred in the past that you feel was handled poorly? This could also be in reference to social justice and equity. How can you be a leader in this situation? The book says “the most courageous and needed leaders are the ones who don’t wait for permission, or until they wake up feeling ready. They take a deep breath, put one foot in front of the other, and figure it out as they go.” This is a powerful message. Like Gemini’s message, I’m sensing that it may not be you who needs healing at this time. It may be that you are being called to light the way for someone else. If no one is stepping up to the plate on topics that you are passionate about, then forge your own way. If this is something that you feel very strongly about, then no one else would be able to meet your goal with the same level of skill, passion, experience and unique perspective as you can. How are you being called to lead right now?

♒ - Aquarius: Big Picture Thinking. Pleiades Energy. Visionary. Inspired Ideas. You are being called to bring healing and renewed energy into your life through your creativity and inspiration. Is there an area of your life that feels stagnant and watered down? If so, then it is time to breathe some life back into it; to rekindle your passionate spirit. It is never too late to make changes and to learn new things. Aquarius, you may be the sign that knows this lesson best. What new ideas or creations are you being called to pursue? These ideas may be revolutionary in the sense that they turn the status quo upside down, or they may be of a “big-picture” perspective; designed to create change on a large scale. This card is asking you to dream a new world into being for yourself. To do so, you will need to envision what sort of future you’d like to have, hold this vision and follow it with daily action. Walking this path may take great courage, but it will be worth it in the end.

♓ - Pisces: Child of the Cosmos. The intelligence of the universe lies within you. This month, you are being called to trust yourself. Trust your inner knowing and all the work you have done thus far.The intelligence of Spirit; of the universe and the Divine is within you, just as it is in all living things. It is the part of you that knows the way forward no matter how unclear and uncertain your logical mind becomes. However, because we all live our lives with free will, it can sometimes be hard to recognize the deeper wisdom of our higher selves. We may become disconnected from our intuition, and forget to trust our own sense of knowing. If you have felt lost lately, then this card is a reminder to look within. Trust the voice of your intuition, and let it guide you forward. You are always connected to the source of inner strength, wisdom, flow and power. You just need to remember.

[sol-rising]

— dramione fanfic recommendations bc i don’t have a life;

[CHERRY] No one asked for this but I don’t have a life and I read a lot so.... why not? Majority of these are either on AO3 or FFN. 

— ONESHOTS; 

Best Shot by AccioMjolnir [Mature, 24k words]

Summary: It's eighth year and Hermione is trying to navigate her post-war friendship with Draco Malfoy and a relationship with Ron Weasley when she gets an unexpected visit from someone who knows her better than anyone: herself. Thrown back from the future, an older Hermione drops a bombshell on her: she has only three days to set things right, or Draco dies.

Amateur Cartography by worksofstone [Teen & Up Audiences, 21k words]

Summary: That one-night stand with Draco Malfoy was a mistake. Hermione doesn't make mistakes, or at least she isn't supposed to. She's working hard at her Ministry career, however frustrating and pointless her job may be, and she's also got to live up to everyone's expectations as Hogwarts's most famous Muggle-born and a top-tier War Hero. So, why is she still sleeping with Draco Malfoy, ex-Death Eater and infamous pureblood? And why isn't she certain that she wants to stop?

A Muggle-born Magic by Musyc [Mature, 50k words]

Summary: Regency-era AU. Physician's daughter Hermione Granger finds herself in need of a way to pay off her father's debts after his death. Draco Malfoy, retired from the politics of the Isolationists, a group of pure-bloods bent on separating 'true' magic from lesser folk, finds himself in need of a tutor for his son, Scorpius, who appears to be incapable of magic and must learn to survive in a world without it. Draco also needs a wife and mother for Scorpius, to satisfy a promise to his unwell father. After she saves his son from an attack by Isolationists, Draco hires the Muggle-born Miss Granger for the former, and after a riot in Vauxhall Gardens and a scandalous discovery made by his mother, weds that selfsame Muggle-born for the latter. While making the best of her marriage of (in)convenience, Hermione discovers that Scorpius' history of wild imaginings and dreams is more than just imagination. As she attempts to teach him about magical abilities no one expected he would ever have, she and Draco work together to raise Scorpius and learn to trust each other.

Ice by senlinyu [Teen & Up Audiences, 5.1k words]

Summary: Hermione works in Gringotts’ Records Department when Draco Malfoy comes on staff as a curse-breaker. His icy presence drags up memories she’s desperate to move on from and forget. She tries to ignore him, but every time she sees him, she feels chilled to the bone. DHr Advent 2018.

Fallin' (Adrenaline) by LeilahMoon [Teen & Up Audiences, 4.5k words]

Summary: When Professor McGonagall encourages all Hogwarts students to participate in a mentor scheme designed to promote inter-House unity, Hermione Granger is thrilled; she can’t wait to embrace the opportunity for further education. Unfortunately, she's not able to choose who she is allocated to and, when her mentor turns out to be Draco Malfoy, she’s certain she won’t learn anything at all.  

The Two Sided Triangle by Canttouchthis [Teen & Up Audiences, 5.2k words] 

Summary: In which Daily Prophet reporter Hermione Granger inadvertently becomes a superhero and her partner, the intrepid Draco Malfoy finds himself smitten. In other words, a Dramione inspired by Superman and Lois Lane.

Now Is A Gift by senlinyu [Teen & Up Audiences, 5k words]

Summary: Hermione is determined to give meaningful Christmas gifts to everyone in her Ministry department.

Everyone.

Even that anti-social arse Malfoy.

DHr Advent 2019.

riddle me this by megamegaturtle [General Audiences, 8k words]

Summary: Their fingers touch when Draco hands her the paper and Hermione's heart almost jumps out of her chest.

The note reads: How do you spell ‘cute boy’ with only two letters? -Riddle Me This

Hermione finds herself grinning. “Cutie. Q-T. That’s the answer to the riddle. You’re a cutie, Malfoy.”

[the one where someone leaves Draco Malfoy riddles to solve from the local coffee shop's community board and he enlists Hermione Granger for help.]

(Written for 2020 DFW Trope Fest: Double Trouble)

Library Rendezvous by WickedlyAwesomeMe [Fiction T, 2.9k words]

Summary: Hermes Granger just wanted to finish his homework in peace but of course, she always had to ruin his plans. Male!Hermione Granger/Female!Draco Malfoy. Genderbender

Relentless (Hogwarts Era Series) by realjane (Series of Connected Oneshots)

Height by senlinyu [Explicit, 8.7k words]

Summary: “Tall? That’s what you think I should notice about Malfoy? His height?”

Ginny quirked an eyebrow and licked the tip of her quill suggestively. ”Well, isn’t that your thing? Lockhart. Krum. McLaggen. Ron. The only thing they have in common is being tall enough to give me a neck ache.

”Hermione felt her ears grow hot, and she gripped her book tighter. “I don’t have a thing for tall men. Their height is—completely coincidental.”

Dramione Height Differences Minifest 2020.

Diamond Heart by artemisgirl [Fiction T, 8k words]

Summary: When Hermione approaches Draco Malfoy proposing a fake relationship between the two of them as part of a scheme, he's eager enough to participate - the potential benefits outweigh any costs on his time. But as it all progresses, Draco finds himself wondering what it would be like if what was 'fake' was real.

The Spring’s Chosen by artemisgirl [Fiction T, 5.5k words]

Summary: A golden unicorn appearing on the Malfoy grounds sends the Manor into a flurry of activity, to the confusion of one Draco Malfoy. It's just a unicorn that happens to be gold - isn't it? DMHG  

Courting Customs Most Sacred by HeyJude19 [Twoshot, Mature, 15k words]

Summary: Published in 1862 by Lady Apollonia Nott, Courting Customs Most Sacred is the comprehensive text for any pureblood family seeking to arrange suitable matches for their children. It’s also patently ridiculous and not at all appropriate for the modern era of dating. It is certainly not how one should woo Hermione Granger, at any rate.

— ON-GOING/WIPs;

Come Let Us Adore Him by thiscitychickk [Not Rated]

Summary: Hermione Granger scoured the subreddits, perused the checklists, and read virtually everything possible on how to be an all star Congressional intern and staffer. She had her job responsibilities well in hand, but instructions on how to handle the attention of an upstart Congressman Draco Malfoy were nowhere to be found. US politics AU: Congressional staffer Hermione, Congressman Draco

and with you, i fall by passionesque [Mature]

Summary: With Narcissa Malfoy striking a deal for her family — protection for information, the last thing anyone wants is Draco Malfoy seeking refuge within the heart of the Order. 

It would’ve been easy, Hermione thinks. So easy for her to hex him back to Voldemort’s clutches for all that he’s said and done, but being the bleeding soft-hearted Gryffindor she is, she doesn't.

* * * * *

“You should hate me,” he murmurs, flicking his gaze to her from beneath his lashes. 

She should, Hermione knows this. She really ought to hate him, but the memory of the haunted look in his eyes and the hoarse screams of his nightmares echoes through her mind and eases the storm in her heart.

She doesn’t. She can’t.

“You’re right,” Hermione says soberly. “I should. But I don’t.”

Post HBP. Canon-Divergent. HG/DM.

Love In A Time Of the Zombie Apocalypse by andgladly [Mature]

Summary: After Voldemort, there was this. The clock is ticking to create a cure to the unimaginable horror that currently grips the world. Hermione finds herself unwillingly allied with the most hated man in Wizarding Britain.

The Alkahest by Shadukiam [Mature]

Summary: The Marriage Law, once enacted, has the power to destroy Hermione's perfectly normal life. Luckily, she and Ron are already planning to obey the horrific law together as a team... Until a Malfoy-shaped wrench gets thrown into the works. Dramione.

In the Arms of Her Dragon by Wolf Blossom [Mature]

Summary: A random act of kindness (the life-or-death kind) draws together Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger in a way that nobody saw coming. The duo, in fact, did not want anybody learn the secret of their relationship, but their hope was in vain. All of Hogwarts, nay, England suddenly knew about their union. "Nobody said this would be easy, bookworm." Malfoy drawled. "Shut. Up. Malfoy."

Time Twisters by themirrorminder.372259 [Fiction T]

Summary: Narcissa ignores the sharp smile her little brother wears after Bella's funeral, in the same way that Lily ignores the ravenous gaze her little sister aims towards Knockturn Alley. However, Albus Dumbledore cannot ignore the ominous friendship between Draco Black and Hermione Evans, not when he hears blood dripping from their joined hands. {TimeTravel} {DRAMIONE} {Marauder's Era}

Beautiful Incongruence by charlie_weasleys_gf [Teen & Up Audiences]

Summary: “You are not an easy person to talk to, Granger.”

“Well, you haven’t made the prospect of talking to you sound very exciting."

Hermione Granger was ready for her third year at Hogwarts-that was, until it was interrupted by time turners and apologising assholes.

In which Draco Malfoy apologises (a lot).

How to Move On by longdistance [Mature] 

Summary: It's been nearly a decade since the war. A long time since she locked herself away. A long time since he faced his mistakes. She's what he wants. He's what she needs. It's time for both of them to figure out how to move on.

Through the eyes of blind love by Mixilip1 [Mature]

Summary: Torn between the heart and love of two souls thou shall find theeself. Post-war.

Following the war, Hermione finds herself not-so-happily dating Ron, but it seems she can't keep herself away from a certain blonde Slytherin who's determined to finally make her his witch. After hearing a prophecy about her future, she thinks her life might change for good, but what she doesn't know is that the prophecy also included a veela in it.

"Granger, don't be nervous. Just look at me and let go." He said, grabbing her chin, and her brown eyes met his.This is a story about love triangles and veelas. Veela AU

flesh and blood by forbiddenquill [Teen & Up Audiences]

Summary: Scorpius breaks his father’s Time-Turner and ends up getting transported into the year 1998, when the Second Wizarding World War has already ended and where Draco Malfoy is still trying to pick up the pieces of his shattered world.

With Scorpius’ arrival comes shocking revelations, burning questions, and a son’s image of a father Draco is sure he’ll never be able to live up to.

More importantly, it’s Scorpius’s bright brown eyes, so unlike his own, that bug Draco the most.

[alternatively, a multi-chapter fic where eight-year-old Scorpius follows Draco around the castle and tries to discover the secret identity of his mother]

The Other Side by sweetsolitude [Teen & Up Audiences]

Summary: A slow-burn Dramione version of 6th year, The Half-Blood Prince, told from the perspectives of Draco, Hermione, and Theo. No smut, no character bashing. Attempted to stay TTC and the general plot progression of HBP. Primary ship is Draco/Hermione. This fic is already completed at around 150k, will post chapters regularly.

The Hidden Duchess by Moxified [Fiction K]

Summary:  She had always been given everything she wanted ever since she was a child, spoiled to the very bone. Her life consisted of a strict regimen built for a princess that was followed to a tee - even after she came to Hogwarts. Leading two lives is stressful for anyone, especially a young lady with an equally young man curious enough to discover what secrets she was hiding.

An Unexpected Malfoy by RiverWriter [Mature]

Summary: Once upon a time Hermione Granger literally ran into Draco Malfoy in a bookshop. His mother sees a connection between her son and the muggleborn that she can't ignore and determines to get to know the girl. An imagining of how things could have gone if Hermione had been taken under the wing of the Malfoy family.

In Another Life by marana1 [Fiction M]

Summary: She walked over to the huge, full-length mirror. Staring back was her eleven-year-old self but with long, beautiful, silky platinum blonde hair and pale skin. Hermione ran her fingers through her hair, the reality of the situation sinking in. The fairy hadn't just made them switch places for a day... she sent them back in time and switched their lives. DM X HG. EWE. Slow burn.

Hermione's pianist by softblakegriffin, va_lentina [Mature]

Summary: Draco Malfoy was destined to play music since birth. A small prodigy in a family of long-standing musicians, he’s well on his way to become the best pianist of his generation. A month in Rome with his friends is the perfect way to leave the pressure and social obligations behind and relax, immersed in the eternal beauty and soul-stirring art.

Hermione Granger’s road to music wasn’t straightforward. She didn’t attend the Conservatory, everything she knows is the result of sacrifices, and she’s still searching for the perfect opportunity to make music her job. It’s her dream and she thinks Rome, with its breathtaking views and magical atmosphere, is the place where she wants to try and fulfill it.

He’s in Rome to enjoy a short reprieve from London, before going back home.

She escaped London and is in Rome to stay.

Will music and the treacherous city disrupt their plans?

Crimes of Passion by All3Unforgivables [Mature]

Summary: Draco Malfoy lost his family, his dignity, and his humanity during the Dark Lord's rise to power. The only thing he couldn't stand to lose was something that was never his to take. With no one left to mourn him, his disappearance goes unexplored. But angels like Hermione Granger do not go missing without notice. D/H OOC, AU. Very mature themes.

Nightcrawlers by malf0y101 [Explicit]

Summary: Returning to Hogwarts for her eighth year, Hermione Granger is depressed, resentful, and suicidal. That is, until Draco Malfoy presents an enticing offer to keep her alive. Soon after, the two embark on a torture spree of students, professors, and acquaintances while simultaneously engaging in a clandestine and dirty relationship. How long can they keep their game up?

What crawls in the night stays in the night.

Poet. by OneEqualTemper [Mature]

Summary: “Uh...Malfoy? Did you knock your pretty head into a wall this morning?” Ginny questions and slides into her spot next to Hermione.

Hermione gives her a quick glare, her eyes begging her to just leave it alone. Ginny ignores Hermione’s look and waits for Malfoy to answer. Malfoy does his best to ignore the red-headed Witch.

“Hello? Anyone in there?” Ginny questions and waves her hand in front of him.

Hermione grabs the Witch’s hand and pulls it down to the table, “He can sit here if he wants.”

Ginny scoffs but keeps her hand down on the table, “What’s wrong with his own table?”

“Ginny, stop,” Hermione hisses at her friend. “We’re friends. He can come and sit here anytime he wants.”

— COMPLETED;

Hindsight by floorcoaster [Teen & Up Audiences, 12 Chapters, 170k]

Summary: It's a New Year and Hermione decides it's time to make some changes.

Between the Devil and Draco Malfoy by QueenOfSmokeAndMirrors [Mature, 13 Chapters, 34k]

Summary: Seventeen is a dangerous age. Hermione Granger, arrogant and precocious and bored of her mundane life, thinks she can handle a deal with the devil. But Draco Malfoy - the devil's own son - plans on dragging her down to Hell with him. Dramione AU with demons.

Good Luck Kisses by Musyc [Teen & Up Audiences, 8 Chapters, 8.4k]

Summary: A good luck kiss for a Quidditch captain - it's ridiculous. It can't actually work.

But it does.

Every time.

Traditions by raven_maiden [Explicit, 14 Chapters, 69k]

Summary: She straddled him slowly, still biting her lip, her hands on his shoulders. He held her hips tightly as he stared up at her.

“So beautiful,” he whispered, and she flushed prettily, like she always did from his compliments. “You never need to hide from me.”

**

Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy fell in love during the war. One year later, they're heading home for the holidays so he can finally meet her parents. There's just one teeny little problem: her parents think they're both Muggles.

Fortuitous by MrsRen [Mature, 13 Chapters, 93k]

Summary: Recently divorced Draco doesn't believe in the ideology of having one true love. He certainly doesn't expect to meet his match in a Halloween themed coffee shop, but fate has a peculiar way of giving you just what you need.

Manacled by senlinyu [Explicit, 77 Chapters, 370k]

Summary: Harry Potter is dead. In the aftermath of the war, in order to strengthen the might of the magical world, Voldemort enacts a repopulation effort. Hermione Granger has an Order secret, lost but hidden in her mind, so she is sent as an enslaved surrogate to the High Reeve until her mind can be cracked.

Wait and Hope by mightbewriting [Mature, 12 Chapters, 95k]

Summary: “Harry,” Hermione began, voice very controlled, but she could feel the blade of panic slicing at her vocal cords. “Why was Draco Malfoy just screaming bloody murder about his,” and the word almost strangled her as she said it, “wife?”

Harry's green eyes blew wide. Healer Lucas pinched the bridge of her nose, clearly displeased with the recent series of events.

“He was referring to you, my dear,” she said. “That was the other question you got wrong. Your name is Hermione Jean Granger-Malfoy.”

Hermione had to be sedated again.

Beginning and End by mightbewriting [Explicit, 48 Chapters, 242k]

Summary: Years. Broken into months into weeks into days—into hours, minutes, seconds—into moments. Simple at one end, complex at the other. In Draco’s experience, moments, even when simple, had a habit of becoming irretrievable. Moments grew, stretched, multiplied into ages and eras that defined whole stretches of measurable time. Draco regretted several moments in his life, some within his control, some without: all of them irretrievable in nature. At a certain point, wedged between ‘what-ifs’ of his own devising, he’d stopped trying to keep track of those regrettable moments: now and then, pushing and pulling, coming and going, beginning and end. Moments were only moments for just as long. After that, he had no control.

A Draco POV prequel to Wait and Hope.

Through the Years by WickedlyAwesomeMe [Fiction T, 11 Chapters, 93k]

Summary: Hermes Granger fervently believed that Malfoy's sole purpose in life was to make his life a living hell. Genderswap Dramione! Male!Hermione Granger/Female!Draco Malfoy. Companion piece to "Library Rendezvous".

Apple Pies and Other Amends by ToEatAPeach [Mature, 29 Chapters, 77k]

Summary: It’s not until she’s brought a basil and strawberry sponge cake to Neville Longbottom and his new girlfriend, Hannah Abbott, a dozen rhubarb hand-pies to Luna and Xenophilius Lovegood, and another basket of ganache-covered muffins to Dean and Seamus, that Hermione admits to herself what she’s actually doing: she’s making a thing of this. It’s a veritable PTSD tour. With pastries. And hand-skimmed clotted cream. And she has no idea why she’s doing it, but it’s becoming very apparent that she is.

Sometimes you're sad. Sometimes you need dessert. And sometimes, it's a little of both.

Arrogance and Ignorance by AnneM.Oliver [Fiction T, 38 Chapters, 140k]

Summary: A romance set in the era of Jane Austen novels, this is the story of a woman and a man. The man thinks he is better than all others, & the woman knows she is smarter. Their differences aside, they have one thing in common, both are smitten with the other.

The Babysitter by WickedlyAwesomeMe [Teen & Up Audiences, 29 Chapters, 145k]

Summary: It was a dark and stormy Sunday night when Hermione Granger unexpectedly visited his house and entrusted him with her daughter, Rose. Disaster ensues.

Slow burn Dramione with a sprinkle of cute, cute Rose!

The Best of Me by MrsRen [Mature, 21 Chapters, 82k]

Summary: Officially, Hermione Granger was killed in action during the Battle of Hogwarts. Unofficially, Draco Malfoy has never stopped searching for her. Years after the war during a mission in France, his salvation comes in the form of a little blond boy and a familiar half-Kneazle.

Chronos Historia by In_Dreams [Mature, 27 Chapters, 98k]

Summary: Hermione and Draco stumble upon a mysterious portal and find themselves hurtled back through time a thousand years. Forced to team up to find a way home, they quickly realize that much of the history they believed to be fact, wasn't true after all. A founders era, time travel Dramione.

Presque Toujours Pur by ShayaLonnie [Fiction M, 38 Chapters, 174k]

Summary: Bellatrix's torture of Hermione uncovers a long-kept secret. The young witch learns her true origins in a story that shows the beginning and end of the Wizarding wars as Hermione learns about her biological father and the blood magic he dabbled in that will control her future.

omnia vincit amor by SyrenGrey [Explicit, 40 Chapters, 187k]

Summary: Dark days are here at Hogwarts, and the darkest cloud of all is hanging over Draco Malfoy's head. Already burdened with the impossible task of murdering the Headmaster, life becomes more complex when an elusive prophecy entangles him with a bushy-haired enemy, and a steamy forbidden romance unfolds. Sixth Year. Rated E for sexual content and violence.

Rose by longdistance [Mature, 5 Chapters, 20k]

Summary: A short tale of what happens after Hermione and Draco wake up with each other after a drunken night together. Alcohol often has consequences which they soon learn.

[x0401x]

Jeweler Richard Fanbook Short Story #3

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T/N: Okay, so, this is one of those chapters where the author makes mistakes in linguistics (but she’s trying, guys, she’s trying!). She writes “prasinon” as “prase” for some reason, and I took the liberty to fix it myself when translating.

Connecting Chrysoprase

Jewelry Etranger sat inconspicuously at Ginza 7-choume. The store owner, Richard, was the possessor of a beauty that you couldn’t think was from this world, but no matter how beautiful he was, once half a year had passed, you would get used to it. And as I got used to him, the questions also surfaced.

“Hey, Richard, don’t you have any favorite foods other than sweets? Do you eat ramen or anything like that?”

Mr. Richard Ranashinha de Vulpian looked at me with scrutinizing blue eyes. Sitting on the red sofa, he had been observing the contents of a large jewel box, holding them up over his head against the morning light shining in from the window.

“I find difficult to figure the aim of the question. Why ramen? I have had meals with you numerous times. I eat anything without likes or dislikes.”

“I know. It’s not like it’s limited to just ramen, but you don’t eat that kind of stuff much, do you?”

Like chives. Or garlic. Or grilled meat dripping with juices.

I knew that this didn’t suit his image. He was a man whose features seemed to have accidentally come out of a dream world. If he told me that he could live off eating department store sweets and pink roses, he could probably have me seriously convinced up to about 70%. That was exactly why I would feel like searching for a gap.

As I was about to ask if he understood this logic, Richard replied curtly with a clay doll-like face, “What ill intentions.”

That was true. I wasn’t some obsessive follower of an idol’s personal life or anything. Richard hit bull’s-eye with the deduction that I “probably ate ramen yesterday”. For some reason, things got awkward. I was in a position where it was better to retreat for a while. Time to change the subject.

“What stone is that? Looks like candy and it’s pretty cute.”

“A type of chalcedony. They are in the same category as crystals. In particular, this one with a milky apple-green color is called chrysoprase.

“Ah~...”

What Richard was pinching with his bare hands - because it was safer to touch it with bare skin rather than wearing gloves, he said, as it wouldn’t cause any damage - was a pale green, round stone. It had low transparency, was cut en cabochon and looked like an old-style candy.

“W-What was it again? The name. Chry...?”

“‘Chrysoprase’,” Richard repeated for me.

How many times had something like this happened? The stone’s name was in a Western language. Basically, all of them were in katakana. My ears did register it, but I couldn’t memorize it in one go at all. Richard was a helpful person, so there were times when he wrote down the names in romaji and explained them to me, but I honestly couldn’t keep up with him. There were countless stones in this world.

“Chryso... aah, no good. It’s hard to memorize.”

“‘Chrysoprase’. It is said to be a stone that helps to harmonize and integrate personalities. Medieval European literature also mentions it as a stone that Alexander the Great loved.”

Alexander the Great. A person I had learned about in high school. Even I knew that name. The fact that a stone adored by a warlord who had long passed away was still loved by people of the current times was thought-provoking. The range of the gemstone world was broad. But, well, leaving that as that.

“How d’you memorize stones’ names? It’s not like you’ve got some test to do like in a history class...”

“Do you think anyone would buy goods from a trader who cannot even say their names?”

“I don’t, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s hard. There’s lots of types and they sound like magic spells. Like ‘Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte’. It wouldn’t be weird if you felt like cheating without a care in the world. You got any trick for memorizing them?”

“My compliments to you for being able to pronounce the official name of Sri Lanka’s capital. But I cannot praise the part about carelessly deceiving people. Once your reputation falls to earth, it does not recover so easily. To begin with, your perception of business in general is too lax for someone enrolled in the Faculty of Economics. I know you have the aspiration, but if you do not pair it to practical abilities and skills, you will be running idle. Shouldn’t you try to improve these skills once again so that you can avoid unnecessary hardships in the future? Instead of obsessing over finding out something unexpected about the shopkeeper from your part-time job.”

The arguments were so spot-on that I was at a loss for words. Even so, still with a slightly exasperated face, Richard continued to speak. Most likely, it was his gentle side’s turn from here on out.

“Still, you are right, I do have a trick. If I were to use the capital as an example, ‘Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte’ had its original name ‘Kotte’ being embellished with the title of ‘President Jayawardene’s Sacred City’. When you know the origin of it, doesn’t this line-up of katakana letters that only appears in magic spells turn into meaningful words?”

“So it had that kind of meaning? I see...”

“Is this time to be impressed? Do the same and discover the relatedness of all kinds of matters in your daily life. If you direct your eyes to the depths of your history without sticking to the surface, I guarantee that your world will broaden much more richly.”

“Then what about the chrysoprase of just now?”

As I took a stab at arousing his enthusiasm, the volubly beautiful shop owner smiled gorgeously. I felt that this guy would stay in a good mood forever just as long as I gave him sweets and let him talk about gems. And I liked Richard’s face the most when he was in his best mood.

“This word is taken from the Greek language. It consists of two separate words, ‘chrysos’ and ‘prasinon’. The meaning of chrysos is ‘gold’. The bright golden that can be seen showing through within the green was associated with gold. Prasinon means...”

What happened? His enunciation suddenly got bad.

When I urged him to continue, Richard looked down at the stone in his hand with a dull look and sighed a little. “The meaning of prasinon... comes close to plants such as chives or green onions.”

“Ooh—!”

As I clapped my hands together with an “all paths lead to ramen”, Richard made a face like he had just woken up from a nightmare. What is it? Please laugh.

“In any case, the mental attitude of trying to master something is commendable. I pray that your efforts will bear fruit.”

“Thanks, thanks. Well, will you eat ramen after all?”

Mr. Richard, the jeweler, looked at me with an awfully sharp gaze. What was that face? His facial expression looked like the usual nuance that he was growing fond of my foolishness had increased to about 30%. Did he intend to poke fun on me?

“Yes, yes, I will.”

“What do you prefer? Like miso or soy sauce?”

“A large helping of green onions and garlic. And even then, it is good to grate raw garlic and put in it.”

“That’s a pretty hardcore taste for someone who works with close-contact service business.”

“Which is why this is not something I can eat whenever. I eat it carefully by myself when I do not have to meet anyone the next day.”

As my eyes widened, the beautiful storekeeper raised his chin arrogantly. Did he want to say that this didn’t suit his image or had it just unfolded anew?

“How was it, did you enjoy the so-called ‘gap’?”

“No, it’s not like that’s the main goal.”

“Hah?”

“I can’t invite anyone for a French cuisine restaurant or a high-class sweets store, but if it’s a ramen shop, there’s lots of them near my university. If you like, why don’t we go eat together next time? They’re mostly shops that seem better to drop by wearing a t-shirt rather than a suit, but I wanna try chatting with you while eating this kind of junky stuff every now and then.”

“For you to discover a new unexpected thing about me, you mean?”

“I just wanna get along with you better.”

For an instant, Richard’s facial expression strained hard. What was up? His face looked like he hadn’t known better and bit a sour pickled plum or something. As I furrowed my brows, his blue eyes narrowed, looking glum, while he closed the jewel box with a click and stood up.

“Ah, show me more. It wasn’t nearly enough—”

“The chrysoprase is said to have the power to put the balance of mind and body in order, as well as make it spring up comfortably. Perhaps because its fresh grass color is a reminder of spring. Isn’t this stone unnecessary for you, since you are always in a festive mood?”

“Why’re you angry?”

“I am not.”

“Shouldn’t you take a better look at the chrysoprase?”

“Thank you for the unnecessary meddling.”

Leaving me with things to say, Richard disappeared into the back room. Was it that bad to invite him to a ramen shop? It wasn’t a good idea to let him stay angry, so I voluntarily prepared two cups of royal milk tea in the kitchenette. Having come out into the reception room, Richard said nothing more than the expected as he drank a tea that had a little more sugar in it than usual.

After the customer of that morning had gone home, Richard showed me the chrysoprase once again. Upon a better look, I understood the meaning of that naming, which I couldn’t think of as anything more than a mystery at first. Didn’t the people of ancient times think that this was a plant born from gold? The uneven surface was smooth and wavy like an organic body. Chrysoprase. Gold and green onions. Even though there were several gems in this world, I would probably never forget the name of this one. If I ever got to eat ramen with Richard someday, I would definitely bring up this stone.

“Do you remember that talk?” I would ask.

[weil-weil-lautre]

Jürgen Habermas may be the foremost intellectual in Europe. Since the 1960s his scholarship has set research agendas in philosophy, sociology, and history, while his newspaper articles and interviews have steered public debates on topics from the memory of the Holocaust to the Iraq War. He may also be the foremost intellectual of Europe, advocating for the continent’s economic and political integration.

In recent years, as that integration has stalled, one might have expected Habermas’s public interventions to gain in urgency. Instead, the opposite has happened: Although he has been as philosophically and politically productive as ever, his work has seemed to lose its relevance. Political developments against which he has struggled for decades, from populist nationalism to the erosion of the welfare state, seem more intractable than ever, while problems on which his political theory has little purchase, such as the growing influence within Europe of an illiberal and undemocratic China, appear ever more pressing. Still eminent in the academy but increasingly marginal outside it, the theorist best known for his notion of the “public sphere,” in which intellectuals influence politics by shaping public opinion, risks becoming the most compelling counterexample to his own ideal.

Habermas’s scholarly work and political commitments are held together by a worldview that expands on the ideas of the 18th-century Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. Yet, since the beginning of his career, Habermas has been shadowed by doubts about whether this vision can apply to politics. He has cast about for cultural resources, from the heritage of the French Revolution to the power of indignation, to generate a popular will in support of his program.

Since the turn of the century, this search has led Habermas to reconsider religion—to be more specific, Western Christianity—as a possible ally. Culminating in his recent Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (Another History of Philosophy, 2019), which has not yet been translated into English, his turn to religion is best understood as yet another attempt to overcome an insuperable contradiction at the very foundation of his philosophical project.

The British historian Perry Anderson once defined the task of Marxism after the collapse of hopes for a proletarian revolution as the “search for subjective agencies” capable of overturning capitalism. Habermas’s growing irrelevance suggests that European liberalism has mistakenly committed itself to a similar project of trying to find volunteers for its predetermined goals—and that this project may come to the same bitter end as communist aspirations. His decline as a public intellectual is more than the product of changing cultural trends or unfortunate circumstances that have thwarted some of his cherished causes. It represents the potential exhaustion of the sort of politics that his career embodies.

In his first major book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), Habermas already positioned himself as Kant’s heir. As he saw it, Kant had articulated a system of morality in which all human beings should be treated as free and equal. Kant argued that this system is immanent in the structure of rational thought. All human beings, insofar as we think, are capable of becoming “autonomous” moral agents, recognizing independently that the “moral law” should apply to everyone. From this basis, Kant claimed that liberalism, a political and economic regime founded on the recognition of universal rights ensuring freedom and equality, corresponds to human nature—and that its global spread is the trajectory of history.

Inspired by Kant, Habermas nevertheless recognized several problems in his thought. Kant’s concept of autonomy seemed tainted by a defense of laissez-faire capitalism. People cannot really be autonomous, Habermas countered, unless they have a material basis for living independently. In the modern era, this means that they need the support of a welfare state. Since an expansive government, however, can undermine the independence of its citizens, it is imperative that the latter influence decision-making through voting and debate in the “public sphere.” Only with economic security and political participation can individuals see themselves and others as free and equal.

In the following decades, Habermas devoted his scholarly energies to reconstructing Kant’s account of the moral law, which appears to him as implicit in interpersonal communication rather than, as Kant had it, private thought. According to Habermas, whenever one person speaks with another, this person makes claims about what is true and gives what they hope the other person will take to be good reasons for accepting it. Although we often deceive each other, every conversation is premised on the possibility that human beings can come to an agreement guided by reason, without force or fraud.

As Habermas put it in his 1965 lecture “Knowledge and Interests,” every statement that we make to another person is a “foreshadowing of the right kind of life” (one based on autonomy) and a political demand that we work toward a society in which “communication can become, for everyone and with everyone, dialogue free of domination.”

But there is a tension in this theory. Habermas noted in the Public Sphere that Kant claimed that history would bring about a “cosmopolitan order … under which human beings could really get their right.” But, behind Kant’s “official” teaching, Habermas argued, must stand an “unofficial,” esoteric doctrine, in which instead of waiting for the end of history, “politics had first to push” its way there. In order to work effectively toward the goal of autonomy for all, political action would have to be directed by a collective “will,” shaped by intellectuals “giving guidance to the public.” This “unofficial” Kantian doctrine has been the banner under which Habermas has worked as an intellectual, trying to rally Europeans to the goal of autonomy.

Since the 1970s, Habermas has been concerned by two obstacles to this agenda. The first of these is economic. After the crisis caused by the oil shocks, Habermas came to believe that Europe’s nation-states no longer weigh enough in the balance of the global economy to protect the redistributive policies that make autonomy meaningful for ordinary people. In a globalizing economy, he has warned repeatedly, “Keynesianism in one country” is no longer possible. The welfare state must be recreated at a continental scale.

Habermas’s second problem concerns the collective “will” that is supposed to work toward autonomy. In Towards a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism (1975), he began to argue that such a will could not be located in any of the historical identities—class, religion, nation—that have organized European politics. Rather it should be found in a new kind of “collective identity” that would “no longer be anchored in a backward glance.” This new identity must be, in fact, not only European but universal, available to every human being without exclusion. Just as social democracy had to be extended from particular countries to a united continent, Europeans had to reimagine themselves as members of a common humanity.

This call for a collective identity that includes potentially everyone was a challenge the ideas of Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), the Nazi and Catholic political theorist who influenced the thought of Hitler’s regime and postwar West German conservatism. Schmitt argued that politics is founded on a “friend-enemy distinction” defining an in-group against a threatening out-group. He further claimed that modern politics is dominated by concepts derived from Christian tradition—a point, he insisted, that applies even to supposedly rational Kantians like Habermas. There can be no viable form of collective identity, Schmitt suggests, without powerful and potentially dangerous shared emotions and an aura of the sacred.

Habermas has often rejected Schmitt’s “clerico-fascist” ideas, with particular fervor in a 2011 article on Schmitt’s concept of the “The Political.” There he argued that liberal democracies neither have nor require a “religious aura.” They are based on “respect for the inviolability of human dignity,” which, he maintained, is a secular concept independent of any “friend-enemy” distinction. Appeals to collective will should be made on this rational, inclusive basis—or none at all.

Throughout his interventions in European politics, however, Habermas has been unable to stick to this formula. He has often called on Europeans to generate a collective will around a shared past, powerful emotions, and values of heroism and sacrifice, which border on the irrational and quasi-religious forces Schmitt saw as essential to politics. These injunctions, at odds with his own theoretical commitments, have been less than coherent intellectually and less than successful politically. They reveal the inadequacy of what Habermas has promoted since the 1980s as the “collective identity” to replace class, religion, and nation for Europe: “constitutional patriotism.”

Habermas developed the concept of “constitutional patriotism” during the Historikerstreit (“historians’ dispute”) of the late 1980s. During this period, West German conservative politicians and historians argued that their fellow citizens nursed a morbid sense of shared guilt over the crimes of the Nazi regime. Thinkers like Ernst Nolte insisted that Germans must develop a more positive national identity. These appeals often descended into downplaying the Holocaust, shifting the focus to German victims of Soviet reprisals, and they accelerated a rightward shift in the political culture.

Habermas was the most vocal opponent of this trend, and he cemented his status as a leading figure of the German center-left. Breaking through debates over historical guilt, he argued that his countrymen ought to shift their attention, and their affection, to the West German Constitution of 1949 and the broader European liberal democratic tradition on which it was based. They should find their identity in a “constitutional patriotism” potentially open to all human beings, rather than in positive or negative feelings about their national history.

While the Historikerstreit positioned Habermas as the champion of a post-national, progressive West Germany, he overplayed his hand. As the East German government collapsed in 1989, he insisted that “constitutional patriotism” meant that German reunification must not proceed on the basis of national identity. Rather, citizens from the former communist state should join West Germans to draft a new constitution, so that all could feel united by agreed-upon civic values, rather than their unchosen ethnic heritage. This proposal found little support, a failure that bitterly disappointed Habermas. In an interview given in 1993 (in The Past as Future), he complained that post-reunification German politics was based “vague appeals to national feeling” instead of constitutional values.

Rather than deciding that constitutional patriotism could not serve as the sort of collective identity his Kantian politics required, Habermas shifted focus from Germany to Europe. Since the days of the Historikerstreit, he has argued that Europeans should see themselves as united by the legacy of the French Revolution and should formalize their identity by creating a new constitution for a supernational European state, one that would transcend economic and legal integration to create a democratic policy. This decadeslong campaign seems from the perspective of the present like a larger-scale version of his unsuccessful intervention in German reunification. Both have been dogged not only by the resistance of public opinion and political elites, but also by an incoherent view of history.

While his ideal of collective identity seems to require Europeans to reject what he once dismissed as the “backward glance,” Habermas appeals to the legacy of the French Revolution in terms that echo the radical nationalism of 1789. In an essay written on the eve of its bicentennial (“Popular Sovereignty as Procedure”), he argued that what had begun with the fall of the Bastille was not over, “[r]ather it is a project we must carry forward in the consciousness of a revolution both permanent and quotidian.” The “ideals of 1789” must inspire passionate identification and deliberate action in the present. Otherwise, they “will not take root in our souls.”

With such language, Habermas spoke the language of the revolution’s leaders, who had tried to make the values of human rights and democracy part of what they called moeurs, or social practices and emotional experiences. Their efforts could be violent and illiberal. Creating a new civic religion centered on the rights of individuals and a passionate commitment to the nation led, for example, to the persecution of Catholics.

Although he has shied away from the revolution’s violence, Habermas has often described 1789 as the genesis of modern Europe and argued that a sense of connection to such historical events is vital to the “constitutional patriotism” he favors. In a 2001 talk at Washington University (“On Law and Disagreement”), he said that “citizens must see themselves as heirs to a founding generation, carrying on with the common project.”

It is by no means obvious, however, that citizens of contemporary Western democracies see themselves as heirs of the revolution. As Habermas noted, European countries today are receiving more and more non-European immigrants with different worldviews, creating “divided societies” without a “strong value consensus.” It is doubtful whether young people in Europe today will learn to think of themselves as the heirs of 1789 if they do not come to identify with a culture, nation, or civilization that transmits this revolutionary heritage to them.

In an increasingly diverse Europe, ties of symbolic filiation are fraying. As Habermas’s own emotionally laden rhetoric of inheritances, legacies, and heirs suggests, the abstract civic ideals written into a constitution have meaning for citizens only to the extent that the latter already feel themselves to be part of a community to whom those ideals are addressed. So Habermas’s references to 1789 as a point of identification for Europeans contradict his own political theory—and Europe’s social realities.

No more coherent are his frequent appeals to the collective emotion of “indignation,” which he imagines all of us feel when human dignity is violated. The idea of indignation allows Habermas to imagine collective political action might be possible in the absence of traditional identities. In 1992, for example, after incidents of violence against Turkish immigrants in Germany were answered with mass protests, Habermas wrote to Die Zeit in support of demonstrators’ post-nationalist “indignation” on behalf of newcomers.

But indignation does not necessarily serve liberal, cosmopolitan ends. In a 1963 article in Merkur magazine, Habermas denounced the West German state’s campaign of repression against homosexual Germans, which he saw as fueled by homophobic “moral indignation.” As he insisted that people’s private sexual practices should be protected from the indignation of their fellow citizens, however, he argued that “not all indignation leads to witch-hunts” and that “political enlightenment also requires moral motivations.” But in the absence of shared values about the sorts of practices that our feelings about “human dignity” commit us to defend, indignation carries the risk of degenerating into a just such “witch hunts”—or into impotent moralizing.

The latter was the tone that Habermas struck during the Iraq War, castigating the George W. Bush administration for its violations of international law. He saved his most strident criticisms, however, for European leaders, who were unable to develop a united foreign policy as a counterweight to U.S. power. In a 2003 open letter (“February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together”), he deplored this “shipwreck.” Habermas was to some extent concerned by the split between the historic member states of the European Union and the new members from Eastern Europe, which generally fell into line behind the United States. But he was most animated by the failure of Germany, France, and Italy to turn their diplomatic corps’ outrage over U.S. policy into something more substantive. He was also, however, embarrassed and compromised by his own previous support for NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign in Serbia, which had begun without authorization from the United Nations. He struggled to explain why that apparent breach of international law had been acceptable, while U.S. action in Iraq was not.

Habermas found signs of hope, however, in the “power of feelings” that had inspired millions of Europeans to protest against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But this indignation could not give force to European foreign policy. Without the orientation provided by shared values and a common identity, popular feelings lack the sustained motivating power to shape elites’ behavior. And the United States is hardly Europe’s worst problem. In recent years, as Russia and China have made their influence felt in Europe, often exploiting the same divisions between Western and Eastern countries on which the Bush administration played, neither the threat of division nor popular disgust for Moscow’s and Beijing’s human rights abuses has seemed effective at moving Europe’s leaders toward a united foreign policy.

The legacy of 1789 and the feeling of indignation are not sufficient to produce the collective will that Habermas sees as essential to the realization of the Kantian ideal. In moments of frustration with the halting progress toward European integration, he seems to recognize this inadequacy, and he calls upon supplementary virtues of “heroism” and “sacrifice.”

However, there is no place for these values in Habermas’s theory. Indeed, he often speaks of them with contempt, associating them with the worst excesses of nationalism. In a characteristic moment, just weeks after the 9/11 attacks, he scoffed at Americans’ references to first responders as “heroes.” The “connotations” of heroism, he warned, evoke troubling political memories for a German. Quoting Bertolt Brecht, he concluded, “Unhappy is the country that needs heroes.”

Habermas did not recall that in The Inclusion of the Other (1996) he had demanded European leaders make a “heroic effort,” sacrificing their national identities and short-term interests for an integrated supernational polity. Later, in his On the Constitution of Europe (2011) he again summoned Europe’s “frightened” elites to show “courage” and bemoaned their inability to deepen the European Union’s cohesion. Europe is indeed “unhappy” if its future depends on intellectuals’ ability to coax elites into living up to values of heroism that they themselves despise.

The legacy of the French Revolution, mass emotion, and virtuous elites are only some of the incoherent and ineffective cultural resources that Habermas has drawn on in support of his Kantian political ideal. Such resources are supposed to motivate European citizens to forge a common will, while enabling them to break with historical forms of collective identity. None of them, however, seem to function in the absence of the traditions that Habermas intends them to replace. In an implicit admission of this failure, Habermas has turned in recent years to Christianity as another such resource.

In his recent Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, Habermas argues—in a version Schmitt’s claims that he once vehemently rejected—that Christianity has been a historical source for many of liberalism’s core concepts. He insists that Christians today can contribute to the liberal project by “translating” Kantian imperatives into religious language and inspiring believers to advance liberal ends.

Much of Auch eine Geschichte can be seen as a quarrel with Schmitt, but also with the French sociologist of religion Émile Durkheim (1858-1917). The latter argued that politics is always underwritten by a sense of group identity generated in collective rituals through which individuals unite in a group defined by its allegiance to something “sacred.” A liberal democrat and Kantian like Habermas, Durkheim posited that human rights can only be cherished and defended by citizens who are united by a national identity indistinguishable in its intensity from religion.

Habermas notes that Durkheim called for the “renewal of solidarity” through emotion-generating collective rites, such as Bastille Day parades, in order to rescue liberalism from “the abyss of anomie,” or the decline of binding social norms. Yet, Habermas insists that while Durkheim’s ideas may have applied in ancient societies, they are not relevant today. His turn to religion will not go so far as to admit, as Schmitt and Durkheim do, that liberal democracy must itself be a kind of collective faith if it is to survive.

Habermas’s turn to religion is unlikely to offer a more successful prop for his “unofficial” Kantian politics than his previous appeals to 1789, indignation, and heroism. Even as he invokes Christianity as a means of evoking a collective will, Habermas continues to hold at arm’s length the idea that liberal democratic states must actively generate strong allegiances to a shared identity that is smaller than all of humanity. Instead of calling on the state to foster a form of patriotism more robust and less inclusive than Kant’s cosmopolitan ideal, Habermas appeals to religion, as he once appealed to history or emotion, to supply the willpower still absent in his own system. But the post-Reformation Christianity, filtered through Enlightenment philosophy, that he promotes as a resource for liberalism is already much more culturally specific and less inclusive than he acknowledges. Many Christian theologians, such as John Milbank, reject his instrumental conception of their tradition.

As Habermas reaches unconvincingly for Christianity as another stopgap in his search for a new form of post-national collective identity for Europe, Schmitt’s influence continues to grow. In a 1985 essay on Schmitt, Habermas asserted that his nemesis was unlikely to ever gain a wide readership the English-speaking world. Since the 1990s, however, Anglophone scholarship has been marked by a Schmitt revival, first led by figures on the left such as Chantal Mouffe, whose ideas have also exercised a great influence outside the academy, inspiring left-populist parties in Europe such as Podemos and La France Insoumise. More recently, right-wing imitators of Schmitt’s theologically inflected fascism, such as Adrian Vermeule, have risen to intellectual prominence, and perhaps soon to political influence.

More troublingly, Schmitt has become a major point of reference for leaders of the rising global power. China’s use of Schmittian theory to justify its recent crackdown in Hong Kong has been widely noted, but, as Gloria Davies warned in her 2007 article “Habermas in China,” if Schmitt has taken off in China, this is in part Habermas’s fault. Widely read in the 1990s and early 2000s by reform-minded intellectuals, Habermas sparked outrage when he seemed to violate his own cosmopolitan liberal theory by endorsing NATO’s bombing of Serbia, which infamously destroyed China’s embassy in Belgrade.

Habermas’s most widely read article in favor of airstrikes against Serbia, “Bestiality and Humanity,” was structured by claims that Slobodan Milosevic’s regime was committing crimes against humanity—and by an attack on Schmitt, who had dismissed the idea of crimes against humanity with the phrase, “humanity, bestiality.” Outraged Chinese intellectuals such as Zhang Rulun countered that by supporting the violation of Serbian sovereignty, Habermas was more like Schmitt than he realized. Zhang argued that Habermas had revealed Western liberals, for all their talk of “democratic procedure” and “dialogue,” had no more respect for international law than the “rogue” states they wanted to bomb.

Zhang has revealed a fact about Habermas he has often been at pains to conceal, if not escape: That behind his liberal veneer is an emotional and ultimately irrational heart. But what afflicts Habermas is less hypocrisy than self-denial—a lack of self-knowledge that has made it impossible to avoid a drift toward political irrelevance. What remains to be seen is whether the same is true of Western political culture writ large.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Emotional healing does not depend on the process of figuring something out. It does not depend on conceptual understanding, but rather on a return of the feeling life to a natural biological rhythm. Emotional healing involves allowing the feelings to enter into the basic pulsations of the body. This is accomplished, in part, by separating those feelings from the arrhythmic clutch of thought. The feeling life is not a conceptual experience. Feelings are not ideas, but subtle physical experiences. They take place in the body. They are not inherently meaningful in the way they seem to be when we apply our thoughts and beliefs to them. Feelings are part of the rhythm, the giving and receiving, the nourishment, and the interdependent ecology of our experience here. We often misunderstand our feelings. We think that some of them are weak and some strong, some are good and some bad, some right and some wrong. Such a relationship to our feelings represents an overlay of arrhythmic thought onto the intimate rhythms of our bodily experience. When we allow ourselves to turn toward our feelings at the bodily level, we can discover a core of warm nourishment there. Even in our anger, our guilt, our confusion, our loneliness, even in the depths of despair, we can find something that we truly want — a sustaining force which we can receive and then give in return. Feelings can be recognized as a movement of energy on a subtle level. Like breathing, the beating of the heart, and the movement of blood in the veins, feelings are not owned by us. They are part of the stream which sustains and uplifts this mysterious human form. The process of self-care reveals experientially that feelings are energy, rhythmic movements of energy in the body. They are like tones that resonate from subtle regions of the human form. These feeling tones have become disrupted by the ways we have been taught to fight against them, deny them, dishonor them, and obstruct them. We are in this body, this exotic life form, on this puzzling planet, assuming that we understand what the consciously felt energetic fluctuations called feelings actually mean. Mystery is the predominant quality of our human experience. We don’t know very much. We can’t know very much and yet there is so much here, so much to receive and so much to give. We turn our attention to the body so that we may take care of it and honor it. The human body offers us immense evolutionary possibilities. All the scriptures and spiritual teachings which have been passed from generation to generation have revealed, in one way or another, that it is an honor to be a human being — to have this body — even though there are times when the suffering and difficulties are great. In order to discover the sacred possibility of our human embodiment, we must learn how to turn to ourselves and be with our experience in a way that truly honors our life here. This requires learning how to honor and bring dignity to each aspect of our life. We must learn what it means to attend to ourselves with absolute respect, even though we don’t really understand what we are, who we are, or where we are going. The conditioned mind is making constant demands for closure and conceptual understanding. It lobs labels and names at our delicate experience, many of which suggest that there is something wrong, that we are undignified, ugly, or weak in various areas of our life. The path of compassionate self-care offers an antidote to the mind’s demands. Its fundamental principle reveals that there is nothing wrong, shameful, dark, or ugly about human life. A string of conflicted and limiting constructs, beliefs, and ideas has so dominated our awareness that it seems as if those ideas are real and nothing else exists. If we can dislodge and dismantle those disguised thought patterns, we can return our attention to the beauty and innocence of our life here. We honor the body because it is more than what it looks like. This body is not simply the physical appearance that we can see and touch. Within the body and surrounding it, there is an energetic field which cannot usually be seen by the naked eye. The visible body is like the hub of a wheel. From its core there are spokes which extend in every direction. These spokes are a shimmering illumination, an invisible radiance. The radiance surrounding the body is the subtle aspect of our visible form. As the body moves with each inhalation and exhalation, something more than air is taken into us, something deep and subtle, which we might call energy or life current. We not only breathe air and ingest food; we also take energies into ourselves, and by these energies we are fed. We do not live by bread alone. Something deep, subtle, and invisible nurtures and nourishes us, making it possible to serve and to give. The body is like a thread or a strand which has a series of unseen openings at different points along its surface. These openings pulsate the way a diaphragm does when we breathe. During those pulsations a sacred offering is made to us, and a previous offering is returned. Energies are received and energies are given back again. The whole body breathes — not just the lungs or the diaphragm. The entire body breathes at many different levels, in different places, and in different ways through openings along the spiraling thread of the human form. The knowledge of these openings and their purpose has been revealed in various occult traditions. The great and central opening of the human body is located in the domain of the heart. The front of the body — the heart and the area around the heart — is a portal, a subtle passageway which is responsible for our feeling life. It is through this opening that we experience courage, inspiration, love, and the creative act itself. Human beings consciously encounter life in the vertical position. We stand upright and the front of our body directly greets the world. Our relationship to form and phenomena does not arise only from the sensory organs. We are not just eyes and nose and mouth. We are an exotic life form, mobile on this earth, facing each other and the world through the front of the body and the delicate opening which dwells there. Our feelings are frontal experiences. This becomes clearer and clearer as we turn our attention gently toward the body and allow ourselves to breathe and to feel in an easy way. Turning the attention to the body is the beginning of the process of compassionate self-care. We allow whatever feeling experience we are having there to become part of the rhythms of the body. We don’t make demands on our feelings. We simply give them the space they need. We attend, allow, and respect. This is self-care. Feelings are energies which are given to the body and then consciously experienced. They are not ours any more than the air we breathe is ours. We cannot control them. We can only say yes and let the mind’s grip on them disappear. Feelings are part of the rhythmic flow, the stream of life. Compassionate self-care is a way of participating in that flow respectfully and openly. Thoughts about feelings are a conditioned response to something we do not understand. The actuality of the feeling cannot be defined. It can only be received and allowed. We breathe, we feel, and we allow. How much time is spent each day arguing with this organic process? How much time is spent trying to force back and push away something that we think is not right about ourselves? How much time is lost disrespecting the sacred presence which inhabits and radiates from the physical form because we misunderstand the beautiful mystery of our existence here? If, for instance, we have become caught in fear, we might, instead of battling the thoughts and trying to be brave in some manipulative way, turn our attention toward the physical side of that fear and stay steady with it — breathing and allowing. If we feel clear and open, we do exactly the same — giving permission to whatever way the energetic current seems to be expressing itself in the body. We gently disengage from the mind’s demands, labels, and illusory assertions about what it all means. The feeling life is not a conceptual experience. Feelings are not ideas, but subtle physical experiences. They take place in the body.

[The Prayer Of The Body II Compassionate Self-Care BY STEPHEN R. SCHWARTZ OCTOBER 1992]

[thehouseofvs]

[RP Journal - 1/15/2021] Valeria Camena: The First Steps on a Thousand-Malm Road

It feels strange, writing within a journal again. I haven’t had the need nor desire to keep one since I first arrived here. What was the point, when all of my memories, or at least the ones that mattered, were seared into my mind in the form of relentless nightmares and colorless dreams? Why would I need one, when there was nothing here that was worth my interest or willingness to one day remember? All I needed to do was stay on my path. Pursue the answers that I sought. Fight if I must. Flee if I must. Kill if I must.

At least, that’s what I kept telling myself.

For five years, I lived like that. In this endless, gray hell that I found myself in, unable to trust anyone, to grow close to anyone, to feel anything for anyone. Because, even after learning the truth, they all still felt fake. Like pale, lifeless imitations of the things I once knew. Of the people I once loved. I desperately wanted to get back everything and everyone I had lost, to be able to feel something again, to see a colorful, true world once more. But then one night I met him, within yet another of my tortuous dreams. Rae-Hann. To be honest, I didn’t know what to make of him at first. An odd stranger, who had somehow wormed his way into the most sacred part of my being. He saw something that no one else had seen. I wanted to lash out at him, to expel him as swiftly as he came. But I stopped myself. My curiosity won over, and I allowed him to stay - and then we talked. It has been a while since then, and the two of us have had many more discussions and “adventures”. It took some time, but eventually the two of us began to form some semblance of trust for one another. After all, we were two strangers in an unfamiliar place, coming from circumstances quite similar to one another. I suppose one would think it was only natural that we would form a bond of sorts, given enough time. And before I knew it, we did. That was when things changed. For the first time in years, I finally saw something different from the grayscale nightmare that was my life. I saw color. I saw Rae-Hann’s color. When I first noticed, I could not help but stare whenever I got the chance, when I thought he was not looking. Simply doing so was like taking a breath after being deprived of air for so long, and the sight of him brought with it a sense of comfort, of peace, and of hope. For the first time, I thought to myself that maybe, just maybe, there was something worthwhile in this world after all.

Rae-Hann took the time to talk with me. To listen to me. To hear, know, and understand me, even if it was only a little. He had held out his hand to me, offering me a place in the life he had carved for himself upon the Source. And like a lovestruck fool, I took it. Like a lost soul, I clung to it. Like a helpless child, I allowed him to guide me away from the path I had been following for so many years. He led me to a different path. To Siannault Tavard. To them, his loved ones at the Star’s Rest. But it has not been easy, even ignoring the wound upon my shoulder and the circumstances of my arrival. I have always been an awkward girl, even in my old life. It was never comfortable for me to make new friends, or socialize with strangers. But I tried. For Stilicho’s sake, and now for Rae-Hann’s. I met a few of them. Aultena Sephimiri, Karrn Moks, Edgard Beaumont, V’hala Helsi, and V’ari Tia. Seeing those twins here had me concerned, but like Siannault, they seemed to have no recollection of me. The real me. Likely for the best.

However, I had been able to tell that the atmosphere around the Inn has grown more dense as of late. I initially wondered if it was due to my own presence, but the arguments I briefly overheard between Rae-Hann, Aultena, and Siannault clued me in. It seems that even in this warm, cozy little inn full of friends and family, there was still problems lying just underneath the surface.

Whatever was currently happening, I felt as though it was a poor time for me to stay here at the Rest. As warm and welcoming as they have made me feel since coming here, I cannot say that I have not felt as though I were an intruder within their world - their reality. After all, they’re all still gray to me. Perhaps, if given enough time, that will change, but when? I have been contemplating leaving today. I think it would be for the best. My wound was manageable now, and there did not seem to be any adverse effects since the incident, so I think I should be alright to do so. But how will Rae think, if I were to suddenly go? Would he feel like I was abandoning him, at a time when he might need me? I feel sort of silly, thinking this way, because he’s surrounded by so many loving people who care for him. But I feel I at least owe it to him to talk, before I do take my leave. Speaking of, it seems he just arrived. I will continue this later tonight, I think. It feels oddly cathartic, putting my thoughts down like this. Until then... -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Well, tonight was interesting. I am not really sure where to begin with this, but I suppose I should do so after Rae-Hann came to see me in the Rest’s infirmary. He had caught me writing in this journal, as well as the sight of my packed belongings, but he did not seem surprised. Although, considering what he himself had been planning to do, perhaps he thought it was not his place to judge. Whatever the case was, he came to inform me that he was leaving the Rest for some time. We talked about his plans. Apparently, he wanted to head to Ul’dah to wrap up some unfinished business with that fortune-teller we met, Una’to. I have my reservations about the Voidsent-possessed man, but I trust Rae-Hann. Whatever his intentions are, I know I do not have to fear. Still, I am concerned. And I voiced my concerns, but I did not try to persuade him from his current course. I knew better than that. However, Rae did not seem to know what he would do with himself afterwards. Perhaps return to his research, or other jobs that he said he had put on hold, for the sake of the Rest and its inhabitants. Looking at him now, I think I finally understand what it was he saw in me the day we met. Right now, I saw someone who felt alone, lost, and angry with the world. So, I took a chance.

I finally took that first step forward. To truly, fully invite the Mystel who had brought me no small amount of joy and hope into my life. I reached out and offered my hand to him, as he had done for me so many moons ago. I told him that since neither of us had a plan, an idea of where we’d go, why not simply take that journey together? Neither of us had to be alone. We could do what we wanted, when we wanted, how we wanted - and know that, at the end of the day, we would still have someone to return to. That, together, maybe we could find something worthwhile on this star. After the words left me, my heart raced. I felt as though I was on the edge of panic. I feared that I might have stepped to far, or misread what Rae needed at that moment. I wanted to simply run and hide my shame, feeling as though a rejection were imminent. But that did not happen. Just like when I took a chance and accepted him when he reached out to me, he now did the same with me...on the condition that, were he to ever hurt me, that I would tell him. That I would be honest with him about my woes. On the surface, that condition might have been an odd one to make. But hearing the pain in his voice, the strain of withheld tears, was more than enough to tell me what lay hidden within his request. Not that it was a difficult one for me to accept. I pulled him into a hug on instinct, sensing the raw hurt he was feeling, and I made my promise. Rae is...the only person on this star with whom I feel as though I can be completely honest with, and I told him as much.

After our tender moment passed, we made arrangements to meet at Shirogane’s pier, once I had settled my end of things at the Rest. With my belongings, I searched for Aultena so as to pay off my debt - but after having no luck, I was lucky enough to stumble into V’hala and was able to settle things with her. That said, I decided to leave a letter for the Rest’s proprietress, informing her of some of what was happening. Aultena deserved as much, after taking a moment to consider how I would feel if I were in her place. It isn’t much, especially coming from a stranger such as myself, but I hope it offers some small amount of comfort. I also left a letter for Karrn Moks within the infirmary. It felt terrible to leave so suddenly, especially after all the care he had given me since my dramatic arrival. I wanted to at least thank him, and let him know that I hoped we would meet again eventually.

With my work finished, I left the Rest behind and went to the pier to meet Rae. I spotted him shortly after, and stood with him near the water’s edge. We sort of just stared out at the distant waves for a bit and talked...I suppose we were both contemplating about what was to come in the near future. Of what this journey would be like for us. When the subject of our departure, of taking our first steps, was broached...I suggested we do something a little strange. An old legend I remember hearing, once - if you place a wish within a glass bottle, and allow it to be carried away by the ocean, perhaps one day it might come true. It seems silly, I know, but it felt appropriate. And meaningful. So, we went to the edge of the pier and cast the bottle I had prepared off onto the waves, allowing both of our wishes to drift onto the horizon. Rae wished for solace, sincerity, satisfaction...and mine was for our success and safety on the road ahead. Well, that, and perhaps another, more selfish wish of mine. If possible, I wanted to one day find some measure of happiness...ideally, with Rae included.

And with that final send-off, the two of us had no business left in Shirogane. Our next step was to head to Kugane, and then charter for transport to Ul’dah. While our journey was to start as soon as we left upon the ferry, I think we both knew it would not truly begin until the last of Rae’s business was concluded. And so, we departed from the residential ward’s shores, to lantern-lit Kugane and the world beyond. The rest of the day after that was a blur. Though neither of us had explored Kugane before, neither of us felt as though now was a good time. But...maybe someday in the future, we can take the time to properly see the city’s sights. Instead, we booked the first airship headed for Limsa Lominsa, and from there to Ul’dah. Tonight is the first night of our trip, and Rae-Hann is certainly unaccustomed to airship travel. I’ve never seen him so unsettled...is it weird that I find it sort of adorable? But, I think that is where I will leave this. Writing in this journal will take some getting used to, but I think I can see the merits of it. Who knows, maybe one day, I’ll want to use these to look back and remember this. I certainly hope so. And, strangely enough...I look forward to what waits in store for us, on this thousand-malm road. ( @yokasaris​ @casualcatte​ @therpperson​ )

[arcticdementor]

Kayfabe is a treasured part of pro wrestling culture. Kayfabe refers to the commitment of everyone involved (the wrestlers, the refs, the announcers, and to a certain degree the fans) to maintaining the shared fiction that pro wrestling matches are unscripted. (Wrestling is real, in the sense that the athletes are taking real punishment and risk really getting hurt, and there is a degree of improvisation, but the outcomes are predetermined.) Kayfabe has had a kind of mythical importance to many in the pro wrestling community: you keep kayfabe no matter what, even in the event of serious injury, out of a sense of sacred commitment. Crucial to understanding kayfabe is that it is not an attempt to deceive the audience. Modern wrestling is in some ways perfectly open about the scripted nature of the matches. Fooling people is not the point. If every fan signed an affidavit saying they knew the outcomes were predetermined the wrestlers would still keep kayfabe, out of commitment to the culture. Kayfabe is a mutually-approved illusion. It is artifice, but it is mutually agreed upon artifice, a consensual fantasy.

Our current political culture is kayfabe.

The illusion that we pretend to believe is that we are in some sort of uniquely politically fertile moment for progressivism and social justice, that we are experiencing a social revolution or “Great Awokening.” Further, we keep kayfabe by acting as if we believe that certain policies like police abolition or abolishing border enforcement (or if you prefer utterly meaningless sloganeering, “abolishing ICE”) are tangibly viable in anything like the near future. I say that these are kayfabe to emphasize my belief that most people who endorse these beliefs are well aware that they are not true, and to underline the sense in which the commitment to unreality is mutual, an expression of a strange kind of social contract. Most thinking adults comprehend the current moment and understand that the hand of establishment power and the influence of social inertia are as strong as ever. (Why would you feel otherwise?) But because people have understandably been moved by recent righteous calls for justice, they feel they must accept the fiction of a new awakening to show solidarity with the victims of injustice. This is emotionally understandable, but strategically counterproductive. And indeed one thing that has defined these new social movements is their relentless commitment to the emotional over the strategic.

…

Living in a culture of political kayfabe is a strange experience. It feels the way that, I imagine, it feels to live under a truly authoritarian government, where you’re constantly having exchanges where everyone involved knows that what they’re saying is bogus but you push right through the cognitive dissonance with a smile on your face. Only you’re not compelled by the fear of torture or imprisonment but of vague-but-intense social dictates, of the crucial priority of appearing to be the right kind of person. So often political conversations today have this dual quality where you feel forced to constantly evaluate what your interlocutor actually believes even as propriety compels you to take seriously what’s coming out of their mouth.

A major negative consequence of our commitment to kayfabe lies in our acceptance of behaviors we would ordinarily never accept, under the theory that this is such a special time, we need to shut up and go along with it. Take our broken discourse, as frequently discussed in “cancel culture” debates. My experience and my intuition tell me that almost everyone in the progressive/left/socialist world knows that our discourse norms and culture are totally fucked up. Trust me: most people in liberal spaces, Black and white, male and female, trans and cis, most certainly including people in academia and media, are well aware that we’ve entered into a bizarre never-ending production of The Crucible we can’t get out of. They’re probably just as sick of Woko Haram as I am.

But they’re either empowered and enriched by this state of affairs, and don’t want the party to end, or they’re holding on for dear life trying not to get their lives ruined for speaking out of turn. Look past self-interest and self-preservation and you’ll find that everybody knows that the way left spaces work now is horribly broken and dysfunctional. The problem is that thinking people who would ordinarily object don’t because they’ve been convinced that this is some sort of special moment pregnant with progressive potential, and that is more important than rights, compassion, or fairness. So we maintain a shared pretense that things are cool the way you go through the motions on an awful date where you’re both aware you’ll never see each other again.

If I say “cancel culture,” normies indeed don’t know what I’m talking about, because they are healthy, adjusted people with a decent set of priorities who value their own time and lives too much to get caught up in all of this horseshit. But if I say “cancel culture” in front of a bunch of politics-obsessed professional-class shitlibs they will pretend to not know what I’m talking about. They’ll put on a rich fucking show. They do an impression of Cletus from The Simpsons and go “cancel culture?!? Hyuck hyuck what’re that? I’m not knowing cancel culture, I’m just a simple country lad!” These are people who have read more about cancel culture in thinkpieces than I read about any topic in a year. But pretending you don’t know what cancel culture is happens to be a key part of the performance, a naked in-group signifier, so they pretend. The “I don’t know what cancel culture is” bullshit performance is kayfabe at its most infuriating. I know you know what cancel culture is because you’re currently using it to demonstrate your culture positioning by pretending you don’t know what it is. You fucking simpleton.

People say and do weird shit and it’s all wrong but you just pretend like it isn’t. Who wants to be the one caught making waves? When you’re in a group of people and someone engages in something patently ridiculous - when, for example, someone says “AAVE” in an ordinary social situation with no academic or political reason to use jargon, even though everyone there knows the phrase “the way Black people talk” is more elegant, useful, and true - and the moment passes and there’s this inability to look each other in the eye, when everybody starts studying their drink and clearing their throat, that’s life under kayfabe.

Getting to this is not normal. It’s not a healthy state of affairs. It can only happen when people come to believe that self-preservation requires pretending things are OK.

…

It is at this point that people say that “defund” does not mean “abolish,” which is true, and Defund the Police indeed does not mean “abolish the police.” Defund the police means nothing, now, though I’m sure that the people who started using it had noble intentions. At this point it’s a floating signifier, an empty slogan that people rallied around with zero understanding of what semantic content it could possibly contain. If it’s meant to be a radical demand, why use the vocabulary of an actuary? If it’s meant to mean a meaningful but strategic drawdown of resources, why use it interchangeably with “abolish”? I cannot imagine a more comprehensive failure of basic political messaging than Defund the Police. Amateur hour from beginning to end.

I take the political concept of alternatives to policing seriously, in the same way I take many political ideas seriously that are not likely achievable in my lifetime. I know there are deeply serious people who are profoundly committed to these principles and who have thought them through responsibly. I appreciate their work and become better informed from what they say. But their ideas did not reign last year. A faddish embrace of a thoughtless caricature of police abolition reigned, pushed with maximum aggression and minimal introspection by the shock troops of contemporary progressive ideas, overeducated white people with more sarcasm than sense.

Policing will not end tomorrow or next month or next year. And whoever you are, reading this, you are well aware of that fact. The odds of police abolition in any substantial portion of this country are nil. Indeed, I would say that the likelihood of meaningful reduction in policing in any large region of this country, whether measured by patrolling or funding or manpower, is small. Individual cities may reduce their police forces by a substantial fraction, and I suspect that they will not suddenly devolve into Mega-City One as a result. (Though I can’t say initial data in this regard is encouraging.) I hope we learn important lessons about intelligent and effective police reform and more sensible resource allocation from those places. But the vast majority of cities will not meaningfully change their policing budgets, due to both the legitimate lack of political will for such a thing - including in communities of color - and broken municipal politics with bad incentives.

…

Living under kayfabe makes you yearn for plainspoken communication, for letting the mask fall. The professed inability of progressives to understand why woke-skeptical publications like this one keep succeeding financially is itself a slice of kayfabe. They know people are paying for Substacks and podcasts and subscribing to YouTubes and Patreons because it’s exhausting to constantly spend all of your time pretending things that don’t make sense make sense, pretending that you believe things you don’t to avoid the social consequences of telling the truth.

When you’re someone who spent the past several decades arguing that the American university system is not hostile to conservative students, that it doesn’t try to force extremely contentious leftist views onto students, and then you watch this video, how do you react? I think many people, most people, even most people committed to the BLM cause, see that video and wince. That is not how we get there. Browbeating 20 year olds for not parroting your politics back at you is not how racial justice gets advanced. But if you’re caught in this moment, how do you object? Acknowledge that, yes, in fact, it is now plainly the case that many professors see it as their job to forcefully insist on the truth of deeply controversial claims to their students, berating them until they acquiesce? Well that would be an unpleasant conversation with the other parents when you pick up your kid from Montessori school. So you just choose not to see, or keep you mouth shut, or speak in a way that maintains the illusion.

I mean there is the absurdity of what she’s saying to contend with - the now fairly common view that policing was literally invented in the antebellum South purely to enforce slavery, because in ancient Rome if someone came in your house and stole your stuff you’d just be like “oh damn, that sucks.” Is there a relationship between modern policing and slavery? Of course. Does the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow infect modern policing at every point? Sure. Should we make political and policy decisions that recognize that historical influence on policing, especially given the racist reality of policing right now? Yes. But what good does it do anyone to pretend that the concept of “the police” is 250 years old? Why on earth would we get the correct shit we do believe tangled up with this bizarre shit we don’t believe? (The professor in that video does not herself honestly believe the police were invented to support African slavery in 18th and 19th century America.) Because this utterly ahistorical idea is being promulgated by people who claim to speak from a position of justice, we are forced to assign seriousness to it that it hasn’t earned, seriousness that it could never deserve. Because we live in a world of mutual delusion. Because of kayfabe.

…

And the fact that some will wrinkle their noses about this piece and its arguments, go about their days of progressive performance art, and pretend they don’t believe every word they just read? That’s kayfabe, my friend. That’s kayfabe. And we’re trapped in it, all of us, you and I. You know it’s all bullshit. Will you keep the code anyway? I’m willing to bet that the answer is yes.

[new-caba]

Response to a Noelle Stevenson interview

This is a publication from my other blog which Tumblr trolled and shut down my reach.

--

I want to respond to some stuff Noelle Stevenson said in this interview.

“Their arc is the arc of the show. It always has been,” showrunner Noelle Stevenson told The Times in a recent phone call. “Every season is about this relationship, even when they’re the farthest apart.”

True, but your narrative is confusing about that. I am sick of people saying "It’s getting annoying the amount they’re focusing on the two” and they say this because, while there are times when the narrative wants to discuss Adora’s past, her relationship with the Horde people and the connection she has with Catra, there are way more times when it pretends she’s just a generic mystical warrior who is cool on her own and beat the bad guys just for fun (usually putting Catra’s life at risk in a non reciprocate way) and ignores that Adora even has a personality other then “to be so much better then what she has done in the past”, and “so much stronger then everyone that she can deny herself as much as she wants” as if those were a positive things. Almost focusing on how strong she is because she can resist abuse, implying that those who aren’t that strong are “bad victims”. That’s what she means by “I will not be controlled” in 4th season.

Adora is just using She-ra as a way

to run away from her internalized homophobia, that’s what being She-ra means to her and that’s the brilliant main narrative. Hear me up: she wants Catra because the old friend reminds her of a safe place to explore and have fun, in a way that this perfect being everyone wants her to become doesn’t allow, and her becoming everyone’s savior is just fueling this problem. However, they imply her heroism is a good thing, so how can it be that her opposite desire, the desire to live a happy life with her love, is the main narrative? Being She-ra (a miraculous problem solver) is her main narrative. If she used She-ra as a way to protect herself, her friends and the love of her life I would find her really cool, but she just used it to run away from herself.

To recapitulate, in the first season, the story is indeed about Catra and Adora because it is about Catra trying to survive with dignity without the help of Adora, and it is about Adora trying to understand how to get the help of the princesses to fight the war. But in the end Adora realized that the fact she has overlooked Catra was a problem because now Catra came back as a leader and she doesn’t know how to go about that.

This would be fine if the second season was directed to the two of them at least trying to get along or to talk about each other, in order to continuous with this theme of them growing up to their own life paths without letting to have a connection, healthy or not. But instead it becomes about Adora mindlessly fighting some battles and Catra alone doing the job of trying to achieve something to herself and to the Horde people in general. When Shadow Weaver runs away from her, she starts to loose hope she will ever have support to continuous. She feels like no one will ever help or love her, and if they do, she better just protect them while she dies, because she does not deserve it. And this is all being reinforced by the way Adora is treating her (being a brutal bully).

In the 3rd season, when Shadow Weaver returns to Adora, the protagonist realizes she had again been neglecting her own past traumas and wants to interact with the witch, to be close to her again. It would be a good continuation of Adora’s story with the Horde people, and, by consequence, with Catra, if she used the witch solely to achieve what she needed, but no. That’s eeeeevil, right? She did someting muuuuuch better: guaranteed the witch was around and always interacting with her, putting bad ideas in her head and aligning herself with Glimmer to be able to torture Catra again. She even says she wanted to believe there was something good in Shadow Weaver still, and to me this feels like she’s just trauma bonding. You cannot expect this person to be nice, it’s not reasonable.

It’s funny that Catra is unforgivable to the point of having to let her go and “live with her ‘choices’”, but Shadow Weaver can do what she wants without consequences, and no one discussed that in the fandom, as far as I saw.

On the other hand, Catra has wanted to interact with the witch solely because she needed guidance, since she had to manage a war being only a teenager, but she kept her arrested. Which, given how harmful SW is, is quite a reasonable boundary until you find a better way to handle her with safery. Still, all the blame of the world falls on her for having been mean to her former mother. Much better to always let her loose, like Adora did, right? I see.

You can say what you want, but Adora could have fought Glimmer to demand the which was actually better locked up, they are in a war, for god’s sake! It is so important for social movements to actually know how to war in order to win those waring them first, yet this so-called “social justice” cartoon is preaching as a value the worse war strategy possible. You do not let the former leader of your enemy loose in a room of your castel if you’re at war, no amount of “non-violent” value is gonna make this make sense. Because it’s the most illogical thing ever. 

Adora is proving not to be trustable to Catra by guaranteeing the witch could pottentially go back to her, which she has proved many times to be very found of. Catra is seeing that Adora will always contribute to her suffering and never defend her. That’s what Catra realizes in the Crimson Waste after Adora says to her she’s living with Shadow Weaver. The feeling is like “it’s me or Adora, I need to act before Adora can control my life and I have no choice but to live in hiding”. She’s not wrong. 

And what good did it do that Adora went to the Crimson Waste, really? Like, what was the point of the mission? Why was that narrative arc important to her? She was just driven by Shadow Weaver’s misguidance. She didn’t learned shit there. She should have learned stuff by talking to Razz and to the princesses about their history, you know. Prioritizing herself in the relationship she had with her friends, so that they helped her figure stuff out. But the narrative wants to mean it’s evil to put yourself first. It’s not, suggesting that is just denial. Why is Catra being the one accused of isolating herself, when she has great reasons not to trust anybody, while Adora is isolating herself in the same way, even though she has trustable friends? Who’s the wrong one there?

And don’t come with the talk Catra could have just lived in the Crimson Waste, she’s not safe there, it’s not a safe place for a teenager who doesn’t know shit about the world to handle without help (or two, if you count Scorpia). It’s absolutelly cruel to suggest that.

It wasn’t just that Adora left. That was actually never really the issue at all,” explained Stevenson. “It’s that for Catra, Adora was her number one priority. Their relationship was her number one priority. And for Adora, it wasn’t.”

It was. Adora run away from the important stuff in battles to focus on Catra. Even when Catra is not in battle, Adora’s thinking she will be there and that she will be terrible. Adora is always thinking about Catra in a bad light, as if Catra was only thinking of destroying her. Catra had other issues going on. She’s first trying to prevent her former mother from killing her, then she’s trying to prevent Hordak from killing her, then she’s trying to take away the territories from the princesses -  rightfully, by the way, because the princesses abuse their power and use it to control Etheria at any cost, as seen by Glimmer in the 4th season, and as seen by the fact the princesses expect Adora to solve all their issues with security herself, as if Adora had to control everything for them with her divine powers. They continuous with this attitude until the 5th season, when Adora loses her sword and finally the princesses have to learn to get along and solve their own issues without her. Despite all the talk about magic friendship, the princesses of power only help each other in a meaningful way against the war in this last season, when Adora finally stops begging to serve them (even though what they were doing to her with these expecctations is still their fault, not hers). And Catra was there, trying to stop them and their toxidity all along. She was the one trying to do something useful. This idea Catra is just obcessed with Adora… like yeah, she is always very concerned with Adora, since the princess can’t stop stalking her, personally attacking and stigmatizing her. This is self defense. And it’s pure projection to suggest Catra is the obcessed one. Noelle you’re… lying to yourself.

Anyways, at the end, all Adora’s narrative arc always ends up in dead end. The sacred connections to the princesses was unproductive, her travel to the Crimson Waste was unproductive, literally everything she finds out about her story is an accident. And they’re blaming Catra for wanting to do something. It’s like they’re so afraid of telling this story that they are villanizing who wants it to happen.

[continuing the last comment] This backstory has made Catra one of the show’s most relatable characters, even though she’s a villain who keeps making bad decisions.

Catra is not relatable because she thinks she should be the priority of people’s life, she’s relatable because, unlike the protagonist, she has actual life problems and challenges like it was never shown on TV before. She is always being tortured, abused and, mainly, oppressed, she has no power what so ever and have to survive this reality. She loses faith in humanity and can get really dark because of it - as people do -, she makes messes because of it and have a hard time healing, even though she gets there, which feels empowering. This is just an ordinary narrative arc, nothing like “only making bad decisions”. You know what is not empowering? The comparations with her and bad people, like she was mean because of these difficulties. Her mistakes are not worse than the ones Adora makes out of trauma. Why is one the villain and the other, the good guy? I have said this in a thousen different times now, but this is discrimination against oppressed people, to call her a bad guy and elevate her to the same level of villains who have magic, body weapons and science on their side.

Also, she did not made bad choices. Not wanting to go into the unknown without protection like her attitude was in the frist season, taking seriously when powerful people threatened to kill her if she does not follow their orders like she did in the second season and not wanting to be in a land full of dangers having to intimidate everyone like she did in the third season, are not life mistakes. They are very healthy and helpful choices. You wasn’t able to sell the idea she was wrong to do so, because it’s a lie. It just made it seem unfair that she’s not the good girl.

Catra’s journey has involved realizing that “you are not always going to be the number one priority in the lives of the people that you love,” Stevenson said.

Catra was absolutelly right to demand stuff from Adora, who basically was running away from her own story. This is the biggest act of love you can do for someone, to stand up for them no matter what, even when they are confused. She did not have to learn how to give space to Adora, Catra knows how to take care of her own business and leave other alone, as she has done the whole series. More projection.

She’s also had to learn “that it is OK to ask for the things that you want, because people don’t always know. Her big, heroic moment in the final season is actually just being able to ask Adora to stay.”

Her big heroic act was to be resilient enough to continuous to do what she has always done, which is to ask Adora to be by her side. Even after Adora neglected her to her abusers to the point she was “raped by the pope” and she stoped believing she was worth of love. She didn’t had to learn that, she just had to not forget she knew that.

Adora’s journey has been about learning that being a hero is more complicated than the willingness to sacrifice yourself for the cause or for your friends.

“Putting the greater good at the top of your list is a good thing to do, but you still do have that responsibility to the individuals in your life who depend on you,” Stevenson said. “Your friends don’t want you to die and sacrifice yourself because they love you. They want you in their lives.”

Are you now suggesting her friends deppended on her? Because they didn’t. Why do you say that? I don’t understand that if it is about Glimmer and Bow, but if that is about Catra, yeah, Adora could have used her magic powers to fight against Catra’s abusers, so you can say Catra was dependent on her to do it and she didn’t. But Catra never directelly imposed Adora to go and do that because Adora could be feeling unprepared. That’s not something you impose on others if you’re a decent person. That’s why Catra tryed to handle what she could on her own in the secound season, before she could find some help. She didn’t want to demand help when people were not openly abled to help.

And this is related to the fact you believe there’s such a thing as heros, and is defending the hero idea. Also that you think there is such a thing as the greater good. Haven’t you learned anything watching Harry Potter? Seriouslly? Oh, wait. You’re probably calling J.K. R*wling a T*RF as you did with me, never mind (censored because my reach was canceled after I said JK’s name on the other account). No wonder you’re such a bully if you keep defending this idea. I won’t even respond, I will just quote Kiara again, ‘cause that’s too basic:

“we’re not here to save the world. we are here to empower ourselves and each other to embrace all of our divine missions here. and that collective effort changes our course rather than a single person taking the lead. […]

i’m not focused on being a hero because i’m self-aware. i’m aware of what my strengths and weaknesses are and radically accept them. that is how i can help and it’s the only way anyone else is going to be able to help. if people don’t start getting real with themselves about what they’re meant to do and not what they wanna impress people with, it’s going to be much harder. i’m focused on what i can do. i have surrendered. it’s not inaction. it’s strategy”.

Well, it was much harder to Adora, wan’t it? It could have been so much simpler if she just cared about herself. She only faced herself in the last secound, with Catra imploring her, as the sweet person she is, to please do stuff just so that people could live on earth to help each other and for nothing else. Funny that Adora is always trying to impress people being the cool She-ra and at the same time Noelle is like “She-ra is this uncomfortable cloth she had to wear”. Either it’s ok to live to impress other people, or it’s uncomfortable. This is cognitive dissonance. As Magdalen Berns used to say, if you have to think about what you’re doing, if you have to make an conscious effort, it’s not natural. Why is this so hard for people to understand?

During this final season, “They become good influences on each other,” Stevenson added. “Adora learns to be a little more selfish, while Catra learns to be good and to be selfless in the way that Adora is.”

Selflessness is such a sin. The fact Catra got selfless is more trauma inducing. Here’s more Kiara:

“virgo-pisces can represent the delusion that the idea of selflessness can become because to be selfless is to deny desire of the self in this physically embodied existence and to deny your humanity, to deny that you are an individual and that you are a Self. it is a complete act of dissociation from reality, where being of Self also means survival because it is also called SELF-preservation. to engage with delusional selflessness it is to project unrealistic expectations onto our world that we will never need something in return. that we can continuously give and give and give while also never asking for help to restore, rest, and be taken care of. it’s just not realistic to pretend we’re okay with being hollow. our resentment and bitterness prove that’s not true.“

Anyway, I hope both Catra and Adora can just become selfish.

I wish I didn’t love Catra that much not to get pissed with those interviews, but I will stop looking to articles like that now not to get the urge to respond. I have been away since Noelle pretty much confirmed my indignation trhough her actions against me on twitter, but this response was almost ready to publish in my drafts for a long time and I just wanted to go and put this out in the world once and for all, so here it is.

i have this dream that we would be able to take what we see in the media and make it our own, not to be so relyant on the vision of the creators and the industries. I don’t think it’s fine for modern society to keep mindlessly watching stuff without discussing it afterwards so that they can be a part of the construction of the narratives. But you see, it is really concerning not only that the creator of the one entirely lesbian show is playing so much mental gymnastics about her own creation to the point of contradicting herself, but that the whole crew, full of remarkfull writers and storytellers, are also doing it. No one said “oh, wait, this is confusing. We’re telling two opposite stories, one about two girls growing up and learning how to love each other, and the other about dissociating from yourself and mindlessly beating people without any connection or growth”. Like, if not even in the crew it is safe to discuss a narrative, the fandom will never be. That’s what i’m learning, even if I still like to see Catra and Catradora Fanart.

[tawakkull]

Spirituality in islam : Khuluq (Good Nature)

Good nature, in addition to meaning temperament, disposition, and character, is a goal to which a traveler aspires, for it is the most important dimension of creation. In brief, this station means that one is characterized (equipped) with God’s qualities or way of acting. For example, God is All-Forgiving; therefore, one must be forgiving. One who realizes this sacred goal can easily do every good thing or deed.

The words khalq (creation) and khuluq (nature) are derived from the same root word. Khalq relates to the external form or appearance, the visible, material, and experienced dimension of existence; khuluq is concerned with the spiritual dimension, meaning, or content. An individual cannot be judged or known by his or her outer appearance, for one’s real identity lies in one’s character, temperament, and natural disposition. However many different images one may project; one’s true character or temperament eventually will reveal itself. How meaningful are the following words of an Arab poet of the pre-Islamic Age of Ignorance:

If a man has a bad quality, sooner or later it will reveal itself;Let him continue to think that it can remain hidden.

In other words, the outer appearance is deceiving, for one’s natural disposition removes or corrects all deceptions and thereby reveals one’s true nature. Since one may acquire a second nature through education and habituation, moralists divide nature into good and bad. In the present context, we use “nature” to mean “good nature.”

The most correct standard of a good spiritual life, one that Sufism uses to describe or qualify a person, is good nature. One who has taken a few steps forward in good nature may be regarded as advanced in the spiritual life. Although miracles, dazzling stations, and superhuman actions may be acceptable when they issue from good nature, they are worthless if not combined with good nature.

When asked which believer was better on account of his or her belief, the Prophet Muhammad, upon him be peace and blessings, answered:

 The one who is better in conduct or nature. [ Sulayman ibn Ash'as al-Sijistani Abu Dawud, Sunan Abi Dawud, 4 vols. (Beirut, n.d.), 14; Ibn Hanbal, Musnad, 2:250. ] 

This is natural, because God praises and consoles His most distinguished servant the Prophet Muhammad, upon him be peace and blessings, not with His extraordinary favors but with his laudable virtues and praiseworthy qualities, declaring: 

You stand on an exalted standard of character (68:4). 

His nature was the aim and fruit of his creation. Since the Prophet’s conduct embodied Islam and the Qur'an, when his wife ‘A'isha, may God be pleased with her, was asked about his conduct by Sa'id ibn Hisham, she answered: 

Do you not read the Qur'an? His conduct is (the embodiment of) the Qur'an. [ Muslim, “Musafirin,” 139. ]

The verse: 

You stand on an exalted standard of character (68:4) 

shows that the incomparable conduct of the Prophet, upon him be peace and blessings, was based on the Qur'an. In addition to his outer and inner faculties and senses, and the material and immaterial aspects of his creation and character, the Prophet, upon him be peace and blessings, was endowed with all potentialities needed to be the most forward and greatest representative of human virtue. Developing these potentials to the highest degree possible, he attained the highest degree of human perfection.

Not content with this state, as is declared in the verse: 

Surely, in the Messenger of God you have a good example for him who hopes for God and the Last Day, and remembers God much (33:21), 

he established the most excellent example for his followers and thereby gradually transformed them into the most virtuous community of all time. With such sayings as: 

The most perfect in belief among the believers are the most perfect in conduct [ Abu Dawud, Sunan, 14; Ibn Hanbal, Musnad, 2:250. ]; 

A man can “cross” with good conduct the “distances” which he cannot with acts of worship and adoration [ Al-Haythami, Majma’ al-Zawa'id, 8:24. ]; and: 

The first virtue to be weighed in the Balance (in the other world) is good conduct, [ 'Ala al-Din 'Ali al-Muttaqi al-Hindi, Kanz al-'Ummal fi Sunan al-Aqwal wa al-Af 'al, 8 vols. (Beirut: 1985), hadith no. 5160. ] 

and by employing the perfect, fruitful principles he brought to perfect humanity, he guided his followers to the realms where angels move.

The signs of good nature have been summarized as follows: a person possessing this quality does not hurt anybody by either word or deed, overlooks those who hurt him or her and forgets the evils done, and returns evil with good. The Prophet, upon him be peace and blessings, who is praised with the verse: 

You stand on an exalted standard of character (68:4), 

is the most excellent example of these virtues. He was not offended by the one who stood before him and told him to be just, [ Al-Bukhari, “Adab,” 95; Muslim, “Zakat,” 142. ] by the one who pulled his robe from the back and hurt him, [ Al-Bukhari, “Khumus,” 19; Muslim, “Zakat,” 142. ] by the one who threw dust on his head and insulted him, or by the one who slandered his innocent and beloved wife 'A'isha. [ Al-Bukhari, “Shahada,” 15; Muslim, “Tawba,” 56. ] In fact, he visited each of these individuals when they became ill [ Abu Dawud, “Jana'iz,” 1. ] and followed their funeral processions. He did so because good nature was a dimension of his blessed existence.

Many people seem to be good natured, mild-mannered, and humanitarian, although good conduct and mildness are no more than affectations. When they experience a little irritation, anger, or harsh treatment, their true nature will be revealed. One who has good nature does not change his or her manners even when in a hellish state, but remains mild and shows no harshness. A heart open to good nature is like a very broad space in which one can bury one’s anger and rage. As for those intolerant and impatient ones who display bad conduct, they are, like Cain, more stupid than the raven, and can find no place to bury their anger, hatred, and ill feelings.

Let us conclude this discussion with the following couplet:

It is by good nature that a man can be perfected;

It is by good nature that the order of the world is maintained.

[casually-inlove]

I'm a bit curious about the change in He Tian's attitude towards Mo in some earlier 2016 moments. He looked like he was playing around with Mo and even taunt him then, but the kiss came out of nowhere, and he is now having a crush on the boy. What do you think that makes him interested in Mo in the first place, and at which point did he start taking their friendship seriously, and started loving Mo?

Hey there, anon!

That’s a fabulous question actually. At some point, I also wondered what it was that made He Tian interested in Momo to begin with, or when this transition actually happened, and I was addling my head a lot over it, lol. I can only speculate here, but nonetheless here goes.

First of all, let’s take a look at how OX initially presented He Tian. We saw a wealthy, privileged and somewhat snobbish boy, who enjoyed top grades and enduring popularity among other students. Hell, even the teachers were fond of him, while girls flocked around He Tian every break. Whatever he said or mentioned was being met with giggles and bashful sighs. You get the picture. 

Unfortunately, it’s all but a pretty wrapping. In reality, none of those people knows who He Tian really is. We as readers know that in fact, He Tian suffers from profound loneliness. We know that despite all that money, he barely has any noteworthy personal possessions. That he still experiences the aftershocks of childhood traumas. That his relationships with his family are deeply fractured. People who surround He Tian on a daily basis could be described as sycophants. Their adoration towards him is pretty shallow. They are so crazy about him why exactly? Because he’s handsome, rich, popular, etc. Not saying that it’s a bad reason to like someone, but it’s not particularly meaningful either.

Anyway, this leads me to my main point. He Tian is used to that sort of shallow attention and plays along with it for his own reasons. He’s used to people nearly applauding him for whatever he does. He’s used to people wanting to be near him. If we think back to his childhood, we’ll see that instead of a mother he had been (apparently) surrounded by maids (?), who were hired to care for him (and that’s apparently why he’s so bad at house chores, haha). 

Case and point: he’s used to being in the center of attention and having people bend over to his whims.

And then… cue Mo Guan Shan, who gives zero fucks about He Tian. Who gives zero fucks about his popularity or his money, who has the balls to tell him to bugger off in the rudest ways possible. Momo doesn’t dance to his tune, and that’s something new to He Tian, something he hadn’t experienced before.

So… Momo comes off as belligerent, dirty-mouthed school bully who is contemptuous towards those rich and powerful (he has reasons for that, but still Momo’s view is tinted through his own childhood experiences). There’s raw honesty in Mo Guan Shan and that initially fascinates He Tian. Let’s admit it: He Tian comes off as being bored or somewhat indifferent towards life. The fact that there’s one person who doesn’t bow and kowtow before him is refreshing. That’s probably one of the reasons why He Tian hires Mo to cook and clean for him in the first place. He’s bored and Mo is the cure to his boredom. A cure that runs his mouth, threatens to knock his teeth out and outright calls him fake and dangerous, haha.

If I were to give a Tvtrope to this one, it would be “I love you because I can’t control you”. He Tian cannot approach MGS normally, like how he would have approached anyone else. Friendly attitude doesn’t work with him. Momo truly reminds me of a stray dog that is used to people treating it so badly that it would bite the hand that tried to pet it. There’s also a matter of MGS being very prideful. That raw honesty of his doesn’t fade away even when He Tian gives him beatings or pays him to do house chores. Sure, he takes the money but he never sugarcoats his attitude, never hides his distaste for He Tian and people like him. He makes it clear that he HATES every second of being near HT or in his apartment, yet he manages to put it aside when needed. 

Anyway, I digress. I believe that fascination on He Tian’s part had been rather instantaneous. It may have very well happened during the fight between XiXi and MGS. Momo has shown that he didn’t follow any rules, and literally had a savagely pragmatic side to him (when he used a stone to hit XiXi). That was probably the moment when HT’s curiosity was aroused. He’s not used to seeing people like that.

The kiss scene is also very telling. From the easiness with which He Tian invades personal bubbles of the others, we can surmise that he thinks it’s no big deal, and if it’s no big deal to him, he literally thinks it’s the same way for everyone else. As I mentioned before, he’s used to people being willing to “give in” to him, hence he seems to have a mindset that he can take whatever he wants (like a spoiled brat, haha) and that nobody ever would mind — precisely because they are willing to begin with. This fails with MGS. Not only he reacts violently, he begins crying. That’s absolutely not the kind of reaction He Tian was expecting; you can blatantly see it written all over his face. He even asks Momo if he finds HT disgusting. 

I believe that’s when He Tian actually felt a pang of guilt for his doings. The way Mo Guan Shan reacted is extremely human and understandable. Someone he DESPISED came up and forcefully pushed their tongue into his mouth, forced him into a kiss that is by all means just another taunt or a joke, not to mention that by the looks of it, it was his first kiss — something that in many cultures is considered to be nearly sacred. And He Tian probably for the first time in his life experienced a rejection. He wanted someone who didn’t want him, and there’s nothing his cool reputation or money could do about it. He also realized that he disgusted somebody — also something new to him. The novelty of it all, the unexpected guilt — these are the new feelings in his otherwise stale daily life. Mo Guan Shan made him experience something dramatically different.

Another point is that there are rather obvious parallels drawn between Momo and that puppy He Tian used to care for. He saved that puppy from a violent mountain torrent and nursed it back to health, just like he saved Mo from She Li and the angry mob later. He Tian’s failure to protect that puppy from “death” (like He Cheng made him believe) is one of the unresolved issues of his past, which he tries to rectify (or I should rather say, prevent from repeating itself) with Mo Guan Shan. Subconsciously he might be projecting that dog onto Mo Guan Shan, although he seems to be very much aware of his own associations, as he calls Momo his puppy.

During the time He Tian spends taunting and forcing Mo to do stuff, he learns things that make him admire Mo. Like Mo’s refusal to sugarcoat his attitude, the fact that he’s shouldering a heavy financial burden, that he’s actually extremely hardworking, that he has pride and doesn’t entertain shallow ideas of being someone’s monkey on a display even for a princely reward. He Tian discovers traits that he likes. He Tian discovers that under that hard-shell hides someone very honest and raw.

Lastly, if you think about it, Momo and He Tian are somewhat very similar: both of them have been marked by isolation. Mo has been ostracized because of his father’s imprisonment, and grew up being mistreated by likes of She Li and possibly looked down on due to his poverty. He’s withdrawn into a shell out of fear of being hurt, and he the way he views others is marked by suspicion and trust issues. He’s used to people acting nasty to him and, as sad as it sounds, to Mo this is a normal occurrence. What’s abnormal and suspicious is when somebody pulls a random act of kindness on him. And that’s what makes him think “why? what’s their agenda? what’s the catch?”. He Tian, on the other hand, is isolated because of his money and family influence. People who surround him are sycophants, those fangirls and fanboys, whereas in reality not only they don’t care for who he is, they probably wouldn’t even believe if he admitted to being a broken bird. Cause that’s unfathomable, right? Someone who has been born with a silver spoon in their mouth cannot be unhappy or hurting or alone. On top of that, he also has experienced his trust shattered, by his older brother, no less. He feels betrayed. He Tian is just as lonely — if not more — as Momo. So I guess that makes them — two coyotes from the same hill? Or how that Chinese “two peas in the pod/birds of a feather flock together” saying goes, haha. But even still, Momo has something that He Tian never had: someone to love and fight for (Mo’s mom), a home where he’s cherished. I think on subconscious level He Tian craves that, and Momo enables him to vicariously live that life he never had. Does it even make sense? xD

At which point He Tian’s playing around grew into something more serious? I think the kiss episode was akin to a bucket of cold water doused over He Tian’s head that made him reconsider some of his ways. What really triggered his desire to help MGS was probably the plot devised by She Li and the consequent fight. It may have made him suspect that MGS with his financial issues is far more vulnerable to shady vultures than he initially thought and that MGS is walking on an edge here. A little push to the wrong side and he would end up in deep shit. It’s after that fight that He Tian realizes how much Momo is shouldering by himself, and it’s then when we see him try helping him, like getting him a part-time job in that photography studio. Incidentally, it’s also when he’s started to find out Momo’s other sides. Like him being industrious, or unwilling to entertain an idle crowd of onlookers, etc.

Undoubtedly, He Tian’s feelings grew after the mob fight, where Momo got badly injured. We actually see him scared of losing MGS. Not to mention his consequent visit to his father — well they do say absence makes the heart grow fonder. It’s also clear to me that Momo’s display of care (during He Tian’s nightmare) had a big impact on HT. That’s when his violent tendencies of forcing Mo gradually fizzled out and became a lot more playful.

So all in all, He Tian probably started to gain feelings once he realized that Momo had his reasons to act like a delinquent, and that underneath it all there lay a person with integrity, who had been simply disenchanted by life and the circumstances that befell on his shoulders.

Whelp, that’s again a long-ass post. These are but my speculations and I don’t aspire for it to be 100% accurate, but I think I jammed in most of my ideas here.