thoughts-meander - Tumblr blog

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girl what's wrong? are you experiencing the sylvia plath fig tree in your head again?

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James Baldwin talking about love

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Jenny Bloomfield

seasoflife

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Francis Self-love Spiral"

Gary J. Marecic (@lildoodoobutt)

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can I not earn a living wage simply from being a genuine joy to have in class

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My journey of deconstructing old beliefs is finally slowing down. I no longer feel like there are layers of unexamined beliefs that shroud my inner truth. The beliefs are there, but it is all less tangled now. The unlearning, unlearning, unlearning has defined the last ten years or so for me. It is such a cliche to overcome your Catholic guilt, but only because its true. Today, I feel so connected to myself as a friend and collaborator, and I do not feel guilty just for enjoying my life the way I want to.

This has given me space to reflect on what facets of Catholicism I actually still identify with and want to keep. The concept I keep returning to is forgiveness. It is such a huge part of what I was taught: that to be a good Christian, one must forgive others for their sins. Beyond that, it is because of the forgiveness of God and sacrifice of Jesus that we may experience eternal peace.

Forgiveness is a form of surrender, and surrender is the core of my spirituality. To surrender your ego, surrender your ethics, surrender your mortal life, surrender your trust to another soul, surrender your pride, surrender your pain. So much of this journey has been learning how to let go.

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I am still learning more about my brain all the time. Today the focus is on the function of rumination. Passing through the thought loop over and over until you are confident that it looks correct. It's the same thing that makes me a good singer, the urge to repeat a sound again and again until it feels right. When read a message over and over again after sending. When you hurt a friend, so you replay the memories over and over again until you see what they saw.

I was fooled, because sometimes the rumination is fun. It is fun to be obsessed with something, even if for an hour. It encapsulates you. It's not hard to see how damaging rumination can be, though. I recognize this feeling from my dark hour of depression, when my thoughts were so toxic and cruel to myself. They replayed over and over, digging me into a deep hole of self loathing.

I want to stand with rumination as a function of my brain- it is not a curse or something to rid myself of. Only to harness for things that deserve my looping attention, like poetry.

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“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish.”

— Simone de Beauvoir (via macrolit)

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this morning I am thinking about the way a space becomes charged by repeated action. Like how would a room that has held a lot of prayers feel different from a concert venue? I'm thinking about your heartbeat imbuing the space in front and behind your chest with its signature and becoming an energy center. The way repeated thought changes your mental landscape, how can intention change the energetic landscape of a space without adding items? If you clap in the room you're in, the air will feel crisp..if you're sensitive to that anyway

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JULIE ANDREWS in Victor/Victoria (1982) dir. Blake Edwards

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Aurora on Saturn's south pole.

Instagram: nasahubble

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distorted light in new hope

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Gustav Klimt ~ Tragedy (1897)