[elektricity]

Nina Simone by Dezo Hoffman, London 1950

[doomhope]

[Image ID: Photo of Nina Simone sitting at a table in a naturally lit room full of windows. Her hair is pulled back and she wears a green and white striped tank top. She leans her head on her hand with a neutral expression. /End ID]

[mitskey]

mary oliver, 'august'/ vincent van gogh, 'at eternity's gate'

[leah-cultice]

Chu Wong by Nick Knight for V Magazine #124 Spring 2020

[a-quiet-green-agreement]

In his old age his father had lived by himself and said he sometimes woke in the morning and looked out expecting to see snow and found himself surprised by blossoming lilac. You would think a man would know, his father said, just by the light.

– William Kittredge, from “The Soap Bear,” We Are Not in This Together: Stories (Graywolf Press, 1984)

[afro-evolutionary-astrology]

If you’re not serious about healing, you’re not serious about your radicalism.

I don’t need book brain comrades who know more theory than their own thoughts and feelings.

I don’t need people who argue over sectarian minutia, while failing to understand the basic concepts of cooperation.

I don’t want smart friends, if their intelligence doesn’t form into their compassion and care and love for others.

I don’t want dusty books for comrades, I want human bodies and hearts and the vitality that comes when people are vulnerable, authentic, messy, powerful and humble.

Books are storehouses of important, but dead information, wisdom and knowledge belong to living traditions where people are experiencing and reflecting, rather than reading and regurgitating.

I need you to read your books and process your trauma and practice your praxis, and say your prayers and open your heart.

Do not put your ideology above your life, put it in your life, use to create spaces for life, to destroy the ideas, structures that stifle life, to open your heart back up to your life.

Politics isnt the only space that can offer us meaningful liberation; but that also makes us responsible for liberating ourselves from ourselves in the most internal and intimate of ways.

[blackwoolncrown]

“I don’t need book brain comrades who know more theory than their own thoughts and feelings.“

[outraspraias]

“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”

— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

[ardor-mohr]

“When he was nine, Dostoyevsky’s family bought a small country house in Darovoe. It was there that one day a peasant man, Marei, reached out and gently stroked the boy’s face. In prison, Dostoyevsky later said, ‘the memory came back to me and helped me survive.’”

— Laurie Sheck on Dostoyevsky’s Empathy

[nocturnvls]

Lous and The Yakuza | Tout est Gore

[mamma-wolf]

light touch # 39 by christine godden

[blushingenue]

Barbara Bouchet in AMUCK (1972).

[praying]

[metamorphesque]

Buffet Etiquette, Hieu Minh Nguyen

[closet-keys]

I was watching Shrek 2 and my wife and I were reflecting on how much transmisogyny was in it as jokes (e.g. “gender confused wolf” “ugly step sister” “women’s underwear” etc.) and it’s so extremely ridiculous to me the transphobes’ line that having positive representations of trans people (esp trans women) in children’s media would be “too confusing” for kids—because they are literally already making references to trans women in children’s media, they’re just doing it in the most offensive ways possible. Taking away all the empty cis rationalization of it, really they’re not arguing for kids to not see trans characters, they’re arguing that kids should see trans characters as demonized, fetishized, objects of ridicule and disgust. Like that’s literally the subtext in these “how do I explain this to my kids” conversations. They really mean “let me continue to explain this in ways that groom kids into hating trans people and themselves if they are trans”

[olreid]

shirley jackson, we have always lived in the castle

[heartshop]

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

[frankielou]

Jillian Hervey, Lion Babe for Galore

[holyisthenameofmyruthlessaxe]

“Naked hunger. Naked fear. When you look into a face and see the need, naked as peeled fruit. Naked prayer you don’t believe in, but pray anyway because you can’t help it, naked, stupid in your hope.”

— Like a Beggar, ‘Nakedness’ by Ellen Bass