a soul on fire

oh sweetheart, don't you know i'm in love with you?

[mindful-and-motivated-deactivat]

We have to allow ourselves to be loved by the people who really love us, the people who really matter. Too much of the time, we are blinded by our own pursuits of people to love us, people that don’t even matter, while all that time we waste and the people who do love us have to stand on the sidewalk and watch us beg in the streets! It’s time to put an end to this. It’s time for us to let ourselves be loved.

C. JoyBell C.

[20somethingandstilllost]

Be the love you never received.

Rune Cazuli

[20somethingandstilllost]

It’s the hard things that break; soft things don’t break. It was an epiphany I had today and I just wonder why it took me so very, very long to see it! You can waste so many years of your life trying to become something hard in order not to break; but it’s the soft things that can’t break! The hard things are the ones that shatter into a million pieces!

C. JoyBell C.

More of her work (UK link)

(US link)

[20somethingandstilllost]

… I still hope that one day, you’ll stop being so damn logical and follow your heart and I still hope that your heart will lead you back to me.

Rania Naim

[infpisme]

Your strangeness is your beauty. You are incredible because you are odd, you cannot be classified into a type or a sort. Your flaws are wonderful weapons. Your zany ideas are the stuff of legend. Don’t worry about the nay sayers and the people who will mock you or are determined to fit you in a box and pull you down. In video games and in life, you know you are going in the right direction when you encounter obstacles and enemies. The most interesting people I know, the most successful people I know have fought their way there. They have been ridiculed and mocked. They have been betrayed by people who promised to love them and let down. They have lost jobs and hit rock bottom again and again and despite all these obstacles, they made a name and a success of themselves. Because you do not get to the top by being well liked all the time. Heroes and the most intelligent tend to be solitary creatures because they do not go with the flow, they are not part of the usual crowd. Being so well liked by everyone has its own problems, it means you have never pushed the boundaries or escaped your comfort zone just for a while so you can see what you can do. And eventually you become so lost in what others think or say about you, you lose the ability to become anything other than the skin of yourself you put on everyday. The only way you will find peace in this world is to just keep being you. Unapologetically, unabashedly you. And eventually you will find your tribe, you will find your passion, and you will find what moves your soul.

Nikita Gill, Your Weirdness Could One Day Change the World

[nonbinarypastels]

it will save y'all so much time, effort, and emotion if you learn to recognize the difference between someone who genuinely wants to engage with you and have an actual discussion and someone who simply wants to argue with you and drain you of all your energy because they get off on seeing people get frustrated.

the number one red flag for someone who is in the latter category is an inability to ever be wrong.

a person who believes they are right about everything all the time and refuses to even listen to arguments that disagree with or disprove what they’re saying is not someone you can engage with in a way that will end with a meaningful result. people who demand sources but refuse to look at them, people who refuse to read replies that break down what they’ve said because “i’m not reading all of that” or “you like [x thing that has nothing to do with what’s being discussed] so i’m not listening” or some other BS reason, and people who purposefully misconstrue what you’re saying in order to put you on the defensive or make you out to be saying something that you’re clearly not fall under this category.

[prokopetz]

I’ve seen a lot of videos going around of urban-dwelling critters coming to humans for help with various problems, ranging from boxes stuck on their heads to young trapped down a storm drain, and it’s gotten me to thinking:

On the one hand, it’s kind of fascinating that they know to do that.

On the other hand, setting any questions of how this sort of behaviour must have arisen aside for the nonce, does it ever strike you how weird it is that we’ve got a whole collection of prey species whose basic problem-solving script ends with the step “if all else fails, go bother one of the local apex predators and maybe they’ll fix the problem for no reason”?

[roachpatrol]

well, come to think of it, we’re at the top of the food chain but we almost exclusively hunt and kill prey out in the country. 

raccoons and possums and foxes and crows all succeed in an urban environment because they’re opportunistic and observant. and almost none of them would have observed us pounce on one of their species and then start eating it, you know? a lot of them would have observed that we scream and chase them out of wherever we don’t want them to be, but other animals are territorial too. but there’s a number of situations where humans feed whoever’s bold enough to take them up on the offer, and we do tend to pull garbage off of other animals as soon as they slow down enough for us to catch. ‘a human got me but nothing bad happened’ is a much more frequent thing than ‘a human got me and tried to eat me’.  

anyway like, we’re masters of our environment, we make weird shit happen all the time, we have lots of great food and sometimes we share, and we almost never eat someone. it makes sense for urban animals, over the last century or so, to just keep an eye out for opportunities to use us, and to pass the habit on to their kids. 

[tsfennec]

It really is a weird, funny thing. Like yeah, technically they’re predators, and they get pretty screamy, especially if you try to take any of their stuff… but given the chance it seems like they’d rather help us out and sometimes they’ll just randomly give you food, so???

I mean, I guess in fairytales and myths we’ve got our fair share of stories about dangerous people/creatures who might well kill you or otherwise ruin your life, but to whom people nonetheless turn for help in desperate circumstances. So it’s not like the perspective is exactly a foreign thing to our own mindset, really… It’s just that, y’know, we can’t actually go make a deal with the faeries when there’s something we can’t figure out.

(Which brings me to an interesting thought about the ubiquitous rule about never eating the faery food lest you find yourself forever unsatisfied with anything in the human world - and the potential parallels to the dangers of feeding wildlife human food lest they become addicted and too tame and dependent to be safe for either themselves or us. Hmm.)

[absurdistocchiolism]

Okay, but that last bit with the Fae…makes almost perfect sense.

Of the stories I’ve read, the food of the Fae, its origins and effects, are often strange and/or obscure.- Just like our food to most animals.

The Fae are strange beings that seem to know weird things that give them power or an edge over us.- Just like us to animals.

The Fae work and live by strange rules also often nonsensical or obscure to us.- Just like us to animals.

The Fae can easily obtain vast amounts of things we consider rare/precious/desireable, and have no problem with dishing it out wantonly for no other reason than amusement.- Just like us to animals.

The Fae sometimes are amused by having us around, but only on their terms and IF it amuses/intrigues them.- Just like us to animals.

GUYS, I SENSE A PATTERN….

[roachpatrol]

-they have arcane social conventions and the punishment for not paying the correct respects right is banishment, if you’re lucky, and death if you’re not.

-they have wild and unexpected parties where you’d least expect to find them, but if you’re bold enough to entertain them they’ll feed you and caress you and play with you all night.

-time runs strangely in their realm. their homes are summerlands: warm and bright, no matter the season. there is always fruit on their tables. but not everyone who comes in from the cold is let back out again.  

-their games are cruel and complex and unfair, but if you can beat them by their own rules you will access riches beyond imagining.

-sometimes they just fucking fuck with you, the fuckheads.

-they will absolutely steal your children away. when your children return— if they ever do— they will come back strange. they will have magic earrings or necklaces or bracelets. they will know things they shouldn’t. they won’t know things that they should. your strange children might survive, might even prosper, might take wives and husbands and have children of their own. but they will always be marked by their time away from your world.

-the price for pissing them off is always death. sometimes just you. sometimes your whole community. 

-if you are very good, and very smart, and very brave, they will grant your wish.

[teal-deer]

- they aren’t quite immortal, maybe, but they live a long, long time. Whole generations might grow up in the shadow of one of their nests. When one dies, it is a great and sad event, and many come from miles around to cry. 

[thatwhobumblesabout]

@scatteringmyashes

[themageofbreath]

@crooked-tarot-rp @eyesoftirnoch

[felderwin]

kavinsky: look, if you don’t want to date me, and you say you don’t want to date gansey, then who?

ronan: 

[wlw]

its ‘im ready to be loved’ o'clock

[vladtheunfollower]

man responding to something a woman said: actually this is true. I mean, fair enough, this is surprisingly accurate. I would have phrased it like this, but you can still extract some value from this statement as it is actually fair enough if you like and see it that way maybe

[jean-valjean-moreau]

joseph kavinsky:

[gothpout]

everything’s ok!!!!! gr8!! I want to get hit by a car!!!!!

[therepublicofletters]

Athena Pallas, Rembrandt van Rijn.

What is the holiness of empire?  It is to know collapse. –Anne Carson

[avpd-chekov]

don’t you just love how mental disorders are basically buy one get seven free

[cestnepasuneblog]

I didn’t even really want the first one my mum made me buy it

[dorky-lesbian]

Mine’s a family heirloom, passed down through generations

[notbecauseofvictories]

I joke about it bu tno one listens to me like you nerds on the internet, I don’t know what’s real I talk a good absolutist game (it’s the catholic in me, we love absolutist shit, absolute truth absolute morality absolute Absoluteness, but I’ve never been wholly sure except that what’s in me tends towards the Absolute, I love Truth I’d do anything for Truth, a fingernail of Truth, a sliver, an honest word—-if there were any doubt I am a ravenclaw, I care more about knowing what is Right than almost anything) but I don’t know, I really don’t

all I’ve got is that sometimes I make people feel things with well-organized scratchings I love that (I do)

people write to me, anonymously or not, and talk about how there’s something happening to them that made them feel a Thing, and I wrote something that made them feel better about that Thing, differently about the Thing, and I am so privileged, I am so honored by that empathy. I am humbled by it.

there’s an ancient Roman humorist, one of those -us fuckers, who wrote “nothing human is alien to me” and maybe he meant it sarcastically, ironically, but nemi homini something something—-I took Latin a while ago, but I believe that, there’s something essentially human and striving that understands all the human condition, that if you say “I feel—” will respond in kind.

I think it’s a soul (that’s the catholic in me) but it doesn’t matter.

maybe it doesn’t respond without prompting, without discussion and careful listening to other stories, without narrative training. Without everyone having the exercise of stepping into another skull, however strange,unreal. Fiction provides the easiest training, empathy with those who never existed, never will, in the hopes that those who do and are will share in that mercy. Humility and kindness, that you are not the only mind that enjoys the world, that thinks, that feels sadness and joy, that is worth of inhabiting. But I do believe it.

Nothing human is alien to me.

[lvd2]

eye contact is so intimate im saving it for marriage

[smilingformoney]

the fbi man is my favourite tumblr meme because it’s highlighting the absurdity of the idea that a highly trained, highly educated specialist is reading through our dumb tumblr blogs looking for security threats. it’s a ridiculous scenario but it’s also very possible in 2018, and we react not by exclaiming “INVASION OF PRIVACY!” but by treating it as a normal situation and saying hello to the fbi man.