Whatever Works.

Elizabeth [ih-liz-uh-buhth] , noun. twentysomething. seeker, explorer.

[195195119511951-deactivated2021]

Favorite Essays: Authors Writing About Children’s Literature

Roxane Gay on Sweet Valley High

Jia Tolentino on The Mixed-Up Files Of Basil E Frankweiler

Melissa Febos on Children’s Fiction and Ferdinand the Bull

Eula Biss on Little House in the Prairie

Aimee Bender on Goodnight Moon

Stephen Burt on the Fairyland novels

[heavyweightheart]

my friend said that whenever she has a bad feeling about her body/appearance, she asks herself “who profits off of this emotion?” and i really love how simple and incisive that is

[nogreatillusion]

“You go on by doing the best you can. You go on by being generous. You go on by being true. You go on by offering comfort to others who can’t go on. You go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days. You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.”

— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar (via girl-with-a-radio-heart)

[standingatthefence]

“Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.”

— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays (via diaisdivine)

[queengreendown]

I’m only still alive because I’m trying to get back to the ocean.

[theoldestchorusgirlintheworld]

My Culture is emotional young women who can’t do math and spend wreckless amounts of money all in one go on candles

[loveandknowledge]

“We often imagine love to be about a magical intuitive ‘connection’ with someone. But, in [Donald] Winnicott’s writings [about psychoanalysis], we get a different picture. It’s about a surrender of the ego, a putting aside of one’s own needs and assumptions, for the sake of close, attentive listening to another, whose mystery one respects, along with a commitment not to get offended, not to retaliate, when something ‘bad’ emerges, as it often does when one is close to someone, child or adult.”

— Alain De Botton, in an interview with The Daily Stoic

[toadpeee]

There’s something so inherently mystical about swimming to the bottom of a pool to retrieve something. Just gracefully swooping down with a purpose and puttering to the quiet bottom. I mean, yeah, I’m probably retreaving a lost toe ring or one of those soggy water ball things, but damn if I don’t feel like a mermaid princess searching for hidden treasure.

[emergentpattern]

Everything that is tearing us down today will become a memory, and this memory will be shared as an anecdote or a story or a poem or a play or a warning. It will be shared with another human being, who will then understand that he is not alone in his sadness. This is why we show up for others and tell our tales and listen to others. The great congregation meets daily, and you are someone’s angel today.

Tennessee Williams (via emergentpattern)

[asdfghjkllkjjhgfds-deactivated2]

choose people who choose you.

[deathmachinecalendargirl]

I am magic, even though / I am sad.

Alice Notley, “Mudsucking” (via deathmachinecalendargirl)

[fables-of-the-reconstruction-de]

Green was the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly.

Pablo Neruda, from “XL,” 100 Love Sonnets (University of Texas Press, 1986)

[metaphorformetaphor]

Sadness the blue like dusk, the reminder that all things are ephemeral, and that because there is time there is change and that another name for change, if you look back toward what is vanishing in the distance, is loss. But sadness is also beautiful, maybe because it rings so true and goes so deep, because it is about the distances in our lives, the things we lose, the abyss between what the lover and the beloved want and imagine and understand that may widen to become unbridgeable at any moment, the distance between the hope at the outset and the eventual outcome, the journeys we have to travel, including the last one out of being and on past becoming into the unimaginable: the moth flown into the pure dark. Or the flame.

— Rebecca Solnit, from “Moths,” The Faraway Nearby (Penguin Books, 2013)

[treedance]

So uh, what’s been going on while I’ve been gone?

Former president Barack Obama, in his first public appearance since leaving office, to his audience at the University of Chicago. Via The Hill. (via futurejournalismproject)

[meditationsinwonderland]

You’re looking for the explanation, the loophole, the bright twist in the dark tale that reverses your story’s course. But it won’t reverse - for me or for you or for anyone who has even been wronged, which is everyone. Allow your acceptance of the universality of suffering to be a transformative experience. You do that by simply looking at what pains you squarely in the face and then moving on. You don’t have to move fast or far. You can go just an inch. You can mark your progress breath by breath.

Cheryl Strayed (via meditationsinwonderland)

[nubbsgalore]

Happy #ObamaDay

(photos by pete souza, official white house photographer)

[nubbsgalore]

thank you.

[heylabodega]

friendly reminder probs best not to wear mascara to work tomorrow

[bostonpoetryslam]

Think about your favorite fruit and how it makes you feel. Everything you are going to be, you already are. Listen to the sound behind sound. There is a waterfall of old patterns falling out from you.

Ashley Opheim, “Where You Came From,” published in Potluck (via the59thstreetbridge)