Conversations

Everything I scribble on post-its, now available in handy tumblr form.

[katrinaotuonye]

“My body has done her best to keep me swimming in the salty, cold Pacific Ocean, hiking hot golden slopes in Italy, hoofing wet cobblestones in Manhattan, taking in the taste and scent of tea and smoke and chocolate and the rain, hearing symphonies and church bells and crashing waves and morning birds, witnessing night stars and my suitor’s dark, luminous hair, feeling on my skin the insistent wind and the lapping sunlight and the freshness of silk and the comfort of hot water, to wake me after surgery, to wake me after a night of sleep, to conceive, gestate, and bear my child. To give me a life, in other words.

…I can choose to give her shame, or to give her flowers.”

3 Wonderful Revelations from Having a Middle-Aged Body

I'm surprised to realize how I feel about medicine, sex, and youth

[katrinaotuonye]

“I just wanna inspire women to trust the path, identify your purpose, understand the importance of sitting with yourself, of being quiet, because that’s when God speaks to us. The more you do it, you’ll be able to identify your truth, learn to separate the ego from the heart. A little ego is good. But the ego can’t drive the car. The journey to self-love is never mastered because we are going to make mistakes along the road. Every time you make a mistake, that is your tap on the shoulder to love yourself deeper, to get to the lesson and to forgive yourself for your mistakes, but also forgive others. And call bullshit when you see bullshit — without an apology. You can just say, ‘That’s bullshit,’ and then you can go on your merry way.”

Nia Long Isn’t Romanticizing the Past

She’d rather live in the moment and lift up the next generation in Hollywood.

[katrinaotuonye]

It's my 13 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

Ah yes. Lucky 13.

[katrinaotuonye]

“…And love means nothing unless we are willing to be responsible for those who love us, as well as those whom we love. People don't just love you out of the blue, you let them. And people have loved me when I needed to be loved. So as an adult I must give some of that love back to those who want it, or it will all have been for nothing.

I think I'm no different from any other colored girl, who has to grow up and make decisions and live by them. I think we are all capable of tremendous beauty once we decide we are beautiful, or of giving a lot of love once we understand love is possible, and of making the world over in that image should we choose to. I really like to think a Black, beautiful, loving world is possible. I really do, I think.”

- Nikki Giovanni

[katrinaotuonye]

“If I make better work later, I still won’t work otherwise than now; I mean it will be the same apple only riper — I myself won’t turn from what I’ve thought from the start. And this is why I say for my part, if I’m no good now, I won’t be any good later either — but if later, then now too. For wheat is wheat, even if it looks like grass at first to townsfolk — and the other way round too.

In any event — whether people like or don’t like what I do and how I do it, for my part I know no other way but to wrestle with nature until such time as she reveals her secret.”

- Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his brother, Theo

480 (483, 393): To Theo van Gogh. Nuenen, on or about Monday, 26 January 1885. - Vincent van Gogh Letters

[katrinaotuonye]

“…We all know, sometimes life’s hates and troubles

Can make you wish you were born in another time and space

But you can bet your life times that and twice its double

That God knew exactly where he wanted you to be placed…”

[katrinaotuonye]

i am running into a new year

and the old years blow back

like a wind

that i catch in my hair

like strong fingers like

all my old promises and

it will be hard to let go

of what i said to myself

about myself

when i was sixteen and

twenty-six and thirty-six

even thirty-six but

i am running into a new year

and i beg what i love and

i leave to forgive me

- Lucille Clifton

[katrinaotuonye]

"I ask you, dear sir, to have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms, like books written in a foreign language. Don’t try to find the answers now. They cannot be given anyway, because you would not be able to live them. For everything is to be lived. Live the questions now. Perhaps you then may gradually, without noticing, one day in the future live into the answers."

- Rainer Maria Rilke

[katrinaotuonye]

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

- Sharon Begley

Hank Green on TikTok

Sharon Begley died in 2021 but her legacy lives on not just in one quote but in a four decade career in science journalism. (posted by @Payt

[katrinaotuonye]

“what we will become

waits in us like an ache.”

— Lucille Clifton

[katrinaotuonye]

“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

- Toni Morrison

[katrinaotuonye]

...I saw something that a friend of mine wrote, addressing some of the kids in her parish who kind of said, 'I don’t really feel like saying alleluia this year, it doesn’t feel joyful to me.' And she kind of said, 'Alleluia isn’t necessarily about joy, it’s actually about protest.' It’s about protest against death and darkness and the forces of evil, and so we say 'alleluia' not because we’re happy, but because we believe that there is more.

Rev. Kira Austin-Young

[001001001001001001]

“Sisu is a Finnish word that cannot be translated properly into the English language, loosely translated to mean stoic determination, bravery, guts, resilience, perseverance and hardiness, expressing the historic self-identified Finnish national character. Sisu is about taking action against the odds and displaying courage and resoluteness in the face of adversity. Deciding on a course of action and then sticking to that decision against repeated failures is Sisu. It is similar to equanimity, with the addition of a grim quality of stress management. The pertaining adjective is sisukas, “having the quality of Sisu”.”

— Wiki

[katrinaotuonye]

Michelle Williams Celebrates Equal Pay During Emmy Win for 'Fosse/Verdon'

Williams said that the win felt like "an acknowledgement of what is possible when a woman is trusted to discern her own needs, feels safe en

“Thank you so much to FX and Fox 21 studios for supporting me and paying me equally, because they understood that when you put value into a person, it empowers that person to get in touch with their own inherent value. Where do they put that value? They put it into their work. And so the next time a woman, and especially a woman of color — because she stands to make 52 cents on the dollar compared to her white male counterpart — tells you what she needs in order to do her job, listen to her. Believe her, because one day she might stand in front of you and say ‘thank you’ for allowing her to succeed because of her workplace environment, and not in spite of it.”

[katrinaotuonye]

[katrinaotuonye]

1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.

2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.

3. Your real life is with us, your family.

4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.

Toni Morrison

[katrinaotuonye]

Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.

W. S. Merwin