orange dreaming red

I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—that the light is everything—

[sagewraith]

The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind, and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.

Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

[robert-hadley]

Frits Thaulow - A GARDEN PATH

Source: Sotheby’s.com

[urgetocreate]

Janet Fish (American b.1938) Bag of Tangerines, 2000, Oil on canvas

[sovietunions]

“You won’t allow me to go to school. I won’t become a doctor. Remember this: One day you will be sick.”

—

Poem written by an 11 year old Afghan girl 

This poem was recorded in a NYT magazine article about female underground poetry groups in Afghanistan. An amazing article about the ways in which women are using a traditional two line poetry form to express their resistance to male oppression, their feelings about love (considered blasphemous).

Here’s the link

(via thexpotent)

[havingapoemwithyou]

the undertaking by Louise Glück

[intactics-deactivated20211231]

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw - but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of - something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it - tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself - you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for”. We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

[weltenwellen]

Wildness Before Something Sublime Leila Chatti

[redlipstickresurrected]

Salman Toor (Pakistani, b. 1983, Lahore, Pakistan, based Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY, USA) - Floating Bookshelf II, 2018, Paintings: Oil on Panel

[dreamsofacommonlanguage]

Mary Oliver, ‘Summer Story’ in Red Bird (2008)

[weltenwellen]

Wildness Before Something Sublime Leila Chatti

[uglyfruit]

[ID: Three scraps of fabric with red outlined text embroidered onto them. The first one is a pale orange fabric whose text reads “you’re safe”. The second one is a pink fabric whose text reads “you’re forgiven”. The third one is a white fabric whose text reads “you’re holy”.]

[patronsaintofweepingmothers]

"antique store, portland" (2006), lovely librarians

[weltenwellen]

Hieu Minh Nguyen, from “Heavy”

[dreamsofacommonlanguage]

Being queer saved my life. Often we see queerness as deprivation. But when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me. I had to make alternative routes; it made me curious; it made me ask, "Is this enough for me?"

— Ocean Vuong

[inspiredsunnie]

[soracities]

Eavan Boland, “A Woman Painted on a Leaf”

[Text ID: “I want a poem I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.”]

[perennial-princess]