my own holy book

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

[catrocketship]

[poemsforthesehours]

From Lucille Clifton's book, How to Carry Water. (BOA editions, 2021).

[9710144]

[thefamiliarstrange]

reposting leslie feinberg quotes the way facebook moms repost minion memes

[thefamiliarstrange]

[mercuryfountain-deactivated2024]

There’s something deeply political about which fears are normalized, regardless of how irrational or statistically unlikely they may be. To tell the truth I really don’t think much about crime. Have I lived an easy life? In some ways, but there are people with lives a lot easier than mine who are afraid to the point of total dysfunction of getting stabbed or mugged. Who then gleefully endorse the excessive isolation, codependence, and gender-based hierarchies that enable the more likely violence committed by people who actually know each other.

I told my bosses at my last job I was taking a weekend trip to Chicago and they said “gosh, be safe,” as if Chicago is nothing more than the Fox News “Chi-raq” depiction and not a multifaceted region with world-class museums, beautiful scenery, and endless joys and new experiences to be had, even (especially) outside the glitsy tourist areas. They are depraving themselves of all this joy and think all the sensory experiences they need can be found at an Olive Garden surrounded by a sea of asphalt.

Meanwhile, to be afraid of getting hit by a car is a problem for whiny libcucks who should just buy a truck instead, to be afraid when politicians and TV personalities explicitly call for your murder as a queer person is a matter of “hurt feelings,” and women are told to fear serial killers who jump out of alleys with zipties and told to get over their anxieties about intimate partner violence. None of it makes any sense.

[bucatinibucatini]

Bell Hooks has such a good quote about this in her book, All About Love. She says, “Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience. In our society we make much of love and say little about fear. Yet we are all terribly afraid most of the time. As a culture we are obsessed with the notion of safety. Yet we do not question why we live in states of extreme anxiety and dread. Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear- against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect- to find ourselves in the other.”

[endquire]

[catrocketship]

Every day I’m tryna shine a light on the DOOM + GLORY of your existence.

[myownholybook]

“An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.” 

-James Baldwin 

[thecalminside]

Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose.

Eckhart Tolle (via thecalminside)

[myownholybook]

Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do."

On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, chapter 4: take responsibility for the face of the world

[catrocketship]

Walt Whitman’s Advice on Living a Vibrant and Rewarding Life

via Brainpickings:

“The land and sea, the animals, fishes, and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the forests, mountains, and rivers, are not small themes … but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects … they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls.“

And yet he does indicate the path. In a passage partway between sermon and commencement address, he writes:

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

[lazeporn]

If it’s work, stop and do something else.

Ray Bradbury (via lazeporn)

[quotemadness]

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (via salvyaplath)

[catrocketship]

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” thank to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.

It’s MLK weekend and I am thinking a lot a LOT about this MLK quote that white people should know, that I am writing on my heart. (via catrocketship)

[goodreadss]

I paint flowers so they will not die.“

Frida Kahlo (via goodreadss)

[onlinecounsellingcollege]

Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.

Arthur Somers Roche (via words-and-coffee)

Encourage something else. Encourage what you want to have in your mind, because anxiety will take away everything else. 

(via catrocketship)

[catrocketship]

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu (via catrocketship)

[bloodedcelt]