relentless tenderness.

[frak-all]

[halfmongrel]

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

halfmongrel:

Annie Lapin, Thing That Happens to Memory, 2013, Oil and mixed media on canvas, 32 x 25 inches via

[nevver]

John Baldessari, RiP

[weltenwellen]

Maggie Smith, from “Rain, New Year’s Eve”

[rjm--rjm]

sent my tumblr to someone to look at, and realised via the archive just how long it’s been since i’ve really been here. eleven years of tumblr is a long time. i was so different when i began and so much has changed - and lots changed because of this space and all the people i found here, the people who found me, the tool this became to piece it all together. those 2012-2017 years were a heady time, weren’t they? the reblogging subconscious, the inability to say what i wanted to say paired with utter compulsion to write things down. there are so many private posts here, so many drafts. i can look at most all of the things i wrote and know exactly what it means, remember exactly why i had to write it, feel it all so viscerally (like always).

these days things are simpler; i think i’m simpler and i understand myself a lot more. but i write so much less and i hate that. new year goals are overrated but i have two and they are: make a garden and write at least once a week. not here, but somewhere. with my hand. write to make sense of existence, and to find the ineffable in the specific, and because words are the greatest, greatest gift. write to find better words. write to get better, to be better.

2019 was my best year, but 2020 might be something else entirely. it’s hard to see it clearly right now, but i think soon i’ll know. 

“this place could be beautiful, right? you could make this place beautiful.”

[nobrashfestivity]

Gerhard Richter  From ELBE, 31 monotypes  1957

[luthienne]

“It is an aching kind of growing.”

— John Steinbeck, East of Eden

[soracities]

Film Interiors Betty Blue (1986), dir. Jean-Jacques Beineix

[nevver]

Delftware, Helen Hauss

[nevver]

Paradise falling, Alana Celii

[nobrashfestivity]

Georgia O'Keeffe, Light Coming from the Plains 1, 2 and 3, 1917. Watercolor on paper

[red-ibis-red]

There’s a new floor there’s a pathway through the grass. The grass is not growing yet it has already grown the grass is always growing.

The rooms beyond rooms grow lanterns, push curtains aside, have steady gazes.

I knocked all the scenery down, I told you I could fly, I looked you in the eye.

My body is a blazing fire, a stubborn refusal, a rich defiance. My body is as calm and cool as grass.

[rjm--rjm]

hey tumblr i’m so tired of pretending i’m ok.

[danger]

[quotablewomen]

“I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.”

— Flannery O’Connor

[elisabeth-reidy]

“An honourable human relationship - that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” - is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.It is important to do this because in so doing we do justice to our own complexity.It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.[…]It isn’t that to have an honourable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that i can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us.”

— Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying” in Lies, Secrets, and Silence

[numinousobject]

as if a world opened but only to tell you it could not hold you