Scrumtrulescent

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Listening to shame

Shame is an unspoken epidemic, the secret behind many forms of broken behavior. Brené Brown, whose earlier talk on vulnerability became a v

Finally watched these. Good stuff

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“White Gauze”, Robert Mapplethorpe, 1984

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RIYL Burial, Hush Hush, Hyperdub, etc. 

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Misty Copeland

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“Think I like you best when you’re dressed in black from head to toe/Think I like you best when you’re just with me and no one knows”

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Why buy strawberries if you keep letting them go bad? Plump, juicy, really bright red. It's clear you don't think you deserve good things. Afraid to pluck a little greenery off and afraid of the freshness, the startling flavor and the seeds between your teeth. Everybody's got a problem with not finishing things they start. Get over it. Come sit next to me if you have everything to say. Sometimes we're all talk and no action. We wait and watch things slowly change color until they get fuzzy, until it's certain they'll make us sick. If I ate it: it'd be gone. If I threw it away: I'd be wasteful. So it becomes a non-thing with no purpose other than to mold. With this in mind, I'm biting into you now. I know you can feel it! Stop fighting me back. I don't know what we'll become. But at least I've got part of you in my mouth. I'm always shouting at you about intimacy while you're sitting in my lap. You want to know what my problem is? We never had fresh fruit at home.

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Teardrop

What they say about you isn’t true. You wouldn’t do that. You wouldn’t do that thing. A man you never knew is some friend of your friend’s. I told him how I think about how your life ended and he held my hand across the table (I didn’t say he could touch me). He said, “My friends knew him and they don’t think…

As if I had never heard this before.

“…they don’t think it was an accident.”

It was like he was giving me the delicate present of this idea, one I left among crumpled paper ages ago. Fuck men who think they can tell you things you already know. Such as: the ambiguity of your movements, and the type who wades into a river drunk at night. I was that type on the beach before. I kept a sleeping bag in the trunk of my car. I thought nothing of those suicide missions in moonlight, while you sipped from a sandy bottle, your image of me getting smaller and blacker as I took methodical steps toward the sea. 

(This is flash fan fiction about the romance between musicians Jeff Buckley and Elizabeth Fraser).

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Woah. I can't believe I still know how to do this. I can't believe it's been 20 years. If I could get onto the server I used to use, ten bucks says the same dudes are still there. When I was 16 and complaining about something, somebody said "Listen, this is the worst age. You want to be 21 and your parents want you to be 10." That stuck with me forever!

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Darren Waterston

LILT NO. 4, 2014 Watercolor on 19th century gold gilded 16 x 11.5 inches $3,400 

Represented by Greg Kucera Gallery

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Birdwings

Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror up to where you’re bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead, here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. if it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, The two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birdwings.

-Rumi

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"All a girl really wants is for one guy to prove to her that they are not all the same." -Marilyn

I feel extra happy for my dude today. He's been so encouraging while I chase all kinds of rainbows, and I love to see him get excited when he's teaching me how to do something new. 

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I followed you into the water knowing I would never return

by Tracey Emin 

Armory Show 2014 

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Orthodox priests pray as they stand between protesters and the police in Kiev early Friday.

My apologies, I can't find the photo credit for this amazing image.

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The Blues Highway

"It's the second day of an intense four-day road trip designed to follow the paths of bluesmen from their oppressive Southern homes to opportunity in Memphis, St. Louis and Chicago. While exploring voodoo history in New Orleans, driving up U.S. Highway 61 through Mississippi and wandering in and out of noisy Memphis nightclubs, we begin to think of the blues as a suitcase. When it first arrived from Africa with the slave trade, the suitcase contained pain and suffering. By the time people passed it north to Chicago in the 1940s, it had two other things -- electricity and hope."

-Steve Knopper in the Chicago Tribune, 1999

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Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.

Rainer Maria Rilke

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Keep It

Things I picked up for you but kept a secret the month we met:

A rock from a Canadian beach, smooth and black with two white rings around it like an enso. 

Hand crocheted toys for your cats: one hummingbird with a red flowered kiss; one duck with a pink bow and yellow bill.

A bottle of champagne I drank alone instead, pouring half down the drain when I'd had enough. 

You can have my heart or we can share it like the last slice - Drake

Mindfulness was in the news today: it's the hot wellness trend of 2014. I stopped my life for a minute but it's coming back. You didn't let me lose myself.

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other. -Rainer Maria Rilke

I've cataloged each tenderness. I recall them with beginner's mind every time I see your face.