A Little Sunshine

Sophia. Intensely curious. Voracious reader. Professional multitasker. Living at: Facebook Last.fm Twitter Goodreads Smarterer Instagram Kindle Highlights Following: Acupuntura en Zaragoza Brilliantly Disruptive Cerveza, Dinosaurios y Sexo Adolescente Dani Solà Daytrotter Disasther Equipo Team Improve English grammar and vocabulary Learn English Online Linkita Lo Dice Diana Aller Los Mundos de Elena Michael Gradek Ofertas Empleo No Surprises Open Source Classifieds Recetas de todo el mundo Surf Para Principiantes Temporary Email Address Teorías del Absurdo Vintage Sunglasses

[sophiacasas]

Do you think human creativity matters? Well, hmm. Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry. Right? They have a life to live, and they’re not really that concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems or anybody’s poems, until their father dies, they go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don’t love you anymore, and all of a sudden, you’re desperate for making sense out of this life, and, “Has anybody ever felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud?” Or the inverse — something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes. You love them so much, you can’t even see straight. You know, you’re dizzy. “Did anybody feel like this before? What is happening to me?” And that’s when art’s not a luxury, it’s actually sustenance. We need it.

Ethan Hawke, Give yourself permission to be creative - via Kottke, via Swissmiss

[sophiacasas]

I don't think that loving yourself is a choice. I think that it's a decision that has to be made for survival; it was in my case. Loving myself was the result of answering two things: Do you want to live? 'Cause this is who you're gonna be for the rest of your life. Or are you gonna just have a life of emptiness, self-hatred and self-loathing? And I chose to live.

Lizzo

[sophiacasas]

Self-Portrait With No Flag

i pledge allegiance to my homies to my mother’s small & cool palms to the gap between my brother’s two front teeth & to my grandmother’s good brown hands good strong brown hands gathering my bare feet in her lap i pledge allegiance to the group text i pledge allegiance to laughter & to all the boys i have a crush on i pledge allegiance to my spearmint plant to my split ends to my grandfather’s brain & gray left eye i come from two failed countries & i give them back i pledge allegiance to no land no border cut by force to draw blood i pledge allegiance to no government no collection of white men carving up the map with their pens i choose the table at the waffle house with all my loved ones crowded into the booth i choose the shining dark of our faces through a thin sheet of smoke glowing dark of our faces slick under layers of sweat i choose the world we make with our living refusing to be unmade by what surrounds us i choose us gathered at the lakeside the light glinting off the water & our laughing teeth & along the living dark of our hair & this is my only country Safia Elhillo

[sophiacasas]

[sophiacasas]

I am worn out with civility. I have been talking incessantly all night, and with nothing to say. But with you there may be peace. You will not want to be talked to. Let us have the luxury of silence.

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

[sophiacasas]

Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses like these, swapped back and forth and over again.

Michelle Obama, Becoming

[dailyoverview]

Dendritic drainage systems are seen around the Shadegan Lagoon by Musa Bay in Iran. The word ‘dendritic’ refers to the pools’ resemblance to the branches of a tree, and this pattern develops when streams move across relatively flat and uniform rocks, or over a surface that resists erosion.

Instagram: https://bit.ly/2EjiHLR

30°27'24.3"N 48°55'46.0"E

Source imagery: DigitalGlobe

[sophiacasas]

Good bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful. Maggie Smith

[sophiacasas]

[the-bookshop]

Source.

[austinkleon]

Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.

David Foster Wallace (Michael Schur keeps this quote in his office as inspiration for The Good Place)

[sophiacasas]

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.

- Desmond Tutu

[justsomeopinions]

Mood (Paquita Salas)

[dailyoverview]

Last month, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured this amazing Overview of a swirling green phytoplankton bloom in the Baltic Sea. Blooms like this spread across the northern basins of the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans every summer, often spanning hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles. Scientists believe these blooms to be cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae — an ancient marine bacteria that captures and stores solar energy through photosynthesis.

Instagram: https://bit.ly/2Ppd54H

59°31'40.0"N, 23°21'23.0"E

Source imagery: NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

[april-is]

April 29, 2010: The Talker, Chelsea Rathburn

The Talker Chelsea Rathburn

The details of his story aren’t the point, nor is the listener, who looked as bored as we, two accidental eavesdroppers in a London restaurant. The point is, well, his point, which after ten long minutes he came to abruptly, and with a flourish, saying slowly and in perfect seriousness, “All we are is dust in the wind. All we are. Is dust. In the wind.” I think we bit our fingers to keep from laughing, I know we mocked him through Paris, Barcelona, Rome, and even years later, when one of us became a little too serious, the other would turn and quote his quote again, jabbing the air as he had jabbed the air. I picture him still sitting in some café, proclaiming we were always born to run or urging wayward sons to carry on the way we tried to carry on, the couple at the next table who couldn’t help but listen, with so little of our own to talk about.

==

[I was lucky enough to take a writing workshop with Chelsea Rathburn this year, where she talked about using meter, and I wouldn’t have even noticed the iambic pentameter she uses here without that. I think it’s such a great illustration of how meter can structure a poem while still seeming so natural and conversational it fades completely into the background.]

On this day in…

2009: There Are Many Theories About What Happened, John Gallagher 2008: bon bon il est un pays, Samuel Beckett 2007: Root root root for the home team, Bob Hicok 2006: Fever 103°, Sylvia Plath 2005: King Lear Considers What He’s Wrought, Melissa Kirsch

[sophiacasas]

[dailyoverview]

Check out this Overview of Aquatica, a water park in San Antonio, Texas. Constructed in 2012, Aquatica boasts several water slides, pools, a 42,000-square-foot beach area, an aviary, and its signature “Stingray Falls,” a family raft ride that runs through an underground grotto full of stingrays and tropical fish.

Instagram: https://bit.ly/2EYfdtR

29°27'30.3"N, 98°41'53.3"W

Source imagery: Nearmap