A Bockward View on Life

[dk-thrive]

It was something that happened every year at this time, it recurred, and repetition is the whole point of life. Hope is like a new garment – stiff, tight and glittering – but until you try it on, you won’t know if it fits or suits you, while memory is like an old garment: no matter how pretty it is, it no longer suits you, you’ve outgrown it. Repetition, however, is like a durable garment that hugs you tenderly, but never constricts or swamps you. I was glad that I hoped for nothing, but why then this feeling of dread?

— Vigdis Hjorth, Repetition: A Novel (Verso Fiction, March 3, 2026)

[pokemonarchive]

🪸🌸 (2023) Illustrator: ekm

[whitepeopletwitter]

[tygerbug]

This is the money Marge. Reblog for good fortune

[chibird]

Level 2024 unlocked! Congratulations on completing level 2023, and here's to a brand new year of adventures (with 366 stars to collect since it's a leap year)! ⭐

Chibird store | Positive pin club | Instagram

[more-than-ideas]

Béa Henri

chuchotements des étoile

whispers of the stars

[purr-in-ink]

[clairvalon]

[dk-thrive]

what if your markers of success were how well you slept at night? how many books you read? how easily you laughed? how much time you spent storytelling, feeling warm in the arms and homes of people you adore.

[dk-thrive]

Maybe your bliss isn’t climbing a mountain or saving the world. Maybe it comes right where you are, as you are, sitting in quiet contemplation and appreciating the many ways you are blessed.

— Jody Doty, in "Meditations and Musings by Jody Doty" (Facebook, December 23, 2023) (via Make Believe Boutique)

[easily-evi]

posting the purple variant here because yes

[dk-thrive]

The measure of a community isn’t how it treats insiders, but rather how it treats outsiders.

And that’s when I realized a truth that should have been blindingly obvious from the start: The measure of a community isn’t how it treats insiders, but rather how it treats outsiders. It is easy to be kind to your friends and allies. And when you experience that kindness, it can turn a small-town community into something like a security blanket. This is where you belong. But when you experience cruelty, a small town can be something else entirely. It can make you feel trapped and uneasy, as if there is no place to rest, as if your home isn’t truly your home.

What is your experience like if you’re the only Black or brown person in a sea of white? What is your experience if your household is a blue island in a red ocean, or a red island in a blue ocean? How much grace is extended to you when you fall or stumble? How much tolerance do you experience when you disagree? That is the measure of a place, not its love for its favorite daughters and sons.

— David French, from "Try Tolerance in a Small Town" (The New York Times · July 27, 2023)

[zdf-deactivated20251121]

[dk-thrive]

To every house you enter, you must offer healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself, the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.

— Julia Kasdorf, from "What I learned From My Mother" in Sleeping Preacher (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992) (via Wait-What?)

[thewindowofthesummerhouse]

Anato Finnstark

[dk-thrive]

usually, you feel better after you do it

One thing I’ve tried to say to groups over the years, groups of all ages, is that writing things down — whatever you’re writing down, even if you’re writing something sad or hard — usually, you feel better after you do it. Somehow you’re given a sense of, OK, this mood, this sorrow I’m feeling, this trouble I’m in — I’ve given it shape. It’s got a shape on the page now. So I can stand back; I can look at it. I can think about it a little differently — what do I do now?

— Naomi Shihab Nye, from "Before You Know Kindness As the Deepest Thing Inside...” in On Being with Krista Tippett, July 28, 2016 (via Last Tambourine)

[ritasanderson]

I want more kaithes

[dk-thrive]

the feeling that real life might just be inside us

My mother’s face as she stood in our small kitchen, her dumbfounded surprise that I wanted to go to college in the first place, that I wanted a completely different life from hers and my father’s. But that wasn’t really it. What I wanted more than that was what happened inside me when I read books like Siddhartha, the feeling that real life might just be inside us, not out there on our patchy lawns or in our cars or offices or job sites or malls or bars or dead-end streets or city sidewalks, but inside us, where the dreams of others merged with our own so that we were all bigger than before and no one was just one. There was no other anywhere.

— Andre Dubus III, Such Kindness: A Novel (W.W. Norton, June 6, 2023)