There’s no art in giving what you have.
"I do want to create art beyond rage. Rage is a place to begin, but not end. I’m not as wise as my work, but I know if I take the writing deep enough, something larger and greater than myself will flash forth and illuminate me, heal me. I do want to devour my demons — despair, grief, shame, fear — and use them to nourish my art. Otherwise they’ll devour me."- Sandra Cisernos
I don’t know anything, but I know this: whatever is done with love, in the name of others, without self-gain, whatever is done with the heart on behalf of someone or something, be it a child, animal, vegetable, rock, person, cloud, whatever work we make with complete humility, will always come out beautifully, and something more valuable than fame or money will come. This I know.
Sandra Cisneros
Havana, Cuba
© 1993 Alex Webb
"Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on.- Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you."
(via heartcountry)
“Sometimes being immune to the influence of others is a foundation for integrity, but it can also breed indifference and license cruelty. Studies show how much less influenced — that is, how much less aware — the powerful are, how much less their brains engage in mirroring activity. Mirroring is how we replay the actions of others in our minds to connect to what they are doing and feeling. Or we don’t, and fail to make a connection; this is a cerebral process as well as an emotional one. It may be instinctive, but it can also be practiced. Or abandoned.
Inequality makes liars of all of us, and only a democracy of power leads to a democracy of information. But underlings know both versions of the two-sided; the powerful seem to know only one, or refuse to know the other. They can conjure an act of erasure: these things have not happened if no one of high status knows.
If power generates a cushion of obliviousness around it, those of us with power — and most of us are powerful in some way — need to counter this. That means, first, treating people with respect regardless of their status: not taking the invitation to disdain or ignore. It means being aware of how your status may cut you off from what others know and may share among themselves; it means knowing that you do not know. It also means questioning the insulating tendencies of power.
A more radical response is to try to undo the inequality. It means being critical of the forces that create inequality and remembering that they create an asymmetry between who listens and who is heard. The unexamined life is not worth living, as the aphorism goes, but perhaps an honourable and informed life requires examining others’ lives, not just one’s own. Perhaps we do not know ourselves unless we know others. And if we do, we know that nobody is nobody.”
— Rebecca Solnit
(Source: startingplace)
This is the Milky Way Photographed in a Crystal Ball
Photographer and astronomer Juan Carlos Munoz was browsing a flea market in Santiago, Chile, a few days ago when he stumbled across some crystal balls. He bought one for a few dollars and then decided to use it for astrophotography. This “cosmic marble” photo of the Milky Way in a crystal ball is what resulted.
(Source: petapixel.com)
“Perhaps they had the same dream on a certain night..”
(via violentwavesofemotion)
At Target this lady told her son he couldn’t have a Wonder Woman doll because “that’s for girls” and then bought her daughter the same one. It got me thinking about how often I see people bar young boys from appreciating girls/women as protagonists and heroes, and my own experience with it as a kid.