Support your local public library.
I’m obsessed with my library. I wish more people would be the same way— it’s free, it’s recycling, and my library has an online catalogue that can allow me to place books from the entire county on hold. why waste money on an electronic reader?
(Source: honeyforthehomeless)
“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
-Mark Twain
This year, I went dark. It may not be a surprise to anyone who stumbles upon this that this blog is meant as a form of self-therapy. As much as it had a “thesis,” I couldn’t imagine trying to conduct this kind of experiment without having a way of documenting and revisiting all it’s pitfalls and successes. At this time last year I was going through one of the worst depressions of my life, and if we’re being honest, it’s still continuing— I may be coping with it, I may be digging myself out of it, but the core of it is still there trying to claw its way into my daily life.
I know I’m not the first post-grad this has happened to. I got out of school and within a month was employed for really decent pay and benefits to do really mediocre work. I spent ten hours a day imprisoned behind a desk, and maybe only “worked” for 3 of those hours. It completely drained any of my vitality or ambition away. As much as I tried to keep myself busy, my boredom and frustration got the better of me and they let me go. Let me tell you hands down that even if you hate your job, being forced out of it by someone elses’ will can somewhat destroy you. And so everything unraveled, and fast.
I’ve been living with my parents for a year. I’m 24, working in retail management (something I absolutely dont plan on making a career) and lonely. So while I needed to disappear this year, now seems like a better time than ever to revisit Walden. For the first time, instead of fighting against my life I feel like I’m creating a new one.
Today is the 209th birthday of Beethoven’s masterpiece.
He is watching the music with his eyes closed.
Hearing the piano like a man moving
through the woods thinking by feeling.
The orchestra up in the trees, the heart below,
step by step. The music hurrying sometimes,
but always returning to quiet, like the man
remembering and hoping. It is a thing in us,
mostly unnoticed. There is somehow a pleasure
in the loss. In the yearning. The pain
going this way and that. Never again.
Never bodied again. Again the never.
Slowly. No undergrowth. Almost leaving.
A humming beauty in the silence.
The having been. Having had. And the man
knowing all of him will come to the end.
to go through days and months of hopelessness and loneliness and have no place of solace in your mind, only to realize you’ve invented that place or those people or that person that makes you feel safe and that you cannot fairly do that without it crashing down on you.
i’m on hiatus; i’m in need of repair.
I know that for the most part, citizens of NYC despise winter. It has always been one of my favorite seasons in the city; I love the overcast days, the frost on the trees, and walking through this urban maze with cold air circulating in and out of my lungs. However this season has been particularly annoying! Heavy, wet snowstorms that make it a struggle to for me to leave my cozy bed let alone walk outside my apartment building. I’ve been spending my time inside reading and learning about the Buddha. I can now understand why winter causes such cabin-fever in my peers.
Anyways, just when I was feeling the most down about winter, I stumbled upon these lovely photos of snowflakes—the very first photos of snowflakes in fact! Wilson Bentley took the first recorded microscopic photographs of snowflakes in 1885. It is just one of the small reminders that even in what seems to be the most desolate and lifeless seasons, the universe reveals its boundless wonder. View more of Wilson Bentley’s photos here.
