These Are The Things I Truly Believe In

OCT. 28, 2013 

By CAITLIN COLLINSWORTH

I believe in songs on the radio. In shuffle. In chance giving you all the signs you could possibly want. I believe in music, the one song you only ever needed to hear. The melody, the words, letting you know it isn’t just you. There are others out there, the ones who get you. Somewhere across miles, even oceans, someone else felt lost and confused. Someone else set a beat to the feeling seeping into your heart.

I believe in fortune cookies. In the handful set on your table. The end of the meal, how could fate step in when it gives you something you’ve had before? Ink typed on a page allowing all the meaning you will let it. A piece of trust inside something so small. Trust in the universe, in chance, in more than what you can see in your hands.

I believe in the sunrise. In even the worst days ending, the wind piercing your bones walking home through the dark. Coats doing nothing against the outside. The sun will come up tomorrow. The bad will end and blue with eventually come with it. Eyes will adjust as the rays escape through the clouds. The light on your face warming even the coldest of places. Insides that were hollow will fill up with the colors, each day newly painted as long as one remembers to trust.

I believe in taking risks. In living life as worst as you can. It’s a risk loving all you come in contact with, love is never guaranteed. There are people who will eat up all you give them, asking for more when you think you’ve almost run out. There will be ones who will love you back with all their atoms. Believing in the risk you take just by breathing in the air. The others thirsty for passion, finding what burns them and letting it consume. I believe in souls who light up gold when incased by the fire.

I believe in being nervous, being terrified. The butterflies in your stomach fluttering when you see how far you can go. When failure causes the conditioned response, but still holding your head up high. Putting one foot in front of the other, moving forward at all times. You have to build to a run, sprinting doesn’t last forever. I believe in the long inhale, in walking out the door on days it’s pouring and with no idea what to expect.

I believe in you. In us. In loving all the moments. In the times when you’re on the ground and can barely make out the stars. When it’s so dark and freezing and you don’t think you will ever be warm again. When you lose something important to you, the failure weighing on your shoulders. When you wonder how anyone is able to walk uphill after their hearts were snatched out of their chests. I believe in purpose, in letting it find you just by trying everything you can. Boundless opportunities if you are willing to look underneath. I believe in timing, in chance, in never giving up even if you fail. In starting over, in taking a step back, in pausing for the world to see you are trying to help. I believe in solutions, if we keep looking, keep experimenting, we will find them. In trying to create in your little moments, in the only moment we know we have.

I believe in the flow of life from one to another, in being kind.

Your 20s Get Better In Time

This article is literally everything I needed to read right now

OCT. 28, 2013 

By KOVIE BIAKOLO 

I never like telling people my age. It’s usually met with disbelief about not being older. (Although recently, I have encountered a few people who thought I was younger than I am.) I often feel like my age is not a reflection of my experience, and I don’t want to be dismissed because of it. Growing up, I was always younger than all my peers, and I mostly still am. Yet somehow, I have always felt that my life experiences allowed me to have greater depth than those same peers in many respects. Perhaps it was growing up fast due to having siblings significantly older than me, and one who I am significantly other than. Or perhaps it was having to be independent earlier than most. But I have always felt older than I am. Still, I can honestly say that my twenties have been a whirlwind thus far.

A lot of things have gone wrong – horribly, terribly wrong. I sometimes look around my less than perfect, (and these days) often messy apartment, and feel it is an exact representation of my life. My twenties have been chaotic and disorganized and unexpected – like a lot of people. I still remember how scared I was on the morning of my college graduation, almost two and a half years ago now. I had never felt so uncertain in my entire life even though I thought I had plans. Little did I know, that moment would mark the beginning of an uncertain period of my life. Sometimes I feel like all I’m doing is fighting through one uncertainty after another; one thing after another. I feel like I’m constantly running a race, or maybe swimming and trying to keep my head above water. I feel like I’m taking steps forward and having to take those same steps backwards. Every day, I feel like I’m fighting.

I’m good at fighting. Random too-much-information story about me: I came into the world fighting. My mother loves to tell the story of how I’m the baby that she almost lost. And my parents – strip away their education and titles and very put-together demeanor – and you’ll find some of the greatest hustlers you’ll ever come across. So fighting is in my DNA. I know how to pull the sleepless nights and to keep on truckin’ even when things look bleak. And I know what it is to fail even when you’ve given something everything you’ve got; and to have to pick yourself up with no time for respite. I know what it is to be at your wit’s end as to what tomorrow will bring. And I know what it is to hang on by a thread, by your last sliver of hope; to hang on when all you have left is a Hail Mary.

But I also know that even when I have failed, that Hail Mary never failed me. And if you have enough perspective, you might realize it never failed you either. Because no matter how many times we’ve hit rock bottom during these years, if we’ve awoken the next day, we’re already doing better than we can possible imagine. These years are hard and uncertain. And every day that you are able to get out of bed and go into the world and learn something, and create something, and be useful and kind to someone – no matter how small, no matter how insignificant – you’re doing really well. And on those days where you can’t muster the strength to get out of bed because everything just looks like it’s falling apart, stay in bed as long as you need to. Because on those days you’re just getting stronger to be able to continue the fight when you’re ready.

And fight you will, because in order to survive and thrive, you must. But things will get better, and if you look around you, maybe they already are. Maybe you’re smarter, maybe you’re more fearless, maybe you’re more confident and less worrisome. In some small way that you don’t even realize, I promise you’re doing better. And those small ways will one day turn into something big, and you’ll look back at how far you’ve come. You’ll realize that those weak moments were really some of your strongest moments. You’ll realize that all the fighting was preparing you for something much better; something that you might not be able to see right now.

But keep fighting because no matter where you are now, you’re not dead; and that means you’ve still got some fight in you. And as long as you keep fighting, even if it feels like that’s all you’re doing, even if this is hard to believe, believe you must, that these years will get better in time.

Alan Watts Lecture "The State of Nothing"

The State of Nothing Lecture by Alan Watts
If you are aware of a state called is, or reality, or life, this implies a state called isn’t. Or illusion, or unreality, or nothingness or death. You can’t know one without the other. And so as to make life poignant, it’s always going to come to an end, that is don’t you see what makes it lively. Liveliness is change it is motion, and motion is going to fall out and be gone. You see, you are always at the place you always are..[Laughs] Except it keeps appearing to change. And you think wowie we’ll get that thing. I hope we don’t go further down so that we don’t lose what we have. But that’s built into every creature’s situation or matter how high or how low. So is this sense, all places are the same place. And the only time you ever notice any difference is the moment of transition. When you go up a bit you gain, when you go down a bit you feel disappointed, gloom, lost. You can go all the way down to death. Somehow, there seems to be a difficultly getting up. Death sees so final. Nothing seems so very very very irrevocable and permanent.
Then if it is, what about the nothingness before you started. So don’t you see, what we’ve left out of out logic and this is part of the game rule to the game we are playing. The way we hoodwink ourselves is by attributing powerlessness with nothingness.
We don’t realize that is a complete logical fallacy. It takes nothing to have something. You wouldn’t know something without nothing. You wouldn’t know what the form is, without the background space. You would’t be able to see anything unless there was nothing behind your eyes. Now imagine yourself with an anestical eye, and you can see all round. Now whats in the middle? Even if I have all this behind me within view suddenly I will find there is something in the middle of it all and there is a hole of reality. Like now there seems to be wall, not so much a whole, but you see if I was an animal that had eyes in the back of its head. You could feel the sensation I’m describing.
Now you may say to me, now that’s all a bunch of wishful thinking, because when your dead your dead! Now wait a minute, what is that state of consciousness that talks that way? This is somebody saying something that wants to make a point, but what kind of point are they trying to make? When your dead your dead see. Well that’s one of the people that want to rule the world. That’s what frightening about death. Death is real. No indulge in wishful thinking, all you people who dream of an afterlife, and heavens and gods and mystical experiences, and eternity. You are just wishy washy people, you don’t face the facts!
What facts? How can I face the fact of nothing. Which is by definition not a fact. All this is toddle whatever way you look at it. So if you really go the how way and see how you feel at the prospect of vanishing forever. Of all your efforts, and all your achievements, and all your attainments turning into dust and nothingness. What is the feeling? What happens to you?
Is a curious thing, that in the world’s poetry, this is a very common theme. “The earthly hopes men set their hearts upon turns ashes, and or it prospers, a non like snow settles on the desert dusty face lighting an hour or two and is gone” All kinds of poetry emphasize the theme of transcendence. There is a kind of nostalgic beauty to it. "The Banquet Hall deserted, after the revelry, all the guests had left and gone on their ways. The table with overturned glasses, crumbled napkins, bread crumbs , and dirty knives and forks lies empty. And the laughter echoes only in one’s mind. And then the echo goes, the memory, the traces are all gone. That’s the end you see."
Do you see in a way, how that is saying the most real state is the state of nothing? That’s what it’s all going to come to. With these physicists who think of the energy of the universe as running down dissipating into radiation, and gradually and gradually, and gradually, gradually, until there is nothing left.
And for some reason, we are suppose to find that depressing. But if somebody is going to argue that the basic reality is nothingness. Where does all this come from? Obviously from nothingness. Once again you get how this looks behind your eyes. So cheer up you see, this is what is meant in Buddhist philosophy by saying ‘we are all basically nothing.’
When the Six Patriarch says “the essence of your mind is intrinsically pure”. The pure doesn’t mean a ‘non dirty story state of mind’ as is it apt to mean in the word Puritan. Pure means “clear “ void. So you know the story when the Six Patriarch was given his office to his successor. Because he was truly enlightened. There was a Poetry contest. And the losing one wrote the idea that the mind, the consciousness was like a mirror.
So I’m detached, calm, and pure headed. Buddha-ed. But the one who won the contest said there is no mirror, and the nature of mind is intrinsically void. So where is there anywhere for dust to collect? See so in this way, by seeing that nothingness is the fundamental reality, and you see it’s your reality. Then how can anything contaminate you? All the idea of being scared, and it’s nothing it just a dream. Because your really nothing. But this is most incredible nothing. All the Six Patriarch went on to contrast that emptiness of indifference. Which is sort of blind emptiness. See if you think of this idea of nothingness as blankness, and you hold onto this idea of blankness then kind of grizzly about it, you haven’t understood it. Nothingness is really like the nothingness of space, which contains the whole universe. All the sun and the stars and mountains, and rivers, and goodmen and bad men, and the animals, and insects, and the whole bit. All are contained in void. So out of this void comes everything and you it. What else could you be?

A Quick Evaluation of Your Life and Future

Part 1
Write down 10 things that you love to do.

• Do you like to do this: (A) all by yourself/ or with (P) people
• Is it something that is (M) mental or (P) physical
• Pick your top 3 favorites and mark the last time that you did it
• Mark the ones that you did for the first time in 3 years with a symbol

1. Reading a book (A, M, #1- 2 days ago)
2. Spending time laying outside in the dark looking at the stars (A, M, #3- 28 days ago)
3. Roadtrips with loud music and windows down (P, P, ) 
4. Spending time on the water (A, M)
5. Talking with friends and family (P, M) 
6. Looking at photographs (A, M)
7. Snuggling up on a couch when it's raining (A, P)
8. Playing with a dog (A, P)
9. Laughing (P, P, #2- 1 day ago) 
10. Watching a good film (A, M)

Part 2

Write down 10 things you want to do in the future.  You can already have done these, but you really want to do them again.

• Do you like to do this: (A) all by yourself/ or with (P) people
• Is it something that is (M) mental or (P) physical
• Is this (L) likely, (P) probable, (I) improbable

1. Travel (A, P, P)
2. Spend time outside with nature (A, P, P) 
3. Drive recklessly fast on an abandoned road (A, P, I) 
4. Volunteer abroad (P, M, I)
5. Have a family (P, M, L)
6. Fall head over heels in love (P, P, P)
7. Spend more time with my family (P, M, L) 
8. Feel more secure with who I am (A, M, I)
9. Own a personal library (A, M, L) 
10. Make it all count (A, M, P)

William Beckett "By Your Side" Lyric Video

A Father Photographs The World Of His Autistic Son

You can view the original article here: http://snapme.ca/a-father-photographs-the-world-of-his-autistic-son/





Timothy Archibald started photographing his autistic son Elijah when he was 5 years old. His aim was to document the often bizarre and incomprehensible world of his son but the project developed into much more.

Elijah has a need for repetition, loves mechanical objects and is socially withdrawn and Timothy set out to document these often annoying habits and rituals. However, over time Elijah became more involved in the process and helped setup and organise locations and poses.

“According to Timothy, his project Echolilia helped him understand the situation, his role as father, but most importantly, to accept his own son’s differences. Those habits that first drove him nuts completely changed through his photos. In Echolilia, father and son create their own visual language, thanks to which they can communicate with each other even when there are no words they both can understand. In fact, Elijah receives positive attention for his rituals, can share something with his dad, and has even started to take his own photos.” Via

Date A Guy Who Reads Hemingway

By: Meredith McCullough

Go to a dingy cafe, the kind with Penguin Classics rotting in a corner, where the staff’s disdain makes the coffee perfectly bitter. Sit opposite a guy with floppy hair who looks like he doesn’t believe in the beach. You figure you’re bored and wouldn’t mind getting laid later, so you strike up a conversation. Obviously you will have to do this, shy and dull have converged equally beneath his ironic glasses, perfectly wrinkling his Heathcliff brow. Just make sure you act sufficiently awkward to avoid intimidating him. Then you’ll get to listen to him talk at you about books.

Only smile occasionally during this conversation, nod a lot to show you’re interested. Mentioning the occasional philosopher will probably get you a decent hand job later. Disagree with every third thing he says to give the illusion that you’re interacting on “his level”. Now he knows his friends will be suitably impressed. You even used the phrase “Marxist dialectic of the material self”, you’re in! For God’s sake, use big words and don’t make too many jokes. Sarcasm about the plebs, however, is a must. Drop in that you’re a feminist because your second favorite author is Woolf (second, of course, to Hemingway).

If you say “I think” enough he’ll end up believing it and take you to a quiet bar with inadequate lighting. He will be unable to order, yet insist on doing so, now believing that he is the one pursuing you (a fantasy you obviously are obliged to indulge). Over wine he will continue to listen to himself outline the plot of his unfinished novel. Believable criticism works best at this point, if you intersperse the conversation with “compliment – critique – compliment” you’re bound to at least get some decent wine out of him. For example “I love the way your idea captures the real struggle of fractured post-modernity, but don’t you think the characterization of John could be more three dimensional? I love the ending though, that imagery is truly beautiful”… he’ll be putty in your hands.

After he’s had enough wine he’ll start believing that this is somehow special, that because you have the capacity to articulate intelligent ideas you must be only slightly less of a genius than he is. You will be walking home, mid-sentence, outlining the virtues of the sonnet form (a rebuttal to his affinity for beat culture) and he will clumsily cut you off to lean in for a kiss. Thank god, you will think, there are only so many ways to say that Kerouac was a tosser. Afterwards he will call it “making love” and you will let him because that sounds nicer than the bumpy, awkward truth.

He will write lovely things to you, txt you his thoughts and appreciate your ideas about his favorite movies. At this point you’re allowed to not like something, this means you’re opinionated (just don’t be opinionated about One Direction). It feels pretty comfy up on that pedestal now, doesn’t it? He’s made hierarchies into an art, and suddenly you’re at the top. Ignore that he’s placed your friends way down at the bottom, ignore that you’re the only two people up there. Soar on the wings of his promise of genius. Of course he loves you, he’s an artist. Get used to staying in.

Don’t go out dancing, it’s a cliché. Don’t listen to obnoxious music, unless of course you’re being ironic. Move in together and dance alone to old jazz records, but never in a crowded bar. Stay in and read together in bed and tell yourself that this is what you want. You like reading, right? Your degree, your achievements, your creations, he loves you for them because he tells his friends. They say “it’s good to have a smart girlfriend” while you bring them literary sandwiches.

Don’t get married, it’s a cliché. Don’t expect grand romantic gestures in restaurants. He will try to get his work published while you get some cash doing something he finds acceptable. You wonder why no one else seems to think he is the genius he assured you he was. Tell yourself this is how all great artists live, tell yourself that you don’t really need money. Tell yourself you never liked those friends anyway, you’re fine. His are clearly much better because they’ve read Hemingway.

You will live in a small apartment, reading small words that no one else will hear. You will have long debates about semantics and ignore the creeping smell of mould. You can help him with his work though you’ve got no time for your own. It’s insensitive of you to talk about your minor issues when he’s struggling with an existential crisis. You will try and ignore the cloud of sadness and loneliness that artistic isolation shrouds you with. You can read some more books to escape. But only good ones, and mainly Hemingway. You’ve never tried Mills and Boon, but he’s sure you’d hate them, so you probably would, right? He knows you so well.

You will stay in that little flat full of sad manuscripts that will never be published and make the best of things. You used some big words at one stage and liked the sweet sound of a lie he told you, one he wouldn’t tell anyone else. You’ll grow old and wonder at his lack of achievement, especially when you’ve done so much proof reading. In this little flat, childless, this is where you will die, a faded version of somebody else’s dream… a dream that just wasn’t quite as good as he thought it was going to be. Maybe it’s because he just loved you too much?

For goodness sake, stay away from those awful men with their terrible muscles in their loose-fitting singlets. You’re classy, you’re not going to go for someone who offers to buy you a beer in a crowded club (how crass!), who stands next to you on the bar, singing your favorite rock song louder than anyone else. You don’t even like obnoxious motor-bikes. And you’re definitely far, far too clever to be taken in by gorgeous dimples and a stare that makes you feel like a Victoria Secret model.

Don’t date a guy who hasn’t read Hemingway, he won’t be artistic at all. He will stand in awe of your achievements, but he won’t be able to correct you on them. He will only appreciate them because they are important to you, and he wouldn’t even know how to tell his friends how very, very clever you are. He won’t be able to engage with you intellectually, so he will end arguments with a joke, or by pulling a funny face. He will laugh with you for hours at childish cartoons and you will be genuinely impressed by his Cartman impersonation.

He will buy all your friends tequila shots and help hold back their hair. He will make bad puns with your Dad and play X Box with your little sister. He will probably do something terribly cliché like propose on top of the Eiffel tower (because he knows “you like that romantic stuff”, not realizing you meant 18th century English literature). You will probably do something like get a house and have kids, disgusting! He will have a BBQ and you will have a study, he will tell the kids to be quiet while you’re working.

Instead of wrestling with you intellectually, he will tackle you to the bed. Instead of correcting your recitation of Milton, he will marvel at how you understand all “that poetry stuff”. He will hold you when you’re crying, even though he might not understand how reading can make someone sad. You will write a poem about how your daughter has his cheeky dimples when she smiles. Even though he doesn’t understand that it’s Shakespearian in form, he will love it anyway and hang it in the living-room. His dumb jokes will make you smile when you’re in the nursing home together, and he will tell your grandchildren about when you were young and crazy. He will know, because he would have been just a crazy as you.

What has happened to your books and your poems, what is the point in getting a tertiary education if not to impress the boy in the coffee shop? You’re doing all this reading, surely it’s to attract the first guy? Look at him, with his paperback of ‘The Old Man and The Sea’, wouldn’t you like to listen to what he has to say about it? Wouldn’t you like your intelligence to go towards making his life better? Don’t you want to be a bauble, momentarily decorating his deliciously narcissistic view of his own genius? What else could you be doing all that reading and writing for?

Stay away from the second guy, maybe he is just a pretty face. A six-pack and sea-green eyes might not actually mean love, this whole future could well be a product of your hyperactive imagination. You’ll just have one great night, but the rest could all go horribly wrong. If you take that chance, he might get on his motorbike and leave forever, and then where would you be? Well, I guess you could write a pretty kick-ass story about it, and maybe read a book

Excerpt from Beautiful Creatures

"Every day was like a day out of some else's life. Nothing had ever happened to me, and now everything was happening to me- and by everything, I really meant Lena. An hour was both faster and slower. I felt like I had sucked the air out of a giant balloon, like my brain wasn't getting enough oxygen. Clouds were more interesting, the lunchroom less disgusting, music sounded better, the same old jokes were funnier, and Jackson went from being a clump of grayish- green industrial buildings to a map of times and places where I might run into her. I found myself smiling for no reason, keeping my earphones in and replaying our conversations in my head, just so I could listen to them again. I had seen this kind of thing before. I had just never felt it" 

Winter Dreams

"It was his sense that, for once, he was magnificently attune to life and that everything about him was radiating a brightness and a glow he might never know again"

-F. Scott Fitzgerald 

Excerpt from Looking for Alaska

"When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered 'I am going to take this bucket of water an pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God'".

How You Know It's Time To Leave Your City

Scrolling through Thought Catalog, like I do every morning, and I ran across this article.  It's funny when you look at my last post about wanting to graduate and move to Alaska.


By Brianna Wiest
A little while back I wrote an article in which I *gently* poked fun at the whole “I’m just a small town girl in the big city!” thing that people are always really proud of for some reason. And the responses were… interesting. People wanted to see me write about what it means to want to leave your city, when you’re not proud of it like everybody thinks you should be. When the life that is ideal for other people just isn’t for you. And so I decided to do just that, because unbeknownst to them, that is exactly what I’m doing right now.

Everyone wants to know why the hell I’m leaving, and really only because the place I’m going to isn’t New York. Why would you ever leave the city?! They ask. And then get on my case for all the reasons why my life will be subpar now that I’m not in one of the biggest, loudest cities of the world. I just can’t help but think to myself that it’s very interesting, how people think they know what’s best for a person, and how ingrained societal ideals of what dreams and goals and success should look like is. It’s interesting that, when it’s time for someone to carve their own path that doesn’t revolve around what will make other people appeased and comfortable, it’s assumed that there’s either something wrong with them or there’s something they aren’t realizing about their decision. There’s nothing wrong with me. I realize my decision completely.

My plan was to spend time in New York pursuing my career (in editing, which is what I thought I wanted) and then to return to the place I’m moving to now. I decided to skip over the part where I spend my 20s miserable solely for the pursuit of monetary/social success [as in, a three figure annual salary and a fancy title]. In fact, I gave up doing anything in my day-to-day life, career included, that I didn’t enjoy or was passionate about. Of course, that’s a work in progress, as everything is in life, but the important part is that I decidedly lost the old ideas of what I thought success and happiness meant, and in the process, I found exactly those things. And I’m extraordinarily fortunate, because my job goes where I do, and I can go where I choose. I decided to take advantage of that.

Sometimes you just grow out of places. Sometimes you just aren’t made for what everybody else is. And sometimes you stay because the alternative is a little intimidating, especially when you don’t know anybody where you’re going, and everybody is telling you to stay, and that you’re silly for choosing what you’re choosing. But you feel like you want to go anyway, and so you become trapped in that limbo. The people who commented and wrote to me seemed to be at that place.

If there’s anything you have to walk away with from this little rant, it’s that wanting to go is enough. My beloved, beautiful role model Cheryl Strayed said that in a column she wrote. Wanting to go is enough. This applies to relationships and jobs and living spaces and roommates and career paths and majors and the sticky bar you find yourself at on a Friday night. You are cheating yourself out of bigger, better, happier things by staying in what’s known and comfortable. I’m not saying uprooting your life and probably finding a new job and making new friends all while being subject to people’s criticisms is easy. I’m saying it’s important. And I hope you do go. Because if some part of you won’t stop nagging to be somewhere else, you’ll follow it eventually. It’s just a matter of whether you do it now or later.

What I mean when I say Alaska...

Lately, anytime anyone asks me what I'm planning to do when I graduate I tell them I'm going to move to Alaska and get a job and a dog.  It's my way of saying "I don't really know, but I'm sick of being asked and not having a good answer." So somehow, my brain translated that into "Oh, I'm moving to Alaska"

Now although I'm 100% serious about wanting to do this I acknowledge a few crucial things

• Yes, it is cold there- even colder to the native Texan blood that runs through me
• I know, it sounds absurd, but that's what I wanna do
• And by "do" I mean, if I don't get out of the immediate area as fast as possible there is a very good chance I will go crazy.  Not in some "medicate me until I see flying penguins" way, but in a "I will start to lose sight of my aspirations and settle" way, which I refuse to do
• I am in desperate need of a change, and if changing friends, geographic location, and lifestyles doesn't fulfill that change then maybe I'm already crazy.
• I don't care what job I get there, as long as I have enough money to pay my bills and save a little for trips back home.  
• I want need a Great Pyrenees dog in my life.  
• I know that I will miss my family.  My family is the most important thing in the world to me.  I am fiercely proud and protective of my siblings. I am always worried about my parents.  The thought of not being physically there for them makes me a bundle of nerves.
• It isn't going to be as easy or exciting as it is in my head.
• Wanderlust is a real struggle.  My desire to throw my schedule and planner out of the window is only strengthened by the fact that I have mandatory things I have to do.
• I don't care that it will be 24 hours of daylight or 24 hours of darkness.  That sounds likes wandering into the Great Unknown, and the beauty of the Great Unknown is the fact that I have experienced none of it.  

Maybe I'll hate it.  Maybe I'll move there and immediately regret it.  Maybe I will be back home within the year.  But I will never know if I don't try, and if I don't try I won't have a definite answer on what it's like to live in 24 hour sunlight or darkness.  I won't know what it means to be truly on my own.  I won't know what it's like to be in a place where your family isn't a 10 minute drive away. Oddly enough, I want all of that.  I want to come home to a huge dog, an overstuffed leather chair, and a chance to relax with a glass of wine and some home cooked meal.  Maybe I'll get a cat too.  But I will get them both at the same time, so they grow up together.  We can all start that adventure together.  Is this extreme? Yes. Stupid? Possibly. But I am my father's daughter and he moved 6,000 miles away when he graduated college, I only wanna move 2,500.

Sign me up.
I'm down for my great adventure.
Whenever it happens, I mean.

Miley Cyrus & Mumford & Sons - Little Wrecking Ball

You are my person

T-Minus 70 Days

70 days until I graduate college.

How did time fly by so quickly? I remember I started that countdown when it was 290+ days, and it seemed like a distant possibility.  

I spend my days at work or in class, with my evenings filled with greek related events and homework.  I've realized some things this semester that I hadn't really connected before.  I like to hang out with people in a one on one setting.  When I get into groups I feel really awkward and overcompensate by being too talkative, or by getting really quiet.  I've also realized that there is a discrepancy between what I would do if I could and what I'm doing.  I want nothing more in the world than to move 1,000+ miles away and hole up with some mediocre job and a big dog and take some time to understand myself and live drastically different from what I've always known.  That's why when people ask me what I'm doing on day 71 I have no real answer.  I want to be in Romania working with youth, or going to Alaska and working with a local nonprofit organization, or going to grad school and wrapping myself up in school without student involvement on the side.  The world is supposed to be my oyster right? Well there are too many damn oysters and I'm not even sure which ocean I'm in.  But there's something truly thrilling about all of the oysters and water and beaches I've yet to explore.  Sink or swim, right?

Harry Potter Wands- How To

Can we just take a moment to let our inner 8 year old child hyperventilate? 

This is too cool.

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/245657354647715222/

Constellation

By: Jessie Holder
October 4th, 2013

I think they must have molded you out of stardust, out of luminescent grains of heavenly sand. Then they must have made me out of space, of the velvet nothingness that binds the universe together.

This must be how it is that my tendrils of shadow slip between the sparkling gems of you, enfolding each precious granule in my gentle dark and filtering between, binding the immense beauty and rapturous joy of you in the many arms of my soul so your thousands of particles of potential and grace and hope and warm, warm light don’t fly apart. You are starlight beaming out, streaming between the vines of my soul into the heavens.

If you ever exploded you would be a supernova or whatever is larger and brighter still. Your passion would force the universe outward into an expansion it is not yet elastic enough to sustain. But my shadow is strong enough, darling. So I’ll hold each trembling shard of dragon-fired glass, each shimmering speck of your kindness, tenderness, anger, loss, wonder, and guilt.

I have always pulled things toward me. People, dreams, opportunity, danger. If I ever imploded I would be a black hole, my gravity beyond my own comprehension, sucking galaxies into my orbit. But you hold the veins of me, the dark rivers of my love and compassion, my aggression and empathy, my ferocity and my nurturing, my courage and my terror. I am held fast between the pilot lights of you, the iridescent agate stones of your inconceivably generous spirit. I am safe. And the skies are safe from me.

Matter and antimatter, air and flame, brilliant warm light and embracing cool dark, they made us so that we could intertwine. So that we would intertwine. The pull of moonbeams made me to flower for you, an onyx lily on your wings, and the flash of comets called you into being so that you could bloom for me, a crystal rose whose petals open safe in the chamber of my deepest heart.

They made us to know kisses that flow like river water and sing like forest fire. To consume one another again and again, to burst into being as a constellation of incandescent power, of transcendent love.

We were meant to speak into the nighttimes of lost souls with no words, cut from the celestial fabric of angels to sing to the silence: “Love is real. God is here.