This I Found Myself Thinking In The Years That Followed, On Nights When My Wife And I Played The Violin

being an adult is just dragging urself kicking and screaming to things that you will enjoy and that will be good for you

As someone who's going to be moving and starting uni soon, this is where I find myself most days. It's strange seeing someone else write out my thoughts practically exactly as I thought them, but comforting to know that other people have similar experiences!

i keep trying to memorize every detail of the moments i live in. in the soreness of my legs from standing so long at a concert, the chill of the night, the patterns of a tablecloth, the oily texture in my mouth after eating fried bananas. i keep trying to memorize the feelings, the quiet contentedness, the laughter, the excitement. i keep trying to memorize the people, their smiles, the way they speak, what makes them laugh. i’m constantly on the cusp of the next part of my life and that’s just so.. strange. but it makes it so much easier to find happiness no matter what’s happening to me, in a way? because i’m already kind of looking at life with those rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, simply because i know these are times i’ll never be able to live again, and these are people i might not always have, and that makes it so much easier to appreciate everything i might miss later. 

Mount Rainier, Washington by Max Feingold

fuck you education system for making it seem like physics is a terrible subject

the one problem i have with people my age and younger is that a lot of us do not have hands on hobbies. like i have spoken to so many people my age who go to work, go to school and then fuck around on their phone/computer for hours and then ???????? like no wonder ur depressed and have low confidence in urself. u need to get ur hands on something, feed those dopamine receptors! learn how to play guitar, garden, scrapbook, fucking make model trains. i don’t give a shit, MAKE SOMETHING!!

it feels better than drugs when i finish making a thing—and then show it off or gift it.

and then so people my age say to me ‘well—i can’t draw/paint/knit/etc. like you can. my stuff would be terrible.’ yeah, well duh—a part of developing skill is sucking at something and then practicing it over and over and over again until you suck less. u’ll have a hard time feeling lonely or bored when you can’t stop thinking abt a technique you want to try or something you want to make for someone else. making things has SAVED MY LIFE. it gave me a reason to keep living day after day when i wanted to die.

making things improved my generational relationships (when i worked for the newspaper i would talk to customers abt jamming recipes or cross-stitch, one of my grandmas always gives me pattern books and tell me abt when she knitted things for mom, my other grandma is giving me a wedding quilt that HER grandma gave her 50 years ago because she knows i will appreciate it). it also got me likeminded friends who also make things.

take a ceramics class! pick up water colors, bake cakes! learn to work on cars! make soap. DO SOMETHING THAT DOESN’T INVOLVE STARING AT A SCREEN.

there's just something inherently holy about a girl vibing alone in her room

Sunrise

by Louise Glück

This time of year, the window boxes smell of the hills, the thyme and rosemary that grew there, crammed into the narrow spaces between the rocks and, lower down, where there was real dirt, competing with other things, blueberries and currants, the small shrubby trees the bees love— Whatever we ate smelled of the hills, even when there was almost nothing. Or maybe that’s what nothing tastes like, thyme and rosemary.

Maybe, too, that’s what it looks like— beautiful, like the hills, the rocks above the tree line webbed with sweet smelling herbs, the small plants glittering with dew—

It was a big event to climb up there and wait for dawn, seeing what the sun sees as it slides out from behind the rocks, and what you couldn’t see, you imagined;

your eyes would go as far as they could, to the river, say, and your mind would do the rest—

And if you missed a day, there was always the next, and if you missed a year, it didn’t matter, the hills weren’t going anywhere, the thyme and rosemary kept coming back, the sun kept rising, the bushes kept bearing fruit—

The streetlight’s off: that’s dawn here. It’s on: that’s twilight. Either way, no one looks up. Everyone just pushes ahead, and the smell of the past is everywhere, the thyme and rosemary rubbing against your clothes, the smell of too many illusions—

Between them, the hills and sky took up all the room. Whatever was left, that was ours for a while. But eventually the hills will take it back, give it to the animals. And maybe the moon will send the seas there, and where we lived will be a stream or river coiling around the base of the hills, paying the sky the compliment of reflection.

I went back but I didn’t stay. Everyone I cared about was gone, some dead, some disappeared into one of those places that don’t exist, the ones we dreamed about because we saw them from the top of the hills— I had to see if the fields were still shining, the sun telling the same lies about how beautiful the world is when all you need to know of a place is, do people live there. If they do, you know everything.

The hills are terrible, they hide the truth of the past. Green in summer, white when the snow falls.

Look through a strangers' eyes and fall in love with the world 🌼

open a new window somewhere in the world. 

I bound my first book! It was so much fun and I plan on making more as gifts for my family. The stitching is a little wonky, and I cheated on some of the smaller pages but I love how it turned out! I learned so much about books and how they are made from @sealemon 's YouTube channel. Please check out her content!

Here's the first spread I've done:

I hope to fill the whole book with journal spreads based on my favourite quotes, books, and songs. I love @olivebreezy 's blog, it's full of beautiful journal spreads and great inspiration!