"Inner beauty can fade too." 300 Arguments, Sara Manguso

I had this theory: What was best inside a man, if you had an eye for it, you could pour love on it and, like oxygen does a fire, that admiration for it would make that inner beauty grow.

I am not sure that is true. (If beauty is in the eye of the beholder.) But if it is true, to whatever extent it is, the withdrawal of that loving eye would make that inner beauty fade too, flutter and flame out.

"There’s things that move a man. Like currents of water inside. Things he can’t help. Older I got, the more I found it true. Getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up. And it could be something simple as sex, or it could be something as complicated as falling in love.." ~Sing, Buried, Sing, Jesmyn Ward

‘The farther one gets into the wilderness, the greater is the attraction of its lonely freedom.’ Theodore Roosevelt

No Man's Land

The 1975 - Somebody Else

"Emotion stripped of emotion." Devotion, Patti Smith

"Self-improvement and success often occur together. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the same thing.

Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations: Be happier. Be healthier. Be the best, better than the rest. Be smarter, faster, richer, sexier, more popular, more productive, more envied, and more admired. Be perfect and amazing and crap out twelve-karat-gold nuggets before breakfast each morning while kissing your selfie-ready spouse and two and a half kids goodbye. Then fly your helicopter to your wonderfully fulfilling job, where you spend your days doing incredibly meaningful work that’s likely to save the planet one day.

But when you stop and really think about it, conventional life advice—all the positive and happy self-help stuff we hear all the time—is actually fixating on what you lack. It lasers in on what you perceive your personal shortcomings and failures to already be, and then emphasizes them for you. You learn about the best ways to make money because you feel you don’t have enough money already. You stand in front of the mirror and repeat affirmations saying that you’re beautiful because you feel as though you’re not beautiful already. You follow dating and relationship advice because you feel that you’re unlovable already. You try goofy visualization exercises about being more successful because you feel as though you aren’t successful enough already.

Ironically, this fixation on the positive—on what’s better, what’s superior—only serves to remind us over and over again of what we are not, of what we lack, of what we should have been but failed to be. After all, no truly happy person feels the need to stand in front of a mirror and recite that she’s happy. She just is. There’s a saying in Texas: “The smallest dog barks the loudest.” A confident man doesn’t feel a need to prove that he’s confident. A rich woman doesn’t feel a need to convince anybody that she’s rich. Either you are or you are not.

And if you’re dreaming of something all the time, then you’re reinforcing the same unconscious reality over and over: that you are not that. Everyone and their TV commercial wants you to believe that the key to a good life is a nicer job, or a more rugged car, or a prettier girlfriend, or a hot tub with an inflatable pool for the kids. The world is constantly telling you that the path to a better life is more, more, more—buy more, own more, make more, fuck more, be more.

You are constantly bombarded with messages to give a fuck about everything, all the time. Give a fuck about a new TV. Give a fuck about having a better vacation than your coworkers. Give a fuck about buying that new lawn ornament. Give a fuck about having the right kind of selfie stick. Why? My guess: because giving a fuck about more stuff is good for business.

And while there’s nothing wrong with good business, the problem is that giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health. It causes you to become overly attached to the superficial and fake, to dedicate your life to chasing a mirage of happiness and satisfaction. The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more; it’s giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important." ~The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, Mark Manson

VIRGO Your analyzing mind has solved many problems for you and helped you excel in many areas of life. That said, it's not the right mind to heal emotional wounds. Employ your heart and body to that task.

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KFlay-Blood In The Cut 

The emotional full moon in Pisces offers a depth of feeling beyond ideas and sensations..blabla..throw a knife.

"Outercourse", a personal list: monogamy for starters (multitasking and sex don't go together well for me, sorry if that's too limiting for you); reasons to wear cute dresses/shoes/underwear, before taking them off, slowly or quickly-partially; doting in many small ways, odd little gifts and attentions, and I don't want to be made to feel like a dumbass doormat for bestowing them!; shared nerdiness, such as liking underused words like 'drivel'; laughing (giggling, guffawing, chuckling, snickering, cracking up); familiarity, like rereading books and rewatching movies, there are favorite parts and always some small thing you didn't catch the first time too; freedom, not to fuck other people (see item one) but to do what I want and need to do without my man's insecure nose up my ass every minute which is only going to make me suspect he can't be trusted (see item one again); secondary sex characteristics, for god's sake don't shave anything!; ...the rest of my list is private

reviving the art of the mixed tape, v.1

LP-Lost On You. redheads (eyeroll)

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joywave - someone new

 Then she kissed him. She ran her tongue over his teeth and his lips. She sucked on his mouth and kissed him harder, and placed his hands in her blouse and then she was pushing herself against him, feeling the solid feeling in his pants right by his zipper, and something was there behind those barriers that was hard and powerful and she pushed against it all, this package she wanted to spring open and unwrap under a tree on a soft bed of duff, and she was pushing him down and trying to open his package, and that heavy belt came first, that impossible bolt and rivet, that zipper with rusted teeth that wouldn’t budge, and there it was, there it was. ~The Portable Veblen

Coleman Hell - Fireproof

VIRGO  Wisdom isn't glamorous. It's typically depicted by an old scribe on a mountain or a short green alien. Ryan Gosling wouldn't play Wisdom in the movies. And yet, "wise" is the most attractive thing you could be today.

Ok but this is the reaction to sanity and wisdom, in my experience. I clean (act like an adult) and Django is here demonstrating the part of henpecked. Hiding, lest I might nab him, like his ass doesn't show.

“Remind me, what is the stoic glacier method?”

“It’s the slow process of shaping someone’s behavior by force of one’s own personal stoicism.” (“If you wish to be loved, love,” said Seneca, a Stoic of note.)

~The Portable Veblen

VIRGO Remember when you felt helpless? If you could have only known that help was on its way, how much easier the moment would have passed. Remember the lesson. Trust that there are forces on your side.

They say that whatever you do during an eclipse is like planting a seed – you’ll get more of it whatever it is.  So I’m trying really hard today to be okay.  I sent my youngest kid into the hinterlands of Germany overnight, by himself, for a ‘save the environment’ mission trip.  A plane, two trains, one bus, all in German.  It is hard to describe how you feel about a youngest child.  It is not that you love them the most, more like you love them the hardest.  They are the most likely to be not-ready when you die, stuff like that occurs to you, and in whatever way you find yourself wanting to protect that one the most.  So, being how I am built, I send him the furthest away so that I know he will be okay.  And, to be honest, I cried most of the night in terror that something might go wrong, and cried most of the morning because nothing did and he doesn’t need me anymore ish.  Once there, he texted that all was well, except he is with 9 other teenagers and none of them speak one another’s languages and it’s super awkward.  “I feel like a newly divorced dad or something, lonely in a new place with nobody and a single bed.”  I snapped a pic of myself where I am sitting at work – all those other teens have mothers too, at work somewhere missing them too right now, and everyone knows how to say “Mom”.  Start there (and then come back Boy…)

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Life is an eclipsing of things, one over another over time.

The elusive camera-hating prince charming. My mother naming him after Idris Elba still cracks me up. For scale reference, that is a 4 inch potted plant he is sitting next to. You'd think, given he is the only pretty prince in my pond, that I would see him ruling the roost at his leisure fairly often, but he almost never lets me get anywhere near him. Wary and ambivalent to the bone. Only Jasper can sit next to him.

upshot

I love my job. Being a teacher is the shit. Even when it's a nightmare.

VIRGO Pleasure can serve as an anchor to the moment. It keeps you from skipping ahead in your mind and missing the good parts. Tune in to your senses. The pleasure is there. All you have to do is take it.


That's a lot. But not enough.

People use their bodies far too lightly for my taste. A tattoo should mean some serious shit. It's forever on the only self you've got.

I have one tattoo of the names of my children written in an alphabet that one of them made - child hieroglyphs, is how I think of it.

I wanted to put an eye tattoo on my back. I kept thinking, "I have to watch my back." Over and over, I thought it, like a trauma mantra. I paid an artist to design something for me. Black/white line drawing I wanted, for emphasis on no bullshit. She never got it right, though. It was either flirty girly looking or evil-eyed ugly. Then I dropped the idea. But all the while the betrayal times were 'over', my gut was telling me different.



I am the only self I've got. If I can't trust it, how do I live?

So then I returned to the idea of the tat, after. But the design(s) I had paid for weren't right. And I felt really shitty for a really long time also, and I didn't want to put shittyfeeling on my body forever. But I am stronger now, so I went to see Sunshine's artist (how does she know evvveryone??). She sees him once a month so that she is 'forever a work in progress'.

Sunshine: A Work in Progress

His waitlist is normally 6 months and he usually only does huge pieces, but she talked him into hearing me out. I told him the whole story, Grandpa Ott and all, even about the sun in the water of the magic pond, the un-inverted feeling. "I want something that watches my back, but more like to TRUST MYSELF than to mistrust others. I need to listen to my own eyes."

He doodled as I talked. He turned tears into a water droplet, a tiny pond just big enough to reflect an Ott flower blooming above it.

Not that they (Ott glories) can't live in harmony, given the right offer. They like to coexist with throrny roses, for instance. And they glow-bloom before dawn, attracting hummingbird moths, not birds at all but butterfly-bees. Both the glories and the moths are more than meets the eye.

Add a discerning eye and ta-da...

While the mentality of our culture is deeply entrenched in competition and the survival of the fittest, such a mindset ultimately leads to a hostile society in which nobody will want to live. Venus and Neptune form a visionary trine. Look for softness, chivalry and compassion. If you don't see it in the world, imagine it and you'll help bring it into being. (Think globally, act locally.) VIRGO weekend love horoscope: It's not just about who they are but about who you are when you're around them. Do they bring out the best in you? Define best: Flourishing/Sexy/On Solid Ground. (Right?) (That what I bring out in you?)

Walt Whitman, "A morning glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books."

Their name is that of my actual grandfather, for whom Ears is named. And as lovely as the tiny blooms are, glowing in the center of deep violet velvet, it is their tendril that makes them special. It is thinner than a standard tendril, more like curly hair than vines. And they will kill any plant that tries to shade them out by wrapping around and squeezing - think strangulation with a piano wire. They look so delicate, and they are, but also damn near impossible to win a fight with let alone to kill. It'd be better to make peace with them, if you can.

I didn't use any kind of filter, I didn't even autocorrect the exposure, this is exactly how it looked. It had just rained heavily. Then the setting sun came out. The reflection hit the glass surface of the pond and rays of the sun rose up out of the water. For all the world, you would swear that the sky was the reflection and the sun lives underwater of that pond in reality.

When I am there, I feel un-inverted just like that. As if the rest of the time, I seem to live in the world more successfully than most people do because it is a trick I have perfected. Like "magic". But the real magic hides me Away.

real magic

VIRGO: Life takes courage no matter which choice you make.

Tawista woods - Minerva NY