I Love All The Words We Have That Mean Traveler. I Love The Shades Of Difference Between Wanderer And

Your purpose in life is not to love yourself but to love being yourself.

If you goal is to love yourself, then your focus is directed inward toward yourself, and you end up constantly watching yourself from the outside, disconnected, trying to summon the “correct” feelings towards yourself or fashion yourself into something you can approve of.

If your goal is to love being yourself, then your focus is directed outward towards life, on living and making decisions based on what brings you pleasure and fulfillment.

Be the subject, not the object. It doesn’t matter what you think of yourself. You are experiencing life. Life is not experiencing you.

In regards to the expensive nature of saffron…

‘stares into distance, takes a long drag off of what is, if you look closely, in fact a candy cigarette’

what if I told you…that saffron…is actually not that hard to grow at home for your own use. 

Oh look a place you can buy the bulbs. 

If you live in a climate colder than zone 6…as I do…plant them in containers and move the containers into a basement or garage during the winter. 

They bloom in fall, and are quite lovely. And also you get saffron. 

TIL

Anne Bancroft was happily married to Mel Brooks from 1964 until her passing in 2005.

and there is something wonderful about the sexiest woman in the history of American film being in love with the funniest man in the history of American film.

it's just so charming.

I realized why the idea of constellations has always swayed me. constellations are so very human.

our wonder of the stars is bone-sunk; we’ve been thinking and dreaming and watching and watching and watching since the beginning of time, and we looked for so long that we started making connections. 

we played a celestial game of connect-the-dots; trying to find order in something so vast and trying to show that the stars are in everything and everything is in the stars.

we plucked pictures out of the infinite; there’s a dog, there’s a bear, there’s a lion, see? look, right there; the stars hold and mirror back everything. 

but then it went a step further. instead of everyday things, we stopped picking out the cups and the bears, and instead we saw stories. 

look, there’s Andromeda, chained to a rock and waiting to be devoured by Cetus. there’s Orion, and Hercules, and do you see Orpheus’ lyre? Zeus sent an eagle to retrieve it after Orpheus’ death and he placed it in the sky. 

we did the most human thing imaginable: we wrote our stories into the stars. we filled the night sky; previously so vast, so unknowable; with our history. we forged connections to the stars and made it so our children will always know where they come from. 

What does it take to teach a bee to use tools? A little time, a good teacher and an enticing incentive. Read more here: http://to.pbs.org/2mpRUAz

Credit: O.J. Loukola et al., Science (2017)

i have never met an unpsychotic person who knows what it actually means to “not encourage the delusion” …not a single one

Amazon Unveils a [Horrifying] Fanfic Publishing Platform

Today, Amazon announced the imminent launch of its newest endeavor, Kindle Worlds, a publishing platform for fanfiction. When I read the announcement, I was horrified, then angry, then sad. I want to take a moment to explain why this is such a tragedy.

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The best writing teacher I ever had wasn’t the one who taught me grammar and spelling. He wasn’t the one who taught me outlining and paragraph structure, nor was he the one who taught me about themes, motifs, and symbolism.

He said, “Wiggle your pencil.

Put the tip of your pencil to the paper and keep the eraser end wiggling.

If you have nothing to write, write that: I have nothing to write, I have nothing to write, I have nothing to write, I have nothing to write, and eventually, by force of boredom, something else will come out.”

We would take 30 - 45 minutes every day to ‘wiggle our pencils’ in our wide-ruled notebooks, during which time, he was silent except to remind anyone who stopped to keep that pencil moving. 

I finished not one but two novel-length stories that year. It was fifth grade.

Wiggle your pencil.