A Good Reminder

It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.
-Aldous Huxley, Island (Thank you, heartmindspirit & atelier)

Shop Hesby

Every great living room in the history of eveeeer has had a great rug. I haven’t done my fact checking on this one, but I’m almost certain that it has to be true.

I can attest because without a rug the awkward empty space between my couch and coffee table felt like an abyss. My feet were cold and I didn’t have any desire to hangout and read a book on the couch. Clear signs of an unfinished room.

I scoured the internet for a month and a half before I finally found this Shop Hesby rug and fell in love. I knew that it was just what we needed to bring color, life, and warmth into the space.

I was totally right and I couldn’t be happier with the way this little space is turning out! It’s not perfect yet, but these things take longer than a minute if you want to do them right. Or so I’m told.

I really hope that whoever I end up with loves books so that he will understand my references to literature and we can lay in bed together and read and have a huge library created from the combination of two individual lifetimes

"Listen. I don’t know how or when my grieving will end, but I’m always
relearning how to be human again."

— Sherman Alexie, “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir”

"But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, “I should sit here and I should be entertained.” And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true."

— Zadie Smith