✽ ayanna ✽

“As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid someone else will erase me by denying me love.”
― Jenny Slate

“it was going to be all right.
at last.
for a while.”
― Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man

“Touched bottom again. Decided to liberate myself... We are never trapped unless we choose to be.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947

“Teach the children. We don't matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones – inkberry, lamb's-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones – rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays