How do you fall in love?

http://literaryjukebox.brainpickings.org/post/35053832866

Amen.

Hear, hear.

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles,their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farm-boy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by
particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for
nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent.

You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a
matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long- breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.
Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is.

That is home. That is happiness.”
― Hermann Hesse, Bäume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte

Home.

The F word.

In Praise of Abstraction: Moving Beyond Concrete Imagery

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5897

Yes, as simple as that.

There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever.
There are only small steps upward;
an easier day,
an unexpected laugh,
a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.

-Laurie Halse Anderson

Social Pariah.

Flipkarttt. <3 This one's quite a handy bookmark! When you're reading, you simply hang a 'Do Not Disturb' sign on you. 

Urdu Love Poetry in the Eighteenth Century

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00fwp/srf/srf_conventions_of_love.pdf

Meditations in an Emergency- By Frank O'Hara

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

          Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

          Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?

          I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

          Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.

          However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.

          My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I am curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

          Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)

          St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and courses and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.

          Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!

          It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

          “Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. —Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. —I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.” —Mrs. Thrale.

       I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." 
- George Santayana

Requited love and other improbable fucks.

Jaane woh kaise log the jinke pyar ko pyar mila?!

A Room Of One's Own.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/8654/1/

Struck a chord. 

How hard is this going to be, huh?

http://halfhalf.posterous.com/dont-work-be-hated-love-someone

Don't work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

Bombay Bicycle Club - You Already Know

My favourite songs are the ones that break my heart.
My favourite people are the ones who don't wave back.

“Sometimes you fight what you are, and sometimes you give in to it. And some nights you just don’t want to fight yourself anymore, so you pick someone else to fight.” 
― Laurell K. Hamilton, Incubus Dreams, 

They Called It ‘Unsinkable’- looking back on RMS Titanic

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/07/world/europe/20120407_
TITANIC_FEATURE.html?hp

An Address On Woman's Rights by Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose

http://www.womeninworldhistory.com/WR-09.html

Full speech:
http://gos.sbc.edu/r/rose1.html

Stunning portraits of former slaves photographed seventy years after the Emancipation Proclamation

http://blacklikemoi.com/2012/04/african-american-heroes/stunning-portraits-of-former-slaves-photographed-seventy-years-after-the-emancipation-proclamation/

'Tisn't he who stood and looked on, that can tell you what slavery is- 'tis he who has endured.

"—tomorrow is our permanent address
and there they'll scarcely find us (if they
do,
we'll move away still further: into now"

One times one, 1944

Jim Jefferies fries God

I wish more people would appreciate this shit.

The dumbest ones among the religious lot are those who say "Hey- I believe in God but I believe in science too."

Yeah. Take a walk, mistah.

I don't know which I love more- the man or the quote.

I would raise a baby.

Why We're Still Looking for Amelia

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/why-were-still-looking-for-amelia/253638/

Murder your darlings!

Murder your darlings- A guide to better writing by Arthur Quiller-Couch

The Dilemma of Being a Cyborg

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/magazine/what-happens-when-data-disappears.html

My companion of 3 years, a little black Sony Walkman, died on me last week. I have felt the “A Visit From the Goon Squad”  phenomenon  many times since then.

Rushdie On Hitchens

http://salmanrushdie1.tumblr.com/post/15369634397/christopher-hitchens-vanity-fair-feb-2012

Lesbians in India: living a life of anonymity and isolation.

ilga.org/ilga/en/article/mZqY90R1Xf

Why I Am An Atheist By Bhagat Singh -Oct 1930

http://www.sacw.net/DC/CommunalismCollection/ArticlesArchive/bhagatSinghATHIEST.html

Eric James Borges, Gay Teen Filmmaker, Commits Suicide One Month After Producing 'It Gets Better' Video

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/12/eric-james-borges-gay-teen-filmmaker-death_n_1203123.html

Sad.

"Lesbian parents are a bunch of show-offs, what with the lack of abuse and all."

http://feministing.com/2010/11/11/new-study-lesbian-households-produce-a-child-abuse-rate-of-0/?mid=575366