songofanothersummer

[songofanothersummer]

[songofanothersummer]

Colette, writing in 1934. Source.

[songofanothersummer]

spring always has me feeling a certain kind of way

something about the scent of it - flowers in bloom, blossoming trees, earth-soaked petrichor - brings back memories of all springs past, which no other season does for me, for some reason...

it's a bit hopeful and a touch nostalgic, with dashes of bittersweet thrown in

[songofanothersummer]

Here is a Draft I Wrote on August 24th, 2023

Hello. Today is my 46th birthday. I am really happy to be here. I am especially happy to be here because my previous selves did so much work--including when they did not want to be here--to make sure that I would have a chance to walk in the woods on a very hot August day and marvel in gratitude.

[songofanothersummer]

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor People

[songofanothersummer]

“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”

— Ruth Hubbard, “The Political Nature of ‘Human Nature’“ (via gothhabiba)

Yes.

[songofanothersummer]

from Anthology of Armenian Poetry, ed. & tr. by Diana Der Hovanessian and Marzbed Margossian; "Your bosom"

[songofanothersummer]

Julia de Burgos, tr. by Jack Agüeros, from Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos; "To Julia de Burgos"

[Text ID: "in all my poems I undress my heart."]

[songofanothersummer]

Rati Saxena, ed. by Kate Rogers and Viki Holmes, from Not a Muse: The Inner Lives of Women: A World Poetry Anthology; "Mountain nights"

[Text ID: “Last night / there was a dream / And / In the dream? You / You / You / And / Only you”]

[songofanothersummer]

saw a tiktok of a mother taking her very tiny daughter to an art museum and she’s just walking around going “whoooa” “woooaah” to everything but then they got to a marble statue of a nude woman lying on her back and the girl points and goes “mommy🫵” and i just immediately welled up with tears and all the comments are just laughing about it and of course it’s funny but how are you not insanely moved by the way art connects everyone on earth from a centuries-old sculptor to a toddler in 2023

[songofanothersummer]

tonight’s mood is the deep desire to be held close in a dimly lit room, covered in blankets while rain is softly falling outside

[songofanothersummer]

- Lyudmilla Ignatenko, the wife of deceased firefighter Vasily Ignatenko, Voices from Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexeivich (transl. Keith Gessen)

[songofanothersummer]

we used to get prescribed a summer on the seaside. now we just get told to go touch grass. the economy is in shambles

[songofanothersummer]

I feel like a big part of enjoying life is being able to get excited over the truly small things, like having a fruit you like, wearing your fave socks, the smell of rain or the way light comes through your window.

When my anxiety got very severe last year, the thing that made life worth it was those tiny little things, which became tremendously important when I wasn’t well enough to really do anything or go anywhere for a year. A brown egg, some cute stickers, a wildflower my neighbour brought me on the way home from a party, seeing the weather change every day, watching the birds from my window… It’s happiness in miniature, and deserves some attention.

[songofanothersummer]

there is no unlived life or alternative reality where everything went right…. there is only here and now what are you going to do with it

#all we have left to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us

[songofanothersummer]

do not understand people who get bored of seeing common animals. understand even less when they act with annoyance or hostility just because they're common animals. a deer or a sparrow or a field mouse is like a sunset to me

[songofanothersummer]

When I return a library book, I make sure to walk there holding it in my hands instead of in my bag. This is enrichment before it gets returned to the cold limbo of the stacks