Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone can you become expert.
Dr. William Osler
ten years come and gone / I soon run short of fingers / a decade, complete
Happy tenth birthday to La Pêche Fraîche, this little sliver of my soul.
We have reached double digits together, readers, and I humbly thank you.
It is one of those nights when you can feel the life in your house to be as warm as it looks from outside.
—Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy
Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever.
—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Like wine through clay,
joy in his blood bursting his heart—the bliss!
Robert Browning, Pheidippides
It is my 26th birthday, today.
More pressing is that my exam, culmination of the last 3 months of my life, is next Friday.
I am therefore resolutely trying to ignore the fact that my birthday has arrived until then.
It has been a marathon, sans doute.
I watched a swatch of the sky turn red.
The red spread like blood in the sea: red, red, red, and then less and less red, until there was only blue left.
I squinted as the sun rose.
― Kira-Kira
“Perhaps I have loved the artist because creation is the nearest we come to divinity.”
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume I (1931-1934)
“Each year, the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch that he thinks is the most sincere. He’s gotta pick this one. He’s got to.
I don’t see how a pumpkin patch can be more sincere than this one. You can look around and there’s not a sign of hypocrisy.
Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see.”
—Linus, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
How to Not Be a Perfectionist
People are vivid
and small
and don’t live
very long—
Molly Brodak
I say this with incredulity: happy 8th birthday to La Pêche Fraîche.
You are loved just for being who you are, just for existing.
You don’t have to do anything to earn it.
Your shortcomings, your lack of self-esteem, physical perfection, or social and economic success—none of that matters.
No one can take this love away from you, and it will always be here.
Ram Dass
