So you plant your own garden and
decorate your own soul, instead of waiting
for someone to bring you flowers
Veronica A. Shofstall, “After a While” (via wizlaqueefa)
my favorite quote
(via slutsneverdie) +
Why were girls in such a hurry to grow up? She would never understand. Childhood was magical. Leaving it behind was a magnificent loss.
Sarah Addison Allen, The Peach Keeper (via larmoyante) +130/365
You are all in a constant battle with love for your quiet strengths and hatred for your blatant flaws. You need to make less of your self-deprecating judgements and more recognition of what you can offer to the world: being you.
Trust me, no one else can take your place.
+
It is okay to be at a place of struggle. Struggle is just another word for growth. Even the most evolved beings find themselves in a place of struggle now and then. In fact, struggle is a sure sign to them that they are expanding; it is their indication of real and important progress. The only one who doesn’t struggle is the one who doesn’t grow. So if you are struggling right now, see it as a terrific sign — and celebrate your struggle.
Neale Donald Walsch (via onlinecounsellingcollege) +129/365
Not Another Estrada Rant
Aside from its seemingly singular goal to send majority of the student population to dreamland, I’ve always wondered why history was universally taught in curriculums when not a single soul cares. It is fraught with dates and people that are memorized the day before exams and are promptly forgotten afterwards. Who cares when and where who killed who? History was a blur of faces and numbers, of places and events we can hardly correlate with the modern world. I couldn’t imagine history being of practical use, unless you’re in a General knowledge quiz show or you’re kidnapped by a history fanatic who will slit you throat if you failed to name the 1st President of the Philippines.
Well, that was until I learned that a former President was elected by the people in Makati as their prestigious mayor. Oh, and before I forget, he almost won the last Presidential elections too.
They appear to be oblivious to the fact that this was the same president who was charged guilty of corruption and was believed to have gained roughly $80 million dollars from illicit means. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for second chances. But this is something that doesn’t just constitute a single person or a group. The consequences fall upon an entire city, which also happens to be one of the most financially prolific cities in the country.
Imagine how different the reaction would be if Estrada ran for mayor a year after he was overthrown from Presidency. Imagine the protests and angry tirades had he chosen to claim the mayoralty position two years after he was sent to prison.
Unfortunately, time flies, memories blur, allegiances shift and feelings are projected towards another political villain. The past encroaches onto the present and we’re faced with a sad list of possibilities: the possibility of history repeating itself, the possibility of another political downfall, the possibility of more economic downturns.
I realized that we learn history because lessons are buried underneath the failures and dreams are embedded in victories. It just so happens that people are wont to ignore them. I could only hope, for the country’s sake, that this will not warrant an “I told you so”.
+I’d found out that if you pushed people away hard enough, they tended to go.
Morgan Matson, Amy & Roger’s Epic Detour +
Lord, I will trust in You.: Love The Unlovely...
+John Blanchard stood up from the bench, straightened his Army uniform, and studied the crowd of people making their way through Grand Central Station. He looked for the girl whose heart he knew, but whose face he didn’t, the girl with the rose.
His interest in her had…
128/365
How does one define motherhood in a way that was no longer hackneyed or trite? She often thought of grace and kindness, patience and love as epitomes of a mother. Her hand rose to her bulging stomach, concentrating on the flow of air in and out her lungs instead of the heart she imagined beating inside her womb and the beeping of the machines surrounding her in the labor room. She was neither graceful nor kind, patience nor loving.
She was unstable and moody, ineffectual and spiteful. This child deserved better than a mother who was accidentally tossed into pregnancy after a spontaneous, if not drunken, hookup in the backseat of a battered Prius. Being pregnant at nineteen was pretty low on her goals in life. She can barely handle responsibilities handed out to her. Now her knees are quivering at the thought of also being responsible for the life of a breathing, living child.
A lump rose to her throat, pushing and crawling until she vomited on the floor, the smell instantly making her head spin. Fear was eating her alive from the inside. She thought she could feel it burrowing on her muscles, chewing on her bones, wounding the child she whispered to every night. Mama will be here. Mama loves you so much. Mama will protect you.
They were together in this; the anxious woes of a mother to be and the beating heart of an unborn child. Her boyfriend, well, ex boyfriend that is, had a big ego and even bigger dreams. Her parents were walking the thin line between divorce and killing each other over dinner, which roughly explains why none of them questioned her decision to quit college and “travel” for some time. The allowance they sent her every month compensated for the last month when she could no longer work.
It wasn’t fear of the future so much as fear of being worthy. Will she be able to be a good mother? Will she be able to give her child the love and care she always yearned from her own mother? Will she be able to raise the child into someone strong and beautiful and respectful and kind?
Pain shot through her entirety and the questions lay forgotten. A few hours later, she held her baby in her arms. It was tiny, looking more like a porcelain doll than a real child. The questions and skepticism were swept away like cobwebs in the wind. She felt her heart throb with anticipation and warmth, the love pouring forth in a steady stream.
She wasn’t sure if she’s going to be a good mother but she knows one thing: she loves her daughter with such fervor and intensity that made her cry. And that love, her love, can move mountains.
+So my 14 year old sister was playing Sims on my Ipad and she pointedly told me to buy a man so my character can get herself a boyfriend and my youngest sister who was 13, overhearing what she just said, spoke”,My sisters are buying men on the internet! What’s happening to the world!!”
+Until we have seen someone’s darkness, we don’t really know who they are. Until we have forgiven someone’s darkness, we don’t really know what love is.
Marianne Williamson (via erraticintrovert) +
+I do not want your perfection
I want the scars, the birthmarks
The dimples in the wrong places
The habits that never die out
I want the shirts you outgrew
The hands that swear too much
The weird combinations of foodI want the wrong context clues
The overused, too general words
The misplaced punctuation of
Periods and commas and colons
The simple slip of exclamations
The wrong yet beautiful fragments
Or the too lengthy for a sentenceI want the entirety of you
