Smoking Cigarette & Sipping Mango, Watching The World Spin: Fighting The Urges, My Mind Is A Maze, A

I'm getting in my own way again...

Call out to me so my footsteps halter

Burnish my skin of these lasting marks

Made by tears of my own making

With every footstep that I falter

In fog formed by clouds I mistook in my own ecstacy

When the people you are closest to, who may even know you more than you know yourself, call you fearless and strong when you start doubting yourself, it makes you realise that there is a whole part of yourself that only others see and believe in. And maybe you could start believing in that too.

Many folktales throughout different cultures feature a heroine being given the impossible task of sorting through grains/seeds– whether that be picking them from the ashes, from between each other, or from their rotting counterparts.

In this task, she often does as much as she can before submitting to a higher power, whether that power recognizes her virtue or she directly asks for help varies based on the culture and tale.

Featured are eight such tales, most of which can be categorized into “Snake Bride” (ATU 425) type tales or “Cinderella” (Both often ATU 510 in the folklore index– Cinderellas are specifically ATU 510A)

The circle puts them in no particular order, as “origins”  and lineages are muddied, and many of the current incarnations have been influenced by each other, though Ye Xian is the oldest known “complete” version of Cinderella.

Snake Brides:

Psyche, Eros and Psyche (Greco-Roman)

Sukkia, The Snake’s Bride (India)

Donan Sampakang Tale about Gansaļangi and Donan Sampakang (Indonesian)

Cinderellas:

Aschenputtel (German)

Tam, Tấm and Cám (Vietnam)

Unnamed Heroine The Wonderful Birch (Finish & Slavic)

Ye Xian (Chinese)

Neither (ATU 480B– Stepmother and Stepdaughter)

Vasilisa, Vasilisa the Wise (or Beautiful) (Slavic)

Be kind to yourself, you are deserving of love ♡

Will this day ever end

for fear of waking again;

a new rise, a new day

forever a lifetime away

jokes about english teachers overanalyzing books have done detrimental damage to society

i wish i was the birth of a newborn or an infant's first word,

so i could make you beam like a child's proud mother.

i wish i was the first day of school, or a girl's 16th birthday,

or her high school graduation and the after party.

i wish i was your first kiss, or the first time you liked a girl and thought about marriage. 

i wish i was the first heartbreak or the love you'll die with,

i wish i was special, or something like it. 

- i wish i was special

Wednesday, 28th July 2021

Love is more than the dream wistfully painted across torn pages in dripping ink and meadows of wildflowers, by writers and poets huddled by candlelight seeing love written in beloved faces. Seeing love in yearning clouds slowly chasing after the sun's fragile rays. Love is heartache and hurt and pain - a climbing river pushing back against everything you know. It inspires and challenges, it breathes life and ends it. It is everything we want and everything we do not dare to have. Love can bring just as much destruction to the harmony it creates. But it’s never about what love is or what it is not - it is how we shape its destiny within our own lives that counts. Love will always be with you, but will you let it stay? And sometimes we know that we just have to chase it away.