Don’t talk to yourself in such a way that if you did so to a friend, it would end your friendship. If you had a friend dealing with the same things, you wouldn’t berate that person, say, ‘You’re not working hard enough,’ ‘You suck,’ or ‘You’re not as good as [whomever].’ You’d offer your friend encouragement, you’d try to point out all the things your friend did right, and how much progress your friend had made.
You should do no less for yourself.
Be very careful how you talk to yourself. Because you are listening.

-- Pat Cadigan, author

I am a MONSTER

Watch these four destroy the female stereotypes with ease.
(The 'being a monster' bit is a reference to a Jay Z lyric.)

Found here.

Bobbi Gib

Bobbi Gibb, the first woman to run and complete the Boston Marathon in 1966. She ran without a number because women were not allowed in the race! Gibb’s run challenged prevalent prejudices and misconceptions about women's athletic capabilities at the time.

Recommendation

This massage oil from Aesop smells gorgeous! Really lovely massaged into skin fresh out of the shower/bath/hotspring/ocean...

 Breathless hydrating body treatment

Aquadettes

This made my heart melt and sing.
I love this ladies honesty, shes got balls. And the costumes! oh the costumes.... 

Aquadettes from Plied Sound on Vimeo.

“There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm”

― Edgar Allan Poe

'All it takes is practice and patience, practice and patience'

This is Synchronized swimming (1958, Helen M. Cardan)

The film was found in the Chicago Film Archives' Chicago Public Library Collection and is a 1950s instructional film that demonstrates the basic strokes used in synchronized swimming.

My favorite quote...
'The most perfect position in the world is useless, unless you know what to do with it'

Found here

Water

Do you ever stretch in water? I think it can be really useful and I wish I could do it more often!

I love the feeling of weightlessness. In water you can increase your range of motion – and with greater control – compared to stretching on land. It also gives you the opportunity to elongate the spine, release myofascial patterns, soothe rigidity associated with muscular aches and pains and it’s easier to reach and hold the point of optimal stretch, with less strain.

Handstands are a little easier too...

Liz Koch demonstrating psoas stretches in water

Félicia Atkinson

Félicia Atkinson

“Over the past twenty years, as he has traveled throughout Iran, Mohsen Rastani has been taking family portraits. From sparsely populated villages to small, crowded cities, wherever he goes, he takes a white backdrop with him. Sometimes when he stays in one place for a while, he opens a temporary studio to shoot his portraits. And sometimes he makes the street into his studio. When he sees people he wants to photograph, he tells them he doesn’t wish to bother them but asks them to call him. In this way, his subjects come to him, and when they stand between his camera and the backdrop he allows them to present themselves however they like.

“To Rastani, the white backdrop is almost as important to these photographs as the people that appear against it. The backdrop, he says, ‘isolates people better in our minds, so they become eternal … like myths, carved images on the stone walls of Persepolis.’”

—Mohsen Rastani, “Iranian Family Portraits”

By The Sea - Polaroids by Cy Twombly

at last you, will say (maybe without speaking)
(there are mountains
inside your skull
garden and chaos, ocean
and hurricane; certain
corners of rooms, portraits
of great-grandmothers, curtains
of a particular shade;
your deserts; your private
dinosaurs; the first
woman)
all i need to know:
tell me
everything
just as it was
from the beginning

--Margaret Atwood 

Hannah Höch- ‘Aus einem ethnographischen Museum { ” d’un nombre musée’} ,1930 collage
(via goldlionaz)
Source: lamelancoly

There is power in hope.

Nawal El Saadawi — who has been imprisoned, censored, and exiled — still talking about hope.

“TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

--Howard Zinn

HOPE

Image found here

Sunday tune

Sunday Tune

Ahhhhhhhhh Le Weekend!!

I'm trying to get rid of a cold so I plan to wrap up warm, drink hot toddies and make a start on the ever growing pile of books beside my bed...
Have a lovely one!

'les-positions-pour-lire' found at the beautiful goldlionaz

Friday!

Found here

Memories

“We know we are made of memories, but we don’t know the extent to which we are made up of forgetfulness. We think of oblivion as an absence, an empty space, a lack. But in most cases, with the exception of neurological disease, forgetting is an activity—it’s a choice that demands the same effort as remembrance. This is equally valid for individuals and communities. If you visit Mozambique, you’ll see that people have decided to forget the war years. It is not an omission. It’s a tacit decision to forget what were cruel times, because people fear that this cruelty is not a thing of the past but can again become our present. And moreover, in rural parts of Mozambique the notion of nonlinear time is still dominant. For them, the past has not passed.”

Conversation with this year’s Neustadt International Prize winner Mia Couto.
Via theparisreview

Recommended Read

“In the Bible Belt, where I grew up, people looked to scripture for guidance. I tried, but Leviticus damns deformities: the book warns against allowing the deformed to blight the priesthood, listing among the deformed those who have ‘a crooked back.’ Modern translations made the prohibition even clearer by rendering that with the specificity of “he who has scoliosis,” so I turned to other texts.”

Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza on turning to literature after being diagnosed with scoliosis.
via theparisreview

Making shapes

"Two actresses at Delphi Festival adorn costumes of classical Greece"
December 1930.
Photograph by Maynard Owen Williams, National Geographic

Dreams

Drawings by D. B. Horowitz

Recipe

FISHY ONE POT WONDER
Serves 4-6
1 bunch spring onions
4 tbsp rapeseed oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 x 400g tin cherry tomatoes
Pinch of sugar
Pinch of saffron (optional)
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
4 heritage tomatoes (approx 450g)
Small clutch of basil
4 small red gurnards (or other firm-fleshed fish), filleted and
skin removed
10 prawns, peeled
1 x 400g tin butter beans, drained
1 x 400g tin kidney beans, drained
1 lemon, cut into wedges

Chop the spring onions into rounds. Heat 2 tbsp of the oil in a large lidded saucepan. Add the garlic and the green part of the onions and cook until softened but not coloured.

 Add the tinned tomatoes, some sea salt, a pinch of sugar, the saffron (if using), paprika and balsamic vinegar. Simmer for 5 minutes, then pour into a separate bowl and wipe the pan clean.

In the meantime, cut the heritage tomatoes into bite-sized pieces. Add the white part of the spring onions and the basil, torn into small bits. Season and set aside.

Heat the remaining oil in the pan until hot. Season the gurnard fillets and the prawns and sear for about 1 minute on each side until coloured and then return the tomato sauce to the pan along with all the beans. Bring to a simmer for about 2 minutes with the lid on. Stir in the heritage tomatoes and check the seasoning. Serve with a little extra basil on top and the lemon wedges.

Recipe from Rachel Khoo
Illustration by Heather Gatley
Cover from The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer found here

one moment

I want this one moment. It’s what I want in a relationship, which might explain why I’m single now. It’s kind of hard to- It’s that thing when you’re with someone and you love them and they know it, and they love you and you know it- But it’s a party! And you’re both talking to other people, and you’re laughing and shining, and you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes. But not because you’re possessive or it’s precisely sexual, but because that is your person in this life. And it’s funny and sad but only because this life will end. And it’s this secret world that exists right there, in public, unnoticed that no one knows about. It’s sort of like how they say that other dimensions exist all around us but we don’t have the ability to perceive them? That’s what I want out of a relationship or just life, I guess.

 

--Frances Ha (via thatkindofwoman)

Jacques Henri Lartigue

Beautiful movement studies by Jacques Henri Lartigue.
(Thanks Carly for sending the link!)