Vivaldi played by the South African elementary school Goede Hoop Marimba Band

Turn ON the sound

AMAZING

Slow down, turn on the sound and take a couple of minutes to enjoy this!

I think Vivaldi would have been tickled by this as he actually wrote so much of his music for an all girl orphanage/school. So to see a group of girls still playing his music hundreds of years later?!?!?! On an instrument he'd never seen?!?!?!

Wow, the drama in this performance. Genuinely amazing.

this video now

My wife: This seat has become stairs. Sorry for the convenience.

Listen to me: You get good at things by being bad at them. You learn by failing. You gain competency and a sense of mastery by failing at something many times and in many interesting ways.

The sooner you are able to laugh at your own failures, to enjoy the process of messing up, the easier life will be. Because you'll no longer be afraid of learning.

And once you're no longer afraid of failing, you can learn anything.

i wish it were as easy as it sounds

And that's the thing of it, isn't it? Failing and accepting a failure is itself a skill.

And it can be very hard to learn, especially if you come from a family where a failure is a sign that you are a failure instead of a sign that you are learning.

You're going to fail at failing well. There are going to be times when it hurts, times when your brain is telling you that you should just give up and you'll never get it. Times when a failure is going to frustrate you to no end.

And you can still learn to fail well. You can learn to see it as a sign that you're learning, you can learn to give a little chuckle and say to yourself, well, everyone screws up sometimes, I'm just learning.

It is not easy, but it is important.

Growing.

i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. like in the airbnb i was at i guess it used to be a kids room cause you could see the imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. like that's a poem already what's the point

you get it. you get the themes. i dont have time to do it justice. just look at it its on the ceiling

these exchanges and this fiddling about for the collective to appreciate in passing is, to me, true artistic spirit. I don't know what the past was truly like to live, but in my heart i know that humans have always been... like this

.

good work everyone

Voodoo dolls

After The Tower Falls

Here is the secret: eventually, the ache stops, the devastation quickens and then slows, the anger arrives righteous and in want of a reckoning,

and then, it turns back to shadow, suddenly, as if had not been burning a moment before, and in that empty space, there is quiet, and in that quiet, there is relief, like cool water from a soft stream, your heart

is no longer howling, and the pieces of the past all around you

no longer feel like destruction, but a fresh start, flowers growing out of the cracks, a bright song of possibility,

and you know you survived it, the worst thing, the impossible thing, the heartbreak

didn’t break you after all— breathe.

I’m paying to force seven thousand strangers to see a photo of my late husband having fun with his dog. Tumblr Blaze is totally worth it. XD

Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. ❤️

Reblog to have your dashboard be visited by the spirit of joy that death can end but not erase.

Love that this is well beyond 7000 people now and still going

@leavescrown Exactly! It’s a beautiful gift. Martin and Bosco out there travelling around the Tumblr community, continually making new friends.

Reblog so she lives forever.

That post about 30 year old coming of age stories?

I’ve been thinking about it all morning. What would the plot points be for that? What makes a 30 year old coming of age story?

Old folks sound off in the comments

A few ideas:

Obtaining a diagnosis for a health condition (mental or physical) and finally getting treatment and recontextualizing your life.

Student loan forgiveness kicking in, suddenly you can afford to live. That one small change snowballs into something big.

Starting over after the end of The Big Relationship you thought would define your life. Engaging in a new hobby/social group that adds context to how small life felt in that relationship.

You find yourself with a pet you have to care for, which teaches you to care for yourself.

You take a class somewhere that unlocks skills you didn't know you had.

In limbo between leaving the job that used your degree and finding the job you know you actually want—either your "calling" or something that pays well, is low-stress, and you will be treated well.

You've settled the wild and restless needs of your youth, as well as the mistakes you made or opportunities you missed, and you realize the first 30yrs were training wheels. Your real life is just starting.

The necessity of moving on from a long time and beloved mentor.

The sudden desire for quiet, and the loss of friends who still prefer things loud.

The birth of a child.

we gotta stop pretending that anakin skywalker was a normal happenstance. it’s not every day that a bull moose breaks into a stash of cocaine, busts into an elementary school and stomps a classroom of children to death, and then spends the next twenty years murdering the shit out of every other moose it ever sees in all its life until it finally commits quasi-patricide by throwing its dad into the ocean. other jedi fell to the dark side of the force, and they killed, what, a couple people? other jedi are touched by the dark side, which means they really just had a pissy week? anakin touches the dark side and kills a few dozen people. anakin falls to the dark side of the force and then murders or attempts to murder almost everyone who ever knew him in middle school. anakin falls to the dark side of the force and then storms the jedi knitting club and starts cracking heads on the pavement. within ten minutes he has saddled up to go balls-to-the-window balls-to-the-wall batshit, he stops at the bodega by the jedi temple to shotgun a four loko and a sugar free monster energy before immediately proceeding to kill like a thousand fucking people with a sword

what anakin did was dramatic taking into account his jedi-turned-evil peers, but even considering his sith peers - those guys do some massacres. dooku does some mildly heinous shit and dresses like an art deco dark elf king, maul did like, i don’t know, some light manslaughter? i don’t know, the most significant thing he does is kill the guy who is adjacent to the guys that people care about. but in his first three hours as a sith, anakin stops between jedi murders #304-#305 to personally hand almost every other sith lord ever a “sorry you sucked so bad at being evil that a rabid college student could defeat you powered solely by space redbull, but maybe you should grow a spine and step up your game” dunce cap. the “congrats on being an evil pussy” dunce cap. all these other sith lords foamed at the mouth to murder jedi even the once, and anakin just fucking goes to town and wipes the floor with an entire temple of them in about six hours, and that’s not even where he stops. the dude just keeps doing shit. from then on he charges about half-cocked half-in-possession-of-his-sanity, seven feet tall and seven million murders deep, yelling incomprehensible nonsense like a ford fiesta burdened with sentience so it has to acknowledge how much it fucking sucks. but this ford fiesta chose to cope with its inherent, terminal and chronic suckitude by joining a cult predicated on the power of a) punching everyone you meet in the dick and b) hoping everyone you meet gets punched in the dick and c) getting punched in the dick

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

This sign does NOT pull its punches, and I am HERE for it!

Don't forget when companies jacked up the price of EGGS in the middle of a pandemic.

Eggs are an important cheap source of protein for people on a budget.

<3 THIS IS THE SINGLE MOST WHOLESOME THING I HAVE EVER SEEN <3

From the article:

i HAVE to stop looking at shelter cats until i'm moved but BUNNY

bunny is still there and apparently hasn't been adopted because she's very skittish and shy but so AM I

i assume they don't put cats on layaway but i might go this weekend to see if i can say hi, at least. and then bring her home on, like, june 5th when i'm all moved and settled if she's still there.

bunny 1.5 years and a few pounds later

Even if I didn’t have a solid plan, in the back of my head, I always assumed I’d kill myself.

Now I’m an adult and people my age have their lives in order and I’m stuck here, confused, because I never planned to be alive and I’m so far behind.

I feel like I’ll never catch up.

Hey all.

I want to make an addition to this. I made this post a long time ago.

I’m currently back in university, and I’ve made so much progress with my trauma. I’m in a loving relationship.

Things can and will get better. It’s not too late.

Nothing is perfect by any means. But I’m happy I’m still here and didn’t kill myself. I hope you get to that point, too 💕

The addition is important! I see the original post circulating a lot, but the addition is important!

New addition two years later. I’m still going strong!

I’m getting married. I’m still in that loving relationship.

I’ve learned that there’s no real timeline. It’s okay. And while it sucks that I lost time, there’s still so much for me to experience and enjoy.

Newest addition. 7 years after the original post!

I got married last month! My dog is laying on me snoring. I’ve learned to have healthy friendships and relationships. I’ve learned that I’m not alone and that even when things are hard, I’m going to be okay.

Do not punish the behaviour you want to see

I mean, it seems pretty obvious when you put it like that, right?

But how many families, when an introvert sibling or child makes an effort to socialize,  snarkily say, “So, you’ve decided to join us”?

Or when someone does something they’ve had trouble doing, say, “Why can’t you do that all the time?” (Happened to me, too often.)

Or any sentence containing the word “finally”. 

If someone makes a step, a small step, in a direction you want to encourage, encourage it. Don’t complain about how it’s not enough. Don’t bring up previous stuff. Encourage it.

Because I swear to fucking god there is nothing more soul-killing, more motivation-crushing, than struggling to succeed and finding out that success and failure are both punished.

Encouragement and acknowledgment are so much more effective than punishment.