Avatar

living my life™

@hautesprings / hautesprings.tumblr.com

Posts
Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
oaluz

Usually we imagine that true love will be intensely pleasurable and romantic, full of love and light. In truth, true love is all about work. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wisely observed: “Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in my life, they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure was more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work …” The essence of true love is mutual recognition – two individuals seeing each other as they really are. We all know that the usual approach is to meet someone we like and put our best self forward, or even at times a false self, one we believe will be more appealing to the person we want to attract. When our real self appears in its entirety, when the good behaviour becomes too much to maintain or the masks are taken away, disappointment comes. All too often individuals feel, after the fact – when feelings are hurt and hearts are broken – that it was a case of mistaken identity, that the loved one is a stranger. They saw what they wanted to see rather than what was really there.

True love is a different story. When it happens, individuals usually feel in touch with each other’s core identity. Embarking on such a relationship is frightening precisely because we feel there is no place to hide. We are known. All the ecstasy that we feel emerges as this love nurtures us and challenges us to grow and transform. Describing true love, Eric Butterworth writes: “True love is a peculiar kind of insight through which we see the wholeness which the person is – at the same time totally accepting the level on which he now expresses himself – without any delusion that the potential is a present reality. True love accepts the person who now is without qualifications, but with a sincere and unwavering commitment to help him achieve his goals of self-unfoldment – which we may see better than he does.” Most of the time, we think that love means just accepting the other person as they are. Who among us has not learned the hard way that we cannot change someone, mold them and make them into the ideal beloved we might want them to be. Yet when we commit to true love, we are committed to being changed, to being acted upon by the beloved in a way that enables us to be more fully self-actualised. This commitment to change is chosen. It happens by mutual agreement. Again and again in conversations the most common vision of true love I have heard shared was one that declared it to be “unconditional.” True love is unconditional, but to truly flourish it requires an ongoing commitment to constructive struggle and change.

bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

Avatar
reblogged
mascochist

this is one of my favourite moments in Drag Race herstory and it does not get the attention it deserves 

Avatar
reblogged
jonnoxvxrevanche
Avatar
oaluz
Anonymous asked:

i’m white and i consider myself to be a feminist, and i read your white supremacy//feminism post and id just like to ask, how do i fix this in myself? I dont want to be ignorant and i dont want to be how you described us in the post so is there any way i can get better?

oaluz answered:

you can’t fix it or get better. lean into the fact that your position relies on exploitation and violence. who you are was shaped by that, it shapes all of us. you can’t opt out of it, your life is geared towards benefitting from racism, western colonialism, antiblackness. learn to take it less personally and to listen without inserting yourself into narratives and situations. learn that if white supremacy ended and people of colour were liberated, you would probably have to lose things: assumptions of superior beauty, intelligence, success, capability. these are all conditional entitlements.

read as much from the perspectives of people of colour, especially in the areas that you live in. see if you can find local histories of the indigenous people(s), any forcibly transported or displaced peoples, migrants and immigrants. if your whiteness grants you easy access to a national identity, problematise that – why should you get to belong when others don’t? and if you live in a settler colonial country, why should you be proud of being a part of a history that denies indigenous peoples sovereignty and self-determination? 

on a more internal level, be prepared to feel very uncomfortable, ashamed, guilty, by interrogating all of this. learn to ride those feelings and to understand that you are doing your best, but that you ALSO MUST continue aspiring to do better. resist the urge to disengage. learn not to judge yourself or to internalise the judgments of others, these things are counterproductive. you don’t need to prove your worth, but you do need to stretch your capacity for empathy, compassion, and humility in order to fully orient yourselves towards justice. sometimes shame, guilt, regret are important for us to feel because they teach us that we don’t know everything, we can and do make mistakes, we can actually do horrible things sometimes, we can be complicit in horrific things. imo white people need to learn to take a certain level of shame on in order to humble themselves and understand that so much historical injustice has happened for their benefit. be honest with other white friends about this process and notice when you might be trying to make yourself feel better through thinking you’re a ‘good ally’ by working through these feelings. understand that you can never be a ‘good ally’ – all you can do is learn to decenter yourself when appropriate.

ultimately the priority is not you getting better or you fixing yourself. it is ending structural oppression and violence. take care of yourself, and try to find peace within yourself, but its crucial to remain open to this whole entire world outside of you, full of histories of suffering but also powerful resistance. you’re not going to get fully “better” until the world as we know it ends, or is unrecognisably transformed. invest in that instead. xx

Avatar
Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
voguehawaii

ugly xmas sweater but for makeup 💋

HAPPY XMAS EVERYONE! ILY HOPE YOU ENJOY YOUR HOLIDAY WITH LOVED ONES!!!

Source: youtube.com
Avatar
reblogged
belairbottom

Javier Bardem in Jamón Jamón (1992) dir. Bigas Luna

You are using an unsupported browser and things might not work as intended. Please make sure you're using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.