The secret spaces
Oh, hi friends!
What is yours and yours alone?
It could be a secret Google Doc where you write lines of dialogue or scraps of story ideas.
Maybe it’s the practice space you rent across the city, not because it’s cheap but because having it reminds you of what you love doing.
Could be the newsletter you send to 12 friends or the tweets you fire off at 4 a.m. or those rare days where your first thought upon waking is devoted entirely to one thing — yours and yours alone.
Cultivate these spaces. Use them. Draw from them. Go back again and again.
Let the outside world in eventually, maybe, if you feel like it.
But hold on to what is yours.
Mary Oliver
"The Journey"
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.
(h/t Victoria Ratermanis)
Someone You Should Know
This is Creme Puff, who holds the Guinness World Record for world’s oldest cat. She lived to be 38 years old and three days.
THIRTY-EIGHT YEARS OLD.
(This is her at 29, by the way.)
Her owner fed her a diet of dry cat food supplemented with broccoli, eggs, turkey, bacon and coffee with cream. You might as well read her entire Wikipedia page because I know you need to learn more.
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You can also support my work by checking out my new motivational journal, Do It For Yourself, designed to help you through your creative and work projects.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara