Spiny Flower Mantis

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I want to hold hands at a museum with the love of my life.

Jean Béraud. 1848-1935.

Botanical [ 8 colors ]

Nature doesn't hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

@ apricotc on depop

"For women, only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl. The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man. The beauty of a boy resembles the beauty of a girl. In both sexes it is a fragile kind of beauty and flourishes naturally only in the early part of the life-cycle. Happily, men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks — heavier, rougher, more thickly built. A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has only exchanged one form of attractiveness for another: the darker skin of a man’s face, roughened by daily shaving, showing the marks of emotion and the normal lines of age. There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat. No wonder that no boy minds becoming a man, while even the passage from girlhood to early womanhood is experienced by many women as their downfall, for all women are trained to want to continue looking like girls." — Excerpt from Susan Sontag's 1978 essay The Double Standard of Aging

The only darkness I shall allow into my life, is the night

For even then, I have the Moon.

She handed me a Chinese fortune that read “you will bring sunshine into someone’s life” and on the back she had scribbled “you are my sunshine” ever since then she hasn’t been just a lover, but my best friend. I love her so much.

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

― Frank Herbert, Dune