“There Is A Cult Of Ignorance In The United States, And There Always Has Been. The Strain Of Anti-intellectualism

the biggest lesson im learning is that nothing is as extreme or as permanent as our emotions convince us they are. nothing is certain and things are always fluctuating and there are always exceptions and there are always mistakes. there is always pain and there is always love. everything is a delicate touch away from changing

“The only way to handle danger is to face it. If you start getting frightened of it then you make it worse because you project onto it all kinds of bogies and threats which don’t exist in it at all.

Whenever you meet a ghost, don’t run away. Because the ghost will capture the substance of your fear and materialise itself out of your own substance. It will kill you eventually because it will take over all your own vitality. 

So, then, whenever confronted with a ghost walk straight into it. And it will disappear.”

— Alan Watts

I think about love sometimes. About how it’s taught and seen and felt.

I think about the ‘date nights’ and flowers and cards my parents spoke of and the rigid smiles when it went wrong. I think about the vacations and gifts and parties and how much they fought. Over the kind of flower. Over the venue. Over how hot the hotel was. Over how the party was stressful. It was hard for me to see how much they loved each other over their sighs and sharp words.

I was taught to love in grand gestures, but between each showing was a cutting bitterness that I was told was love. I watched the movies and my parents and tried to learn how to love my partner with disgust between my teeth fixed into a picture perfect smile.

We tried to love like our parents taught us and it almost broke us. Accusations hissed through clenched teeth and voices raised over clenched fists as we tried, tried so hard, to love like our parents taught us. Wilting flowers tossed in the compost and dinner dates spent in silence as we ignored each other over steak.

Love like that nearly broke us, and we had to pick up the cracked bits and figure out how to love like ourselves.

Now, I think of my partner, who was taught by his parents to kill what he did not like. I think of how he instead carefully uses a cup and paper to move a spider to a different area because he knows I love spiders, and he loves me more than he hates spiders.

I think of making homemade hot pockets for my partner, because he doesn’t like to eat in the lunch room at work and I want him to have something good he can eat by himself. He smiles so softly when he sees them cooling on the counter, and he knows I love him more than I hate to cook.

I think of him buying me radish seeds because he knows I like seeds more than flowers.

I think of me moving the wasps away from his workout area because I know they scare him.

When I think of love, I think of my partner tucking an extra twenty into my wallet when he thinks I’m not looking. I think of me mending his socks because both of us hate shopping and if I fix them, he won’t have to buy more.

We buy pizza on our anniversary if we remember it. We wait till after Valentines day to buy discount chocolate. We don’t hold hands in public, instead we bump shoulders when we pass each other in public. Brief and secret and ours.

We can’t love like our parents taught us, but I think… perhaps we love like ourselves, and that’s enough.

Warlock concept: A warlock multiclassing as warlock.

Dark Academia for Brown People

 Most people, when they think of dark academia is books (that’s the whole point) and ancient languages such as Latin or Ancient Greek. I’m here to tell you that you all are SLEEPING on brown culture. Love that is conveyed in the languages of Persian and Urdu (my native language) crosses borders. Sure, Shakespeare and Sappho wrote great pieces of literature but the stories and poems of Rumi, Manto, Hafez and Iqbal have a special place in my heart. 

Some of my favourites are:- (all are translated)

Sit at my grave with wine and a minstrel in a trance, so your smell will raise me from the dead.

HAFEZ

My lover’s sadness lit a fire in my heart that burned my chest, there was a fire in his house that burned the nest.

HAFEZ

O the day turned night, what a shame, a gazelle of kindness a lion became, my partner and lover grew tired of my words and prayers too.

RUMI

These are my personal favourites. I can always make a longer post if you all want.

Female poets deserve a whole other post.

As someone who goes to an English-Medium school, we are always taught to converse in English, see the language as a part of yourself but deny a place to Urdu. As I grow older, I have come to appreciate my identity and so should all my fellow brown people. Take pride in your mother tongue.

Me, wearing a blanket as a cloak, stirring my mac'n'cheese in a dimly lit room: potion

Magic?

“Down here - he said - you will find people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no.”

Guards Guards! - Terry Pratchett