Author: briery

26/f

When you find somebody you love, all the way through, and she loves you—even with your weaknesses, your flaws, everything starts to click into place. And if you can talk to her, and she listens, if she makes you laugh, and makes you think, makes you want, makes you see who you really are, and who you are is better, just better with her, you’d be crazy not to want to spend the rest of your life with her.

Nora Roberts, Happy Ever After

Talk about a big bite!

Here, a white-spotted rose anemone clings to and attempts to ingest a
moon jelly in Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Although the
jelly is twice the size of the anemone, most of the jelly is water, so
it’s not an impossibly large meal. While moon jellies are usually open
ocean species, sometimes oceanographic conditions bring them closer to
shore – and into the mouths of creatures like this anemone. (Photo: Steve Lonhart/NOAA)

“When I was about 20 years old, I met an old pastor’s
wife who told me that when she was young and had her first child, she
didn’t believe in striking children, although spanking kids with a
switch pulled from a tree was standard punishment at the time. But one
day, when her son was four or five, he did something that she felt
warranted a spanking–the first in his life. She told him that he would
have to go outside himself and find a switch for her to hit him with.
The boy was gone a long time. And when he came back in, he was crying.
He said to her, “Mama, I couldn’t find a switch, but here’s a rock that
you can throw at me.” All of a sudden the mother understood how the
situation felt from the child’s point of view: that if my mother wants
to hurt me, then it makes no difference what she does it with; she might
as well do it with a stone. And the mother took the boy into her lap
and they both cried. Then she laid the rock on a shelf in the kitchen to
remind herself forever: never violence. And that is something I think
everyone should keep in mind. Because if violence begins in the nursery
one can raise children into violence.”

— Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstocking, 1978 Peace Prize Acceptance Speech