Part 2 of the Mary Oliver series is up ❤️‍🔥 If you feel pulled between having to have a job and listening to the call of your soul, this was written for you. amayarourke.substack.com/p/the-differ...

"I am in the right place at the right time." #HeronMindfulness

I love that somehow I squirreled some paint away months ago, totally forgot about it, and discovered it like lost treasure this morning while looking for something else 😅

Sharing paintings with a fellow painter and just absolutely swooning over each other's work >>>>>> 😍😍😍😍😍

I suppose this is overdue. But for those of you asking: ❓ Why aren’t you still an astrologer? ❓ Why are you no longer teaching classes about the occult, magic, or spirit work? ❓ Why don’t you give readings or spiritual counseling sessions any longer? amayarourke.substack.com/p/why-i-left

I just finished writing Part 1 of a series where I explore how Mary Oliver lived by her Soul's Compass. We start first by looking to her childhood, and the possible story she was set to inherit. A story she refused to live. amayarourke.substack.com/p/how-one-po...

Me: making a pinterest board of my top painting aspirations/inspirations, proving that I am nothing if not consistent; it feels like one continuous dream, lots of focus on water. My music: Ichiko Aoba playlist starts to play; water is her top inspiration (free diving dominated her childhood!)

Jane Austen's Mr Darcy was a Heron. #JaneAusten #Literature

Saw someone upbraiding someone else for having a hobby while the world is on fire, and, my friends: 1. The world is ever on fire, this is today's conflagration; 2. If you don't find time for rest and joy the fire will consume you; 3. Don't let people shame you for being an entire human.

Again, I have poured my heart out. Part 2 of the Manifesto is live! If you have ever: ✨felt the ache of an unlived life ✨found yourself creatively blocked ✨looked at the stirring in your soul and asked, "But what is the point of doing this?" This one's for you. open.substack.com/pub/amayarou...

My challenges with writing are always: 1. Communicating the hook quickly in the beginning 2. Writing too much and then going through the agonizing process of cutting it waaay the fuck down 😭 So right now I'm practicing micro essays (500 words or less), to balance my verbosity with punchy brevity 😅

❤️‍🔥🙏

It’s finally live: the culmination of years of personal deep spiritual and creative seeking, my whole heart, rolled into a manifesto. If you’re a: ✨ creative ✨ mystic ✨ if you crave spiritual grounding ✨ if you’re all of the above This letter is for you. open.substack.com/pub/amayarou...

Amazing how changing my focus toward something I 100% love and feel zero conflict towards doing, makes me more okay to be seen/known again. 100/10 on aligning existence with your values, highly recommend

Back on my bullshit where I intensely long for the sea with every fiber of my being, waking, sleeping, and everything in between And here I thought that tide had receded

On my mind this morning... It truly is bizarre

SWOOON @racheldeering.bsky.social did the heron ask you to marry her after this?

I deserve all the cookies right now. I just whittled down a class by about 1/3 of it's original size. PRAISE ME this is really hard lol

"We labor at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from [themself]." - Nietzche

Had another wave of "oh god I'm an old now" reading about the end of Warped Tour, and a retrospective of how 2005 pop-punk (Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Paramore) literally helped it begin turning a real profit 😅

Me: I shall write a simple 2 hour workshop Narrator: the only way she would be capable of making this a 2 hour workshop is if she wrote an entire masterclass first

Who knew that iteration on old work with a better/more aligned focus would actually make much greater work in the long run? 😮‍💨😭

Is the present and foreseeable future my jazz obsession era? Did all the Murakami finally burrow it's way into my head like a little aesthetic-dictating worm?

I've been resisting it for years... but I might be at a place where I finally set up and integrate Notion into my writing system 😅

My little avian metalhead 😍😍😍

Allowing the music streamer to play obscure soundtracks so I can discover more deeply moving instrumental music (and possible movies to check out): 10/10 writing experience

The last time I experienced this was in 2017. I was living near Carrick-On-Shannon (Ireland). A local man ran something similar to a musical thrift-shop with old instruments, 1000s of records + cassette tapes, books about music. He made tea and chatted with us for 3 hours. It was pure magic.

It's interesting to watch a social circle shrink when you decide to no longer make something your professional focus or perhaps even a major life focus. At some point maybe I'll need to do that "looking for accounts who" listicle things for where I'm at now and what my life focus has become

I just want to tell some software companies to do less. Your onboarding email sequence is TOO much. Please give me my peace back, you've emailed me 5 too many times today 😭

Can scientists stop trying to reanimate extinct animals from bygone eras and instead figure out why we get barometric migraines and how to stop it? <--- I passionately whisper from a pitch black room

“In a poem Gibson wrote shortly before they died, titled “Love Letter from the Afterlife,” they wrote: “Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before.”

Andrea (Andrew) Gibson's death is hitting me like a ton of bricks 😭

One of the strange ways I fill my creative image bank, is watching various home renovation + design youtubes. A fascinating trend is how once-popular magazines are now championing the trends these youtubes herald first. I guess in a desperate bid to stay relevant? Truly bizarre to witness.

Impatiently waiting for The Art of the Boy and the Heron to be published 😤 It's the biggest "Art of" book produced so far by Studio Ghibli, since it's Miyazaki's most personal work to date! Digging deep into the evolution of Miyazaki's work is a personal passion of mine 😍

“The Otherworld is also much closer than we think; it... seeks relationship right where we are. It doesn’t care if you feel unworthy. All I know is that some of its tendrils live in myth, poetry, ritual, and the wild...” - A Branch from the Lightning Tree, by Martin Shaw

My secret kink is nesting tabs within tabs inside of Google Docs until I reach the limit, like some kind of digital Matryoshka doll of words within words within words within words

The cruel thing about invisible illness, is that because you get questioned all the time about whether the illness is legitimate/real or if you've tried xyz, you start to purposefully hide it away from people to avoid all of that. Weird self-reinforcement, but it's for some semblance of peace.

“Nobody really wants to live a productive life. We want to express ourselves, connect with others, and explore the world. Productivity is just a means to those ends; it should certainly not come at the expense of actually living life.” -- the book Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunffe

The books Daily Rituals and Daily Rituals: Women at Work (both by Mason Currey) are two of my most referenced creativity books. By most referenced, I mean that at a minimum I open them and read a snippet at least 2-3 times every week. A thread on why: 1/

Me, writing for creative projects: articulate, rhythmic, good word choice, pretty good grammar, poetic Me texting a friend: the dialogue of a potato with terrible grammar and bad jokes

Few things are more satisfying than getting close to finishing a creative project that has taken ages to get just right I can't wait to share what I've been brewing up 😍

Woof the way this one hit 😭❤️‍🔥

Learning to navigate the middle ground between loving people simply as they already are without trying (or even wanting) them to change and choosing your company with intention and care so that they are a good-enough match for your values, boundaries, and preferences with room for surprises

Let's be honest: gushing in brazen detail about art and media you love reciprocally is a 10/10 type of friendship

Is there anything more vivifying than unabashedly falling in love with something new and being ever more delighted by what you discover?

For once in my life I actually made a pre-determined election 😅 So if you've been missing my writing for the last few months, or you're just curious what my hermit-self has been up to, check it out: open.substack.com/pub/amayarou...

How are y'all in the British Isles and Ireland experiencing this heat wave and able to think coherent thoughts?

Headline: these two galaxy clusters are about to bash into each other--again 😱🤯💀 My animistic little brain: what if they're just falling in love and that's how they kiss and new stars are born? 🤩😍❤️‍🔥✨

When a used book has the good paper inside: the kind with a distinct fiber weave, a thickness with no faint ghost of print from the opposite side, and the print itself is beautifully inked and pressed, faintly indented, into the page, and the whole thing has a certain pleasant, old-timey smell 😍🥵

Gua sha'ing my neck and face so aggressively for sinus pressure relief that I'm lowkey sore