I want to share from inside a life I am actually living, making work that grows out of my days. I want to live in a way that honors the fact that we are always in a creative, dynamic, ever-fluctuating state of becoming. Guess who's back? Fresh newsletter 👇 amayarourke.substack.com/p/a-note-abo...

So foggy and salt water-swept that I can't see the house in front of where I live 😍 dreaaammmmyyyy

And then 7 months later... I live here 🤯

Hello, yes, I am alive! I moved to an itinerant waypost on the Dingle Peninsula where I now paint everyday... which I dreamed of for 5 years 🤯 Social media feels strange when real life feels good, so I have no idea how much I'll be around here. For now, a sunset over the distant Blasket Islands:

"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 >>>>>> 😍😍😍😍😍

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.

❤️‍🔥🙏

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?

"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

My little avian metalhead 😍😍😍

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.

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 😭

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

“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

Woof the way this one hit 😭❤️‍🔥

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?

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 😍🥵

A continuation that made me go ‼️ "Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself." - Soren Kierkegaard

Chewing on this today, that anxiety is the possibility of possibility rather than any true actuality: "[Anxiety] is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility." - Soren Kierkegaard

Throwing it out there that we need more gardening emojis. Aphids and spider mites are the most common gardening pest complaints, and yet nary an emoji in sight for us green thumbed nerds. Petition for ~at least~ an aphid emoji, they be out here eating everything and I'm tired of typing it all out

"Oh, I wanted to be easy in the peopled kingdoms, to take my place there, but there was none that I could find shaped like me." - Mary Oliver

Ireland's drought has been broken by a continuous soft mist of rain and a 10º temp drop this morning. My window is open for the wafting scent of fading light pink hawthorn blooms and wild flowers carried on the rainy breeze. I'm wrapped up in a heated blanket, continuing work research, 10/10.

generous friends who always surprise you >>>>>

eating entire cartons of strawberries in one sitting is a civic duty when there is a nationwide bumper crop

“And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart: Your seeds shall live in my body, And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart, And your fragrance shall be my breath, And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.” ― Khalil Gibran

Just want to make a @cobraandcrescent.com appreciation post and very subtly nudge them to MAKE THE DAMN THING because their insight is brilliant and immediately applicable, and everyone would benefit from their generous curiosity and rigorous experimentation. That is all 💙

"If the first response to interdependence and to our sharing the common, grace-filled soup of the cosmic womb is to celebrate, the second response is to heal." -Matthew Fox

My persistent dream journey fieldnotes: this is the age of countless dawning wetlands storm breaking terra-transformation bewitching loam fields birthing life from cradled ghosts liminal realm of bird tadpole serpent endless beauty of the churning undulating sweet-salt-soil-deluge thresholds

"He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service to speak for him." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

A couple of intuitive paint sketches I made while I was writing the intuition class that I am currently teaching Happy accidents from painting on Tomoe River paper. It's not built for water media, so it does weird and cool things I can't control or predict. It's a balm.

Me to myself last year: do you really want to paint seascapes, water, and clouds, or are you being influenced by other people you deeply admire? Me reviewing my travel photos from 2016: wow most of these are of the sea, weather, and clouds

No cheating. Post the last photo of your pet.

"If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world." - Jack Gilbert

More frog spawn, from today's bog walk 💙 Just before I took this, frogs were mating, calling loud, and causing a lot of surface disruption. Then they heard my doggo sniffling around and went completely still 😂

Since Spring is a winter-pilled trickster around these parts, you better believe I absolutely savor the tiniest signs of life beginning to emerge Enjoy the first frog spawn of the season, and the single patch of snowdrops I came across on a forest/bog walk the other day. 💙

EveryHeron says... "We need to rediscover the natural world, not as a resource to be exploited, but as a home to be cherished."

Once, I put my heart inside an empty bottle and gave it to the ocean, watched it vanish on the back of a wave. Sitting on the beach, toes dipped in sand, the water kissed my skin and brought me back a seashell. I pressed it to my ear and listened. ‘I’ll give you mine in return.’

Spring in Ireland is more like 15 winters in a trench coat, constantly trying to sell you a broken watch.

There's a common notion that being ungovernable means being tough, unmovable, etc. But I'd say that being ungovernable requires agility, the ability to redirect the flow of things, softness that allows us to survive falling so we can get back up and keep going.