love says

Love liberates. It doesn’t bind. Love says. ‘I love you. I love you if you’re in China. I love you if you’re across town. I love you if you’re in Harlem. I love you. I would like to be near you. I’d like to have your arms around me. I’d like to hear your voice in my ear. But that’s not possible now. So I love you. Go.’

Maya Angelou

today was all shades of purple

i feel
confident and sure and still i'm so afraid
i feel so young and i feel so old,
so young with this long lavender bow in my hair that made me look like lucy when i read mccalls this afternoon, you said
so old because people wrote me postcards in 1908 and my decisions matter more every day.
i feel like i have to choose which one i am.
i feel
dusty like the jacket of the sinatra record i bought today and
bright blue remembering that picasso sketch
and telling you about how i think in color.
so privileged, because, has there really been another woman on earth more privileged than me? white and middle class in 2013? how do i live up to that?
i feel like jazz.
i feel full of potential and thrilled at the thought of the future
i feel like the future never starts.

i know you.
you're my shadow.
you've been here all along, you have
your own space in my chest.
i know what it feels like to love you.
did you know i can almost see you?
you are always in my periphery. but i
am still not sure if i have seen your face.

i am strength

i woke up this morning already missing. missing people, missing myself.
if every year i have lived was to have a title, 2011 would be "young" and 2012 would be "love" and 2013 would be "lost" because let's face it, i have no idea what to do with myself and all my struggles this year have been in figuring that out.
but after i woke up i checked my inbox, forgetting that is was monday, you know, the day you get emails from missionaries, and ari said this to me: 

Stop that! You always know what to do. You may not know the course or the exact thing that will happen next or the career you want in life, but you KNOW who you are and you know that you will do the very best you can in anything you do. Yes, College sucks and doesn't give any help in the "what should I do for the rest of my life" department. BUT you are going to graduate with a degree in something, proving that you can do HARD things! and you can. Because you are Hannah FLIPPIN Kroes. You are strength.

and i share this with you because, how true! it doesn't matter exactly what i do, it matters how i do it. and how will i do it? well the same way i've done everything: with love.

just like the heart has no limit for love, the heart has no limit for missing. which is at once very sad but very comforting, because there's room, and i won't lose anyone in there, even if i don't see them for months or for years.

my whole life i have been pulled along by little tugs. tugs to china, tugs to people, tugs to certain classes. and it has not failed me yet. right now i am scared because i don't feel any. i feel like all the strings connecting me to destiny have been cut. no tugs to serve abroad anywhere this fall. none to move somewhere else. none to live in provo, none to go on a mission, none for any classes to take, none to live at home, none to meet any certain people. so i have no plans. and in a way i guess that's nice, because i can decide all by myself, but also it's not because i don't know what i want. i have a few weeks to figure this out, so wish me luck.

i'm still living

in fact, i'm very much alive.
i am looking at the tops of trees again
and noticing flowers. and tasting rain and singing loud to norah jones.
i spent two hours in front of one norman rockwell in the museum the other day. right next to it was two photographs of louis armstrong and ella fitzgerald, and there was a sensor there so when you moved it would start playing "dream a little dream of me",
so i sat there on that stool and stared at that painting of a church in new york city and dreamed a little dream and it was absolutely perfect.
i'm so happy and so full and so me. and so capable.
and life is good.

3rd wave

there are honestly no words inside me. i try to blog sometimes. the result is about 6 feminist drafts.

i am trying to figure out what this means for me. am i settling? 

i've been thinking about my future from a different perspective and it has changed everything. 

what kind of woman do i want to be?

not what kind of person; i know almost exactly what kind of person i want to be.

but what kind of woman? a stay-at-home mother? a working one? an academic? a wife? a teacher? a leader? i am trying to create my own definition of what womanhood will mean for me (something i think every girl has to do at some point) and the answer will change all of my decisions, but the answer is not an easy one to come by.

but it has been helpful that despite what they say this is not an either/or. for me, it isn't. i don't have to grow up and become a wife and NOT a leader; i don't have to grow up and become a mother and NOT engaged in a career; i don't have to pursue a career wholeheartedly and NOT pursue a family. we all know that love should be the number one priority but i don't have to write NURTURE on every line on my list. i can write whatever the heck i want to on my list, no matter how small those priorities may become once my perspective gets a little bit bigger. as much as i'd like to, and as much as i feel i'm supposed to, i will never be comfortable choosing one with the exclusion of the other. 

coming to a conclusion about my own personal womanhood is miles away but it has been quite a process to even begin considering it. i guess the one thing i've figured out so far is that whatever i choose on the spectrum of womanhood will be my own personal choice, not a result of somebody else's and definitely not a settlement.

look, it turned into another feminist post. that was unintentional.

3rd wave feminism (where we are right now, my friends, contrary to popular belief) is about reclaiming female agency and using choice to make yourself into exactly what kind of woman you want to be, while respecting the choices that other women choose to make no matter how different they may be from yours. am i the only one that thinks about this so deeply? is there anyone that can shed light on their own personal definition of womanhood? i would certainly like to hear it.

majors

well, blogging just doesn't seem to be my thing anymore, does it?
is it anyone's?
anyway,
i've been doing a lot of thinking for the past few months. a lot. my mind is constantly going about sociology and feminism and poststructuralism art theory and manet, the painter of modern life, and borromini and japanese botany. this is the first time that i've had to stretch my mind this far. it's very empowering, actually, to learn how to really think. and man is it hard work.
i feel a lot more directed in my career path and opportunities, and i feel a lot more assurance that i can actually do this. there is a lot of judgement passed on majors and i know that when i tell people i'm studying art history, a very small percentage of them actually respect that. but it doesn't matter, does it? because i know what i'm doing and why i'm doing it, and i have never set out to be practical, anyway.
what i am setting out to do is to work hard and to give art more voice and make an personal impression on people that just simply can't be done by good business or whatever else is a "smart" major.
let's not judge people based on things like this. it's hard, because even i do it to others, and i'm in the same situation. but i'm glad when people follow their dreams, whether it is in economics or the arts or science, it's such a great thing to be passionate. i thank the heavens that there's people who want to be doctors and accountants and laborers because if the world was filled with people like me, we wouldn't last a day, would we?
but also thank the heavens that there are people like me, or people like i'm trying to be. thank the heavens that there's people who are so very invested in beauty and truth.