André du Toit

Love cycling. And sometimes I poke my nose in other affairs. Also supporting the @A21 charity.

[Francisco Ribeiro @fraveris]

"Empty as a moonlit sky; and brilliant with light and sweet with flowers."

•Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

This paragraph by Richard Feynman hits so hard:

“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.”

[Into The Forest Dark @ElliottBlackwe3]

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
- Annie Dillard

[Francisco Ribeiro @fraveris]

“I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”

— Daphne du Maurier

Vladimir Volegov art.

[Francisco Ribeiro @fraveris]

“In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to details around us”

Virginia Woolf

Kevin Kia.

[VenetiaJane's Garden @VenetiaJane]

Ancient physicians believed nightmares and night terrors were caused by powerful, malevolent demons, and prescribed the potent counter-magic of the peony to drive them away. Even today peony essences are used as a “remedy of the light” to help overcome fearfulness and nightmares.

[Jim Beattie @JimBeattie18]

Nasturtium Spill
Oil on canvas
Lynne Millar.

[Francisco Ribeiro @fraveris]

"True generosity towards the future consists in giving everything to the present."

Albert Camus

[Cian McCarthy @arealmofwonder]

"And if tonight my soul may find her peace in sleep, and sink in good oblivion, and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower, then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created."
~ D.H. Lawrence

Sleeping Animals (1913)
🎨 Franz Marc

[Francisco Ribeiro @fraveris]

'Don't go backwards -
You've already been there.'

Ray Charles

[Francisco Ribeiro @fraveris]

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

— Oscar Wilde

Art by Kaoru Yamada

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

There's an old idea that if you could just shut off your sex drive, you'd think more clearly. In 2023, scientists basically ran that experiment. They put 66 healthy people on an SSRI antidepressant for three weeks. Memory, logic, and attention all stayed sharp. What dropped was sex drive, motivation, and how strongly the brain reacts to good things happening.

The wire has a name: the mesolimbic pathway, the brain's main reward circuit. It fires for sex, food, money, status, and the next rung of whatever ladder you're climbing. SSRIs flood the brain with serotonin. This lifts depression but also quietly suppresses the reward pathway. In one large clinical study, 73% of SSRI users reported sexual side effects. About half also reported feeling emotionally numb, with low motivation and a flat reaction even to good things.

Cancer treatment runs the same experiment from a different angle. There's a class of prostate cancer drugs that cuts off testosterone. The tumor starves. A 2004 study put 40 men through 36 weeks of treatment. By the end, their depression and anxiety scores had climbed, and verbal memory had dropped. Once they stopped, all of it came back. The hormone behind sex drive was holding up parts of their thinking and mood.

About 10% of American women have such low sex drive that it really gets in the way of their lives. Doctors call this hypoactive sexual desire disorder. It overlaps with depression so heavily that researchers now treat the two as feedback loops, each one pulling the other down.

In men, low testosterone shows up as fatigue, low energy, indecisiveness, and a kind of "why bother" mood. Push testosterone higher, and the dopamine cells in the brain's reward center go up too. So does risk-taking, and so does the appetite for competition. The hormone behind sex drive is also the hormone behind the willingness to push and compete.

Freud got most things wrong. He was close on sublimation, the old idea that the same fuel behind sex powers everything else you care about. The wasteful, irrational pull you might wish you could shut off is wired to the same circuit running curiosity, ambition, and the part of you that bothers to get out of bed in the morning.

[Francisco Ribeiro @fraveris]

“Let the silence lead you to the center of your life.”

Rumi

Janet Soon

[Francisco Ribeiro @fraveris]

"Take advantage of this day. Embrace it with both hands. Accept willingly what it brings: light, air and life, its smile, cry, and all the miracle of this day. Go out to meet it."

(Phil Bosmans)

[Into The Forest Dark @ElliottBlackwe3]

Sometimes it is hard not to despair at events in this world, but this should only further our resolution to create spaces of beauty, wonder & compassion all the more. May we create deeper connection & community for change.
(Art by Carl Larsson)

[Francisco Ribeiro @fraveris]

Healing is a choice. It is not an easy one because it takes work to turn around your habits.
But keep making the choice and shifts will happen.

Yehuda Berg

Juan Brufal

[Francisco Ribeiro @fraveris]

"Finding beauty in the light, and enigma in the shadows, creates a beautiful interplay of light and shadow that shapes spaces and objects, elevating them to a metaphysical level."

Aiart by Kaoru Yamada

[Ramblings @ramblingsloa]

Keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life.

Khalil Gibran

[Francisco Ribeiro @fraveris]

Inside, we are ageless and when we talk to ourselves, it’s the same age of the person we were talking to when we were little. It’s the body that is changing around that ageless center.

— David Lynch