Reading The Bones @antlerandbone - Tumblr Blog

Yule goat and the forest folk

#art #goats #winter #solstice #solstice season

From banshees, to people who had mermaid lovers, crowdsourced stories reveal a different country

“Half a million pages have been digitised by the National Folklore Collection, of which more than 100,000 pages have now been transcribed by volunteers, revealing the fairy situation in every townland, the types of leprechaun and butter churn common to each area, the names of people who tried to steal gold and what happened to them, or who had relationships with mermaids. There is material on local cures, holy wells, strange animals, travelling folk and spirits.”

vespertinals

“Early on Bríde’s morn,

the serpent rises from the mound.

I will not harm the serpent,

nor will the serpent harm me.”

— Carmina Gadelica, Vol. I

Eggs gathered from the barn on Imbolc. These are primarily from Sumatran, Swedish, and Romanian Naked-Neck hens. One or two guinea eggs might have snuck in. Flanked by white-tailed deer, milk, and serpent skeleton on a bed of Eastern Hemlock.

Imbolc heralds the coming spring. The great serpent of the earth stirs and prepares the fallow field to swell and burst with green vitality. Demeter’s bitter tears dry as baying hounds beckon her daughter’s return. The Old Woman of Winter gathers the last of her firewood as her reign suspends for a season.

Seasonal folklore tells of serpents stealing eggs from the barn or milk from goats and cattle. We leave offerings of milk and eggs to symbolically tempt the serpent from its hole. They wake the serpent, who climbs from the mound, which wakes the trees and their blossoms, which wakes the bees, who begin making the honey that makes the mead for the harvest feasts.

It’ll be time to prep the gardens and sow flats of seeds soon enough. May you all grow beautiful things this year.

#imbolc #altars #snakes up #bones #deer #snakes #eggs

jamesusilljournal

This is Where it Ends, Mats Tusenfot, 2012

#art #bones #winter

trilliansthoughts

#winter solstice #newgrange #neolithic #passage tomb #Neolithic passage tomb #piles of rocks

oldfarmhousefallfeatures

☕️ with Cocowhip + a dash of cinnamon, sun beaming through the windows, and orange slices + pine for decorating.✨✨

https://www.instagram.com/mamajbird

#winter #solstice decorations #solstice season #solstice #winter solstice

cycles-seasons

#fall #oak

queenofloci-deactivated20240228

There's an unfortunate side-effect of all the eagles here; due to the overfishing of salmon and the farm being protected, eagles have learned lambs are better pickings. The farmers here are being decimated as the eagles are now abundant....and unfortunately history has taught us what happens when farmers and nature collide: nature always loses.

I am new here, and I do not know the ways of this land yet, but this is a story I've seen play out before along the Colville River, as my lodge mother taught me to watch and listen to the land and the people who lived in it. When the sturgeon were gone, the birds of prey and the cougars went for the livestock. And the vicious cycle of extermination and imbalance rinsed and repeated when the farmers shot the livestock - which caused the rats and deer to overpopulate, which made a boom in Lyme disease....yeah, round and round we go.

I don't know if it is true, but I heard there was an effort to try and replace the sturgeon again - but that required cleaning the pollution in the water. To ina, water is everything, and it always came down to the water in the area. Abuse that, and all is poison.

That England has just decided to dump sewage into all its waterways recently is horrifying - and I even kind of saw it coming. We don't manufacture the chemicals to treat water in this country. We get it from the EU, and Brexit meant that went along with all our damn food. Ugh.

I have a feeling it is the same here in our area: the salmon farm is the biggest polluter in the loch. The wild salmon is greatly depleted but efforts are increasing to assist. I seem to remember ranchers finding if they planted more trees, eagles don't have as clear a path to swoop in with a cumbersome kill - they're huge, and they need space. Deprive them of a runway, and it makes it harder.

Clean up the water, replace the salmon - yes, it will take years. But even in my own garden, I find offering a sacrificial meal to the birds in my hedgerow meant they left my berries alone; I planted loganberries as a barrier between my raspberries. Maybe an offering of carp in a pond in the pasture would take lamb off the menu...but that means investment, and money needs to be offered as incentive, because faster, easier solution will always be a slug from a rifle - and they'll always go for easy when they're losing money.

I don't have the answers, but I can recognise a pattern, and I have seen this before. I will listen, and I will watch, and if I am asked, I will answer with what I know. The land asked me here and I knew, for all its beauty, the land is sick. But there are many who are trying to learn how to tend it, and they are allowed their frustrations, especially in these plague years. There is a compromise here somewhere, but it must be found. Humans are not a pestilence, and we can live here and thrive without killing the land to do so.

I will listen.

#environmentalism

gatheringbones

[“A basic premise of straight culture is the idea that gendered bodies, especially women’s bodies, require purification and modification to be desirable—shaving, perfuming, toning, refining, shrinking, enlarging, and antiaging. But in queer spaces, it is often precisely the hairy, sweaty, dirty, smelly, or unkempt gendered body that is most beloved. I recall the first time I entered a gay men’s sex shop, in the 1990s in the Castro district of San Francisco, and encountered a barrel full of lightly stained and dingy-looking “used jock straps” for sale. It was my introduction to the fact that there were people in the world who desired men’s bodies so much that they wanted deep, intimate, and seemingly unconditional contact with them—even and especially the parts of men’s bodies that straight women seemed to want to avoid.

Most straight women I knew, no doubt due to their socialization as girls and women, appreciated men’s bodies for their sexual functionality but not as a site of objectification that they were excited to dive into and explore—to smell, taste, or penetrate. Similarly, I have been to dozens of dyke strip shows, burlesque shows, drag-king shows, and sex shows in which women’s armpit hair and leg hair and facial hair or their body fat or their genderqueer bodies have been precisely the objects of the audience’s collective lust. Fat bodies and hairy bodies are also staples of queer dyke porn, not relegated to a fetish category. In other words, queer desire is marked by a lustful appreciation for even those parts of men’s and women’s bodies that have been degraded by straight culture. Like a food adventurer who delights in those parts of the animal or plant deemed undesirable by the narrowing of mainstream tastes, queer people’s desire for the full animal has been less constrained. Recognizing this suggests that gay men may have a deeper or more comprehensive appreciation for men’s bodies than do straight women, just as lesbians’ lust for women is arguably more expansive and forgiving than straight men’s. But most importantly, because queer circuits of desire do not rely on the erotic encounter of “opposites” embedded in a broader culture of gendered acrimony and alienation, queer lust need not reconcile a conflict between wanting to fuck and generally disliking one’s fuckable population.”]

Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

#queer theory

vampiresex69

Lemon, thyme and arctic char

givemearmstopraywith

i am writing a thesis on wuthering heights and this is all i have to show for it (x)

#very important literature #wuthering heights #heathcliff #bronte sisters

cundtcake

swiss cows celebrating their autumn tradition of leaving the alps to go down to their other home in valley while wearing big bells and flower crowns (x)

#cows #flower crowns