🐝 loved by bees 🐝

"This creature that was everything I was not. We could not be more dissimilar, and yet, inside, I felt a welling up of sympathy for the toughness. For the miracle of this creature. Was this a gift Silvina gave me, too? How the world opened up? How it kept opening up."

[apicia]

Religious / philosophy / etc blog. This post has my frequently used tags for easy navigation :)

Initiation Song from the Finders' Lodge (From Always Coming Home by Ursula K LeGuin)

Please bring strange things. Please come bringing new things. Let very old things come into your hands. Let what you do not know come into your eyes. Let desert sand harden your feet. Let the arch of your feet be the mountains. Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps and the ways you go be the lines on your palms. Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing and your outbreath be the shining of ice. May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words. May you smell food cooking you have not eaten. May the spring of a foreign river be your navel. May your soul be at home where there are no houses. Walk carefully, well loved one, walk mindfully, well loved one, walk fearlessly, well loved one. Return with us, return to us, be always coming home.

[mariacallous]

I'm going through the readings for the next class, which is the second half of the life cycle events (so finishing up marriage, and then going on to divorce and death) and I got to this part in Sarah Hurwitz's book, where she has a whole chapter on Jewish death rituals, and this got to me:

[appalachiananarchist]

I have an end-of-life patient to whom I spoke today. She burst out laughing and said, "It was all such fun. I just had so much fun." I wish this for everyone. I wish that we each would meet death laughing, with little regret and even less fear.

[holespoles]

"Shimmering night" by Inaslind.

[cowboyjimkirk]

Images from Leonard Nimoy’s The Full Body Project (2007)

The Full Body Project is a book of photography by Leonard Nimoy that features a group of women involved in fat liberation. They were the Fat-Bottom Revue—women who worked in film, theatre, and art and who formed the first all-fat burlesque performance group. The founder of the Fat-Bottom Revue, Heather MacAllister, was an advocate in the LGBT rights movement, the fat acceptance movement, and in particular was a champion for fat lesbians.

[cowboyjimkirk]

More photos:

[str-ngeloop]

I think I miss climbing around in the Banyan outside of the dining center, at new college. Someone had tied some of the prop roots together to form a sort of swing. And people's steps over the years had sort of carved a set of stairs into the mass of trunks, overflowing organic forms like lava flows or a lover's limbs. If you knew where to look, and if you knew where to put your feet, it was really easy to clamber up into that thing. And there was a hidden journal that people would add to. And there was a hammock. And there were all these little nooks and crannies in this Banyan that was like maybe 15 to 20 feet by 15 to 20 feet by 30 to 40 feet high of just dense trunk, and people would clamber up there on hot august evenings in short shorts and graphic tees to smoke a joint unharrassed or make out. and during a lot of parties, especially the big ones, and when people did live music, they'd set up the stage right under the Banyan in that enclosed area, and hang lights and tapestries from its roots, and it was really a staple of the life there. and we underrated that experience. And I think I just missed that experience of being held by that plant. you know?

[str-ngeloop]

it's about... experiencing affective metabolism in sensory reciprocation with a plant... swinging around on the original jungle gym... the environment that allows you to be ape... and the sensorium. the unvelt. the way it changed the felt texture of my philosophy. the way it helped open my mind and my body into each other. the way it facilitated connection between people via resonance with deep ancestral patterns... you know, that real shit

[str-ngeloop]

you get why that's the type of place siddhartha was enlightened, is what i'm saying

[str-ngeloop]

@transcyberism: 'when I was a kid we would go camping to this one campsite in Massachusetts with a huge old crab apple tree. absolutely ancient, with gnarled sprawling limbs going every direction. I barely remember anything from that early in my life but I still have vivid memories of that tree, of walking across the horizontal sections of the branches, meeting random other children there, etc.'

So i've been playing around with this concept i came up with in relation to my community garden research work that i'm calling 'Agroaffectivity'. 'agro' as in agriculture, agroecology, and 'affectivity' as in affect in the spinoza-deleuze-massumi-stengers poststructuralist sense, as in the nondual material interrelated ways bodies affect and are affected, as in what gets colonized into 'emotion' by culture, as in the felt sense of material transformation, the sensorimotor coupling that changes the lived world, changes everything. I mean to indicate just this, me and the fig and you and the apple.

[improvisedliturgy]

When I face you, it is me-and-you facing you-and-me. It is me-and-all-worlds facing all-worlds-and-me. It is the entire universe facing the entire universe. We are always different, because wherever we go, there is a you and a me, two different aspects, never merging into a blank indifferent mush of a single quality. But since me-and-you is contrasted to me-and-you, there is really no contrast at all: the same thing is found on both sides of the contrast. We are neither the same nor different. We are divided from ourselves, impossible to unify into a simple unity, but for that very reason we are impossible to separate from one another. To put it plainly, each of us, at each moment, is absolute, the Center at which all appears and which appears in all things. All things are our transformation bodies; we are the transformation body of all things.

Brook Ziporyn, Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism

[thewitchofwonders]

— Sylvia Fraser, My Father’s House

[rodeoradio]

-Leslie Feinberg, from Trans Liberation Beyond Pink Or Blue

[revolutionaryletters]

thinking about this duolingo yiddish illustration by ilya milstein again.. 

[apocryphics]

[monamoni]

Upside down fig tree in Bacoli, Italy. No one is quite sure how the tree ended up there or how it survived, but year after year it continues to grow downwards and bear figs.

[havingapoemwithyou]

[for comrades who ask] by Tim Blunk

[bijoumikhawal]

New substack essay!

Excerpt:

"In addition to my previous note about the word “suffer” and how it is used to create very direct parallels between Hagar and enslaved Hebrews, there are in fact even more linguistic connections drawn. Sarah and Pharaoh use the same word for casting out when referring to their respective enslaved subjects, and Pslams 94 and 107 use the same word for “wander” to describe the Hebrews in the wilderness that is used for Hagar, with both her narrative and these Psalms following this up with G-d directing each to a well of water. The same word for “sending” is used to describe Hagar and the Hebrews entering their respective wildernesses. The idea of “sending” also comes up when Pharaoh commands Abraham to leave Egypt after the whole mess caused when he married Sarah, and is more commonly used as a parallel to the Hebrews leaving Egypt,² but Hagar is made an even more direct parallel via phrasing, her abject social status, the genuine danger she faces in the desert, and her specific meeting with the divine very shortly after being freed into the wilderness to guide and protect her. This is not to say that the former is not a parallel; it is, both are. In fact, both images are necessary to make the parallel- the abjection and danger of the newly free Hagar, and the newly enriched Abraham who brought down a curse upon a pharaoh."

[2productive]

[urgetocreate]

David Deamer (British), Saturday Morning at the Pool (Isle of Skye), Oil on wood panel

[girls--complex]

[girls--complex]

[girls--complex]