@asfarasyoucanreach - Tumblr Blog

Into the woods, Janek Sedlář

Campania, Italy

The universe is made up of experiences that are designed to burn out your attachment, your clinging, to pleasure, to pain, to fear, to all of it. And as long as there is a place where you’re vulnerable, the universe will find a way to confront you with it.

Ram Dass (via oldtimefriend)

wordsnquotes

We need to move away from this constant need of coming across as calm, cool and collected. We weren’t built to be calm, cool, and collected. If we were, it wouldn’t feel so exhausting all the time. It would, you know, come naturally to us. You know what comes naturally to human beings though? Being open, being messy, being raw, being unfiltered, having lots of feelings. Why should we have to stifle our true nature? Let’s go after the things we want, let’s love each other brutally and honestly, and not worry about the consequences. Let’s release the feelings inside of us and let them land somewhere special. Otherwise, we might have a lifetime of longing in front of us.

Ryan O’Connell (via wordsnquotes)

mizakeuchiha-blog

misswallflower

I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Sonnet XXVII” (via misswallflower)

We might not be aware of it, but too many of our relationships are rooted to a foundation of fear that is fixated instinctually on serving ourselves.

But oftentimes, when our relationships are driven primarily by our fears, we start engendering within ourselves the very attributes we dread the most.

newsweekscience

Less than 2 percent of all Ebola donations went to front-line medical staff in Sierra Leone.

Under cover of darkness, a few burial workers pried opened the hospital morgue’s steel doors and stole three corpses. They carried the bodies to the hospital’s front gates and tossed them beside the road that bisects downtown Kenema, the third largest city in Sierra Leone.

As the sun rose, a crowd gathered around the bodies. No one admitted to dumping them, but members of the hospital’s burial team, the 23 men tasked with carrying and cleaning Ebola-infected corpses, told local journalists the cadavers were a form of protest. The workers had not received the $115 weekly in “hazard pay” they had been promised for nearly two months by supervisors, the government and donors. And they were not alone. All over the country, hundreds—if not thousands—of doctors, nurses, hospital cleaners, lab technicians and burial workers had been unpaid or underpaid, and many still are.

That silent protest took place on November 25, 2014, while hospitals throughout the country were collapsing under the weight of the deadliest Ebola outbreak in history. The men and women on the front lines, risking their lives to save the dying and protect the healthy from infection, had begun to feel duped. Millions of dollars flowed into Sierra Leone from all over the world to help tackle the crisis, but the workers’ pleas to be paid were ignored.

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tylerknott

Wrap me in your legs and hold me in your arms now, we can take our time.

Daily Haiku on Love by Tyler Knott Gregson (via tylerknott)

nevver

Flotsam, Lisa Sorgini

nevver

Breakfast of Champions

kateoplis

Peel back the layers of most of the recent police shootings that have captured attention and you will find a broad societal problem that we have looked at, thrown our hands up, and said to the criminal-justice system, “You deal with this.” Last week I was in Madison, Wisconsin, where I was informed of the killing of Tony Robinson by a police officer. Robinson was high on mushrooms. The police were summoned after he chased a car. The police killed him. A month earlier, I’d been thinking a lot about Anthony Hill, who was mentally ill. One day last month, Hill stripped off his clothes and started jumping off of his balcony. The police were called. They killed him. I can’t see the image of Tamir Rice aimlessly kicking snow outside the Cleveland projects and think of how little we invest in occupying the minds of children. A bored Tamir Rice decided to occupy his time with a airsoft gun. He was killed. There is of course another way. Was Walter Scott’s malfunctioning third-brake light really worth a police encounter? Should the state repeatedly incarcerate him for not paying child support? Do we really want people trained to fight crime dealing with someone who’s ceased taking medication? Does the presence of a gun really improve the chance of peacefully resolving a drug episode?“ "Police officers fight crime. Police officers are neither case-workers, nor teachers, nor mental-health professionals, nor drug counselors. One of the great hallmarks of the past forty years of American domestic policy is a broad disinterest in that difference. The problem of restoring police authority is not really a problem of police authority, but a problem of democratic authority. It is what happens when you decide to solve all your problems with a hammer. To ask, at this late date, why the police seem to have lost their minds is to ask why our hammers are so bad at installing air-conditioners. More it is to ignore the state of the house all around us. A reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all. It’s avoidance. It’s a continuance of the American preference for considering the actions of bad individuals, as opposed to the function and intention of systems.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Myth of Police Reform (via kateoplis)