As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame

A happy sideblog to help me deal with the anxiety, depression and BED I've been fighting for twenty years. Stay safe and look after yourselves!

[deeplovephotography]

[natureac]

This blog will make you feel at peace

[eugeniedanglars]

don’t mind me i’m just crying about this quora response

[transcript: A Quora question from an unidentified user that reads “How do I overcome the sadness about the fact that everyone I love and care about will die eventually?”

The top response is from Michael Bergmann. It reads:

By understanding the place that time has in your life. It is entirely appropriate to be sad—after each person dies, not now. [Note: the words “after” and “not now” are in bold.]

After all, it’s not just death: everything, absolutely everything changes. When you find something or someone you like or love you can try to hold on to that someone or something through the changes which are coming—and as long as you accept the changes you can hold on to the (changed) version of that someone or something for quite a while.

For example, parents can love their children for years and decades — providing they don’t try to hold onto the way their children used to be. If you meet someone you love, that person will surely die — but only once. Before that happens you can make love dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of times.

Do not confuse yourself with a rock. Inanimate nature rushes towards entropy. Mountains erode down to the sea. Our dead bodies decay into soil. But, at the moment, we are not inanimate so we don’t participate in all that, and to be sad about deaths that have not happened yet is to misunderstand your place among the living. We are alive and living things do not go to entropy, quite the opposite. Living things create organization. Trees create tree rings and leaves or needles of a certain shape and color. People create meaning and then sites like Quora to share the meaning we have found or created. Do not rush towards death, it will come for you by itself. In the meantime, participate in all that is not death. And while you are to be commended for not denying the inevitability of death, you also should not do death’s work for it. Leave death to death. There is a great deal to do in the meantime and you might as well enjoy it.

One thing you can enjoy is the fact that you are not alone with this issue. Here, for example, is Shakespeare (Sonnet 64):

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate That Time will come and take my love away.

Read the whole sonnet. And then more sonnets. Many of them are quite astoundingly beautiful. And then see whether you aren’t more happy that Shakespeare lived than sad that he died.

/end transcript]

[everythingfox]

A bashful young wombat trots up to you… Your day improves.

[sofiee-shea-deactivated20250427]

[beetlegarden]

we are not born to die!! what are you talking about!! do you think a book begins just to finish? do you think a song opens with a beautiful chord just for it to end? you don’t read the book to finish it, you read the book to eat up the excitement and the emotions it evokes!! to learn and to digest and to fall in love and be heartbroken!! you listen to the song to dance and dance and sing your throat raw!!! to cry and smile and swell with the harmonies!! yes, we are born with the inevitable fate of death, we are mortal after all, but that is merely the finale of the play!! the final act, the closing of the curtains - we are not born to take a bow and exit stage left!! we are born to love and be joyous and yell and move and learn and cry and feelfeelfeel!!!  we are not born to die, silly, we’re born to live!!!

[astronomical-bagel]

This is so violently hopeful and uplifting everyone needs to see it

[alltheoutsinfreeeee]

@hopepunk-humanity

[theclassyissue]

[whatareyoureallyafraidof]

[ladybluebottle]

Be scared and show up anyway. A favorite quote from Glennon Doyle.💕

[notsoaveragejack]

Anyone else just feel like disappearing

[hopepunk-humanity]

I will never be over endosymbiosis. 

Simply put, endosymbiosis is a biological concept involving two symbiotic organisms who, over millions of years, become so interdependent that they evolve into one organism. 

It’s theorized that this how cells got their chloroplasts and mitochondria. It’s why, to this day, mitochondria have DNA unique to themselves, separate from the DNA of the rest of the organism. 

And without this primordial partnership, life on Earth as we know it wouldn’t exist. 

Nature may be arms race. But it’s equally a cooperation. And we lose so much perspective if we try to strip away that nuance, and apply that misconception to our own society. 

We survive better together than we ever could apart

[scotianostra]

Good Morning from Scotland 

Sound of Sleat sunrise by Seònaid Via Flickr: Couldn’t resist capturing last Saturday’s gorgeous sunrise from the bedroom window. Not much early morning colour this week though, with the change in weather temperature and the rain clouds appearing!

[999999999999996-deactivated2023]

[maureen2musings]

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@peter_outdoor_photography

[riverwindphotography]

Meditations: © gif by riverwindphotography

[noonfrost]

—

[fennecandco]

Trauma didn't make me nice, I consciously made me nice because I don't want anyone else to suffer like I did. Trauma didn't make me strong, I made me strong. Don't you dare ever tell me my trauma made me anything but scared, broken, and confused. Don't give credit to the abusers for me being a good person. They didn't make me good, I made myself good.

[ampervadasz]