m.b/

i am the sea and nobody owns me

[nicholaschmidt]

[sucubism-archive]

a resource for housing and transportation tonight for those in the city. please get out before 6 PM.

[renamonkalou]

Observing the reindeer under the aurora | 

Aurora Borealis Observatory

[murdershegoat]

Dozens of NYC Subway riders, fresh off a Robyn concert, singing “Dancing On My Own” while waiting for the E train. (Video by Triszh Hermogenes) 

[biokitty]

I’m reblogging this again because the absolute joy in this video is something I haven’t seen in such a long time that I’d forgotten this aspect of humanity.

[sadladypoetssociety]

…My parents never discussed color, really, in our house—or, to be exact, they never discussed race. But we knew it was important. My mother would tell us that we must never trust white people, but not why. While we were growing up in Harlem, our contacts were with other black people. White was that thing out there that you never trusted, though of course white nuns and the priests, again, were supposed to be special. They were supposed to believe in God. I knew they weren’t special but my mother warned me that Sister So-and-So and Father So-and-So were different from other white people—somehow immune from the racist disease. So there were all these double messages, and what was clear was that everybody lies and nobody will tell you the truth. You have to listen and you have to look because no one is going to tell you.

In 1947 or so when I was thirteen, I went to Washington with my family as a graduation present. There were my father and my mother and the three of us. Washington was still segregated. My father had a huge sense of history. He would bring us American Heritage books and talk to us all of the time about our history, our country, Washington, the Capitol and the Supreme Court. The Sunday we arrived we went to look at the Federal buildings, and afterward, as a special treat my father took us to an ice cream parlor across the street from the Supreme Court. We walked in and sat down at the counter (because it wouldn’t cost as much as if you sat in a booth), and the waiter came over and said in a whisper, “I can’t serve you here but I can give it to you to take out.” Right? And there we sat as if we had never been black before. That is something I will never forget. Never. I was outraged. Because nobody had told me. I went home and on my father’s typewriter I typed an impassioned plea for justice filled with every cliché you can imagine. But this terrible thing had happened, and I wondered why no one got upset about it. My father had never gotten upset, never gotten embarrassed. This is what I thought: “You’ve been telling me all these wonderful things about American history, and we can’t be served in that store.” It made a profound impression. It was my first great betrayal. And the sense of outrage never leaves.

Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it. I always thought I had a very low threshold for physical pain, that I could not take it and that was that. I did not know how to stand still gracefully when I got beaten, which was every day. I passed out in dentists’ offices. And there was always the secret fear. Recently, I had a physical experience that was ghastly and terrible—and wonderful, because it taught me about pain.

Not too long ago I unlocked the old window of my very old Victorian house on Staten island. Somehow the chain broke and the window fell down immediately and caught my hand. There was no way to pull it out and everyone was gone for the weekend. I broke the window and called for help, and it was seven minutes before someone came. I have the scars to remind me. It was crucial, that seven minutes. In it I lived the whole history of pain from start to finish. The genesis of pain, where you put it, how you channel it and how you end it. The choice was immediate: to die, or to bear the pain. And what does bearing mean? It means changing or going through. It is not death. It is an experience encapsulated. It could stop. It could be ended. By chewing off my arm, for example. But this was not possible for me. So the pain is transformed. The intensity changes. It has to stop or it has to change. This was a physical knowledge that I had not had before, that pain has a mutability. That is very, very important, and that is just as true about emotional pain: it will change or stop. And the worst thing that can happen is death, but that is a whole different thing to involve yourself in. I felt at that point that there was nothing I could not do, nothing that I could not deal with, because pain will always either change or stop. Always. I have tested this since then, and it is always clear and workable.…

Audre Lorde interviewed by Nina Winter, 1976. Reprinted in Conversations with Audre Lorde

[babushkadiana]

The Family by Justine Kurland 

[weltenwellen]

Beverly Engel. Healing Your Emotional Self

[awesome-picz]

[daftpunkblogger]

Are they on a date

[awed-frog]

Life under quarantine: two friends have lunch together [Marche, Italy].

[fillielitsa]

A child eats an ice cream on the first day of restrictions being lifted in Xianning, Hubei province. Credit: Reuters

[artist-turner]

Interior of Salisbury Cathedral, 1805, William Turner

Medium: watercolor,paper

[visual-infinity]

[julaibib]

[pir-ado]

.

[eyeheartfarms]

To be a fat tabby cat sleeping in a ray of Spring sunshine in an old couple’s garden.

[highschoolhandjobs]

i sing the body electric // andrea gibson

photos by (x)

[scientificphilosopher]

Also, you live on one planet next to one star among a galaxy filled with upwards of 300,000,000,000 stars, in a universe with 300,000,000,000 galaxies, each galaxy in turn filled with hundreds of millions to hundreds of billions of stars. You share fifty percent of your DNA with a banana. You are more closely related to chimpanzees than mice are to rats. You are directly related to every single living organism on this planet. You are, in fact, related to every non-living entity as well (including the device you’re using to read this) because all of our elements were forged together inside the hearts of dying stars. Everything you see in the universe has evolved from a point of infinite mass and density, to quark-gluon plasma, to hydrogen atoms, to complex elements, to you! But all of that stuff we can interact with only makes up 5% of the matter in the universe. The rest is dark matter and dark energy, which we can’t see, hear, touch, smell, or taste. You wouldn’t be here today if you didn’t have an unbroken lineage of survival tracing back to the beginning of life on this planet. That means not a single one of your direct ancestors, stretching back over three thousand million years, has ever died before successfully reproducing—this occurring on a planet where over 99% of all species that have existed are currently extinct. Survival is the exception, extinction the rule. Yet here you are. You are also constantly replacing the cells in your body, so much so that in 7-10 years not a single cell in your body will be the same as today. You are, down to every last atom, a different person than you were when you were born. Yet your brain still manages to be ‘you’, day after day, year after year. All the solid material around you is not only 99.9999999999999999% empty space on the quantum level, it’s also in a constant state of dynamic agitation. All of your atoms are dancing, jiggling waves and particles, existing not as individual entities, but only as probabilities. Put enough of them together, though, and we get the world as we know it.

[lettersfromadreamgirl]

okay but waking up in the middle of the night to soft rain and knowing you’ve still got hours to sleep, when you’re toasty warm and comfortable & sleep has made you forget all your worries and responsibilities and u go back to sleep feeling as content as ever