Cierra La Puerta

[herpsandbirds]

Greater Blue-eared Glossy-starling (Lamprotornis chalybaeus), family Sturnidae, Kruger National Park, South Africa

photograph by PanWoyteczek

[xenobotanist]

Truly a superb starling

(but not a Superb Starling, because that's a different species)

[fullslack-deactivated20260525]

Peruvian whistling vessels simulating animal calls (some of the oldest found date to c. 500–300 BCE)

[lisareadsthings]

[neoyorzapoteca]

Muriel Rukeyser

[artschoolglasses]

Spirit Bear Possessing a Man’s Soul, David Ruben Piqtoukun, 1982

[wishingwellfairytales]

No animal, according to the rules of animal-etiquette, is ever expected to do anything strenuous, or heroic, or even moderately active during the off-season of winter - Kenneth Grahame

[hedgehog-moss]

I was wondering last night if it was at all possible to translate sign language poetry into writing, when translating poetry from one spoken language to another that uses the same communication devices is already a headache. So I found a book about sign language poetry (by Rachel Sutton-Spence) and it is a delightful read! At one point the author describes a poem by Clayton Valli about a boat, in which the rising and falling pattern of the words he chose (which are located at different heights in the signing space) evokes the bobbing motion of a boat on the water as it approaches a bridge. And, okay, it will never be the same thing but you can tinker with written words to create similar effects, like how Victor Hugo’s poem The Djinns uses rising and falling line length to convey quietness then frantic action then a return to stillness.

Then the author analyses a Christmas ASL poem by Dorothy Miles and at first you’re like, this is translatable—she lists things children ask for Christmas, and includes signs like “pets” and “cake” which both involve touching the back of one hand with the other, creating a visual rhyme. The English translation pairs “pets” with “candy cigarettes” to preserve the rhyme. The author adds that symmetry in signed poetry is comparable to assonance: instead of signing ‘2 people walking’ with one hand the poet might sign ‘1 person walking’ with the right hand and ‘1 person walking’ with the left hand, for poetical effect. As English doesn’t have this opportunity for symmetry, you can translate the intent behind this deliberate, aesthetic symmetry as a rhyme. But then the author goes on to describe how Miles uses gentle, fluttering-open ‘5′ handshapes to convey a feeling of magic and excitement, and adds extra finger-wriggling or fluttering to some signs to make them ‘sparkle’, so the poem goes something like magic-shivers-up-arms, magic-run-downstairs, magic-feel-bumps-through-stocking and as a translator, how do you not ruin the specific charm of this poem?? You would have to draw actual sparkles around every verse to convey a similar effect.

I really love poetry for how great it is at making us aware of all the resources and hidden treasures of our own language, that we often overlook in everyday life, but I also love the other side of the coin, how poetry in translation gleefully makes us aware of all the cool things our language lacks.

[fravery]

Edward Gordon b.1940. American painter. "The Chest" n.d.

[exhaled-spirals]

« Tenderness is the art of personifying, of sharing feelings, and thus endlessly discovering similarities. Creating stories means constantly bringing things to life, giving an existence to all the tiny pieces of the world that are represented by human experiences […]. Tenderness personalizes everything to which it relates, making it possible to give it a voice, to give it the space and the time to come into existence, and to be expressed. It is thanks to tenderness that the teapot starts to talk.

Tenderness is the most modest form of love. […] It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our “self”. Tenderness is spontaneous and disinterested; it goes far beyond empathetic fellow feeling. Instead it is the conscious, though perhaps slightly melancholy, common sharing of fate. Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time. Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and sameness between us. It is a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself.

Literature is built on tenderness […]. »

— Olga Tokarczuk in her Nobel speech, December 2019

[merrymorningofmay]

thought i’d share another thing i made here :’)

i started working on this thing back in january, as russian troops were gathering around our borders, and i got around to finishing it a couple months later, after they retreated from kyiv and my lucky family and i were able to get back home.

for half of the process i was asking myself, “is making this even worth it if it’s going to be bombed to ashes in a couple of weeks?” (the answer was yes); for the other half, i was asking myself how and why do you even make a house now that there are dead and gutted houses all around (the answer was “well, what else is there to do anyway”).

was aiming for the “small ukrainian granny’s apartment” vibe with soviet era “ugly 70s brown” color furniture and a bit of a witchy/magical realism touch :’) details + a bit of ukrainian folk trivia below!

Keep reading

[staceythinx]

Diving swans captured by Viktor Lyagushkin 

[reinerist]

🎃🎃🎃

[sosuperawesome]

Dioramas // Monster and Spinelli on Etsy

[sosuperawesome]

Original Watercolors // Rivulet Paper on Etsy

[patroklos52-deactivated20250724]

In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world — a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexküll called the Umwelt — an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality. A tick’s Umwelt is limited to the touch of hair, the odor that emanates from skin and the heat of warm blood. A human’s Umwelt is far wider but doesn’t include the electric fields that sharks and platypuses are privy to, the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes and vampire bats track or the ultraviolet light that most sighted animals can see.

The Umwelt concept is one of the most profound and beautiful in biology. It tells us that the all-encompassing nature of our subjective experience is an illusion, and that we sense just a small fraction of what there is to sense. It hints at flickers of the magnificent in the mundane, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. And it is almost antidramatic: It reveals that frogs, snakes, ticks and other animals can be doing extraordinary things even when they seem to be doing nothing at all.

~ Ed Yong, NY Times Opinion, 6-21-22

[sosuperawesome]

Autumnal Wood on Instagram

[yupthatexists]

[songue85]

La Fontana Luminosa, in L’Aquila, Italy

[redlipstickresurrected]

Guo Guozhu aka Guozhu Guo aka 郭国柱 (Chinese, b. 1982, Yongchun County, Quanzhou City, China, based Xiamen, China) - No.2舟山嵊山岛中心村 (Lingering Garden No.2), 122°82′E 30°72′N, 2015, Photography