a cabinet of wonder

“If you've ever wondered where your dreams come from when you go to sleep at night, just look around. This is where they are made. ”

[pure-presence]

artist unknown

[law-of-abstraction]

Sunset (Coucher de soleil), 1913 by Swiss/French artist Felix Vallotton

[great-and-small]

Reached out to a biologist to request some info about an extinct species of freshwater shrimp and the email she sent in response was not only lovely and helpful but also kind of poetry to me? People who study invertebrates are actually the most hopeful and compassionate scientists that we have.

[huariqueje]

In Blue Infinity - Risto Suomi , 2011-12.

Finnish, b. 1951 -

Acrylic on canvas , 140 x 160 cm

[great-and-small]

Watching Przewalski's horses run free on the Kazakhstan steppe for the first time in 200 years

[great-and-small]

[sasasatumblog]

只見線　会津宮下駅〜会津西方駅

[da-da-sk]

Peter Frie The View Belongs to Everyone, 2023

[farmwitch]

[garadinervi]

Shusaku Arakawa, Hard or Soft No. 3, 1969 [Gagosian, New York, NY. © 2021 Estate of Madeline Gins]

[slavicafire]

I love the wording of this. any science news, especially relating to space (and webb) automatically sound like poetry to me and then when they're also written like that... oh how beautiful.

[thecheckeredblouse]

Constellation by Kiki Smith

[madeleinejubileesaito]

from "for living, in climate crisis."

read the whole piece

[cafeinevitable-deactivated20220]

The Hidden Beauty of Seeds and Fruits: The Botanical Photography of Levon Biss

seeds and fruits from around the world

[swordheld]

Well, it helps to know that — I’m going to be a broken record with this — the human brain evolved in a very specific environment, and that environment was outside. And that’s how our forebears spent their time for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s a fairly recent development that we spend all this time, more than 90 percent of our time, inside buildings and inside cars and even when we’re outside in sort of urban, highly built up urban settings.

And the thing about the outdoors and the way that the human species evolved in the outdoors, all the information that we encounter, the sensory information that we encounter in nature, is processed really easily and effortlessly and efficiently by the brain. Our sensory faculties are kind of tuned to the kind of information and stimuli that we encounter in nature. And so this is, again, this is the scientific reason behind what everybody knows, which is that you feel more relaxed and more at ease when you take a walk outside and when you spend time in nature.

But what that has to do with attention is that that kind of diffuse attention that we’re able to spend in nature, where we’re not focusing very intently on anything but we’re just kind of allowing the gentle movements and the sort of soft contours of the things that we see outside just entertain our attention but in this very diffuse way, and the phrase psychologists use that I like is called soft fascination. It’s not a hard edged concentration. It’s a kind of soft fascination that you might experience when you’re looking at leaves rustling in the wind or watching waves on the ocean.

That state restores our attention. It kind of refills the tank in a sense. And so then we can return to our desk and we can return to that hard edged kind of concentration that we have to do to complete our studies or do our work. So I would say in your example that if you need to concentrate but you’re feeling frazzled, even a brief look out the window can have this kind of restorative effect. But ideally, a longer walk in nature would be good.

-  Annie Murphy Paul, from Ezra Klein interviews Annie Murphy Paul

[fleur-aesthetic]

instagram | farmgirlflowers

[m-interior-m]

Source

[caraphoto]

stray cat

静岡県南伊豆町
   Canon EOS 5D MarkIV [EF70-200mm F2.8L IS II USM]