Sunfish Sunkiss

So, there we were with nothing between us but a few leaves, and the wind's glossy voice shouting instructions.

[unsubconscious]

Brent Cotton Before the Thunder Speaks, 2026 Oil on canvas, 91 x 121cm

[petaltexturedskies]

It was a delightful June morning. The sun played on the waters of the river and brushed the dewy grass with its rays. The river and the meadow were strewn with rich diamonds of light.

Anton Chekhov, from "After the fair" wr. c. 1880

[petaltexturedskies]

Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Virgins

[petaltexturedskies]

Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

[opasgarden]

Taken from under our towering sunflowers while picking tomatoes. 

[achillesinhighheels]

choosing to ignore my strangely symbolic dream

[yrbeecharmer]

giving myself a merit badge that says SURVIVED MARCH

[acti-veg]

‘While bats can only sense the outer shapes and textures of their targets, dolphins can peer inside theirs. If a dolphin echolocates on you, it will perceive your lungs and your skeleton. It can likely sense shrapnel in war veterans and fetuses in pregnant women. It can pick out the air-filled swim bladders that allow fish, their main prey, to control their buoyancy.

It can almost certainly tell different species apart based on the shape of those air bladders. And it can tell if a fish has something weird inside it, like a metal hook. In Hawaii, false killer whales often pluck tuna off fishing lines, and “they’ll know where the hook is inside that fish,” Aude Pacini, who studies these animals, tells me. “They can ‘see’ things that you and I would never consider unless we had an X-ray machine or an MRI scanner.”

This penetrating perception is so unusual that scientists have barely begun to consider its implications. The beaked whales, for example, are odontocetes that look dolphin-esque on the outside—but on the inside, their skulls bear a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps, many of which are only found in males.

Pavel Gol’din has suggested that these structures might be the equivalent of deer antlers—showy ornaments that are used to attract mates. Such ornaments would normally protrude from the body in a visible and conspicuous way, but that’s unnecessary for animals that are living medical scanners.’

-Ed Yong, An Immense World

[namu-the-orca]

Cetacean echolocation is one of those things that boggles your mind once you really start to think about the implications. They can see each others' hearts beating fast with fear or excitement. They can see if another dolphin is healthy, or pregnant; how the fetus is doing; if they have ingested debris. Their echolocation is also incredibly precise: a bottlenose dolphin could discriminate between cilinders differing in wall thickness by just 0.23 mm (0.009 inch) from 8 meters away!! And they certainly notice when something is off.

I'm not sure if I ever shared this story before here, but in Curacao, when I was allowed to assist in a guest interaction programme, there was suddenly consternation in the pool behind us. A guest had entered the water and the dolphins were going crazy, paying no heed to the trainers anymore. The lead trainer that was with me gave the dolphins to me to watch over while she went to help. When she came back she told me what had happened. The guest that had caused so much uproar had left the water again and was asked if he had done anything to upset the dolphins. He hadn't, and he couldn't imagine what was wrong... until he mentioned he had a pacemaker. The younger dolphins in the pool had never seen someone with a pacemaker before and apparently it rocked their world.

It was such a wild experience, and offered such a cool insight into how dolphins experience their world. I'll never forget it.

[museiums]

loré pemberton

[pmamtraveller]

Urania by Giovanni Dupré

[fjordfolk]

dogs on rocks

[thekashishverse]

I hate having an internal monologue. Girl shut the fuck up.

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

Leonard Cohen, from “On The Sickness Of My Love”

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

— Susan Sontag; As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh (via letsbelonelytogetherr)

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

The audacity of poets to let go of the very thing that their souls have ached for.

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

I want to throw you against a wall, wrap your legs around my waist and kiss you. Kiss you until we have to stop to catch our breaths. I want you and only you. I want to take you on road trips that lead us to pulling over on the side of the road because we can’t keep our hands off each other. I want you and your flaws. I want your messy makeup from teary eyes as I hold you and talk to you about life. I want the 3am phone calls because you can’t sleep at night. I want to be yours and only yours. I want to taste all your cooking, even if it’s not good, even if it’s experimenting I’d have you cook every meal for the rest of my life. I want you. I want my trembling hands to grab your waist and dance with you in the middle of an empty room. I want to struggle on days when I can’t see you. I want to fight about meaningless stuff that will lead to meaningful sex. I want you. I want your hand to rest on my forearm as we enter a party, so I can reassure you that you are safe with me. I want to sing to you in the shower and have you shut me up with kisses because we both know I’m no singer. I want the ups and downs, the winter and summer days. I want you and only you

[blithegreycat]

Syzygium jambos (Syzygium samarangense is also called this) also know as rose apple is a fruit that is a member of the Myrtle family and popular in tropical landscaping. According to what I read it tastes like watermelon. The Thai name for this is chompoo which also just translates to pink. It is also a Thai surname which is most likely tied to the local agriculture of the area it originated from. Weirdly enough I’ve seen these plants in Florida at one point so apparently they can be grown in the United States

While researching this I came across blogs that said it was used as an offering but when I looked into it further I could only find sources telling me that it’s inappropriate to offer this fruit to ancestors in Buddhism. So if anyone familiar with Thai culture could tell me who or what this fruit is offered to and why I would like to know. If they’re even offered at all