The Beauty of Science

The beauty in the nature of being can be felt in our every observation. This is a blog dedicated to exploring that beauty. Any poems posted are written by me, CK, currently an undergraduate Anthropology student.

[talkgentlytome]

Stuff that people asked to have on their tombstones. Those are all real.

[art-thropologist]

Zinnia Durand

Daughter, loved and lost

[scratched on with some sort of blade: Stop telling people I’m dead.]

[somethingsumthing]

Dance is a medium through which multiple ideologies of person, gender, generation, social class and ethnicity are expressed, negotiated, contested. Dance is an intimate & constitutive aspect of cultural identity and like language, is a window to a person’s worldview. Dance as an aesthetic form may convey anxieties and aspirations as well as covertly express political feelings that people cannot express directly owing to the perils of challenging the social order.

The Anthropology of Dance

[tattrx]

Tattoo History: India

Portraits of tattooed Ramnamis in India.

“The Ramnamis are a religious sect founded by ‘low-caste Hindus, deemed 'untouchables.’ They were denied entry to temples and forced to use separate wells. 

“Tattooing was an act of defiance against caste-based discrimination for the Ramnamis. Writing’s the lord’s name on their bodies was both a rebellion and a message to higher-caste Indians that 'God is everywhere — even here with me.'”

Source: Taylor, Alan. “Tattooing the Name of God on Your Body as an Act of Faith and Defiance.” TheAtlantic.com (Jan 12, 2016)

Photos © Fanil Pandya, Adnan Abidi where credited.

👇 via The Center For Tattoo History and Culture👇 @centerfortattoo

[thescienceandbeauty-blog]

Evening Ponderings

I lay

with my short, constellation hair sprawled across the pillow

like a paintbrush

with well-loved, frayed edges

and think, ‘how did we evolve here'?,

‘what caused this beautiful planet of a molten iron core,

ever shifting,

to twirl in such harmonious elemental composition?’

The language of the cosmos is not so easily decipherable in answers,

as much as I would enjoy that.

Given Archaeology, Astrophysics,

Geology, Mathematics,

we have come closer to answers

but are still in our infancy...

There are yet questions to come we haven’t even thought to ask.

We are meant to contemplate, analyze,

rationalize, mysticize

the comets as they streak across our horizons

reminding us that we are ever more than we believe,

ever more than we think.

Here at night (or rather, in the absence of sunlight)

I wonder too how it is we become so caught in the tangles and lines of our own thoughts..

Is it due to our cerebral capacities?

Are we just on the verge of a breakthrough of cognition?

We have the tools as sentient beings to recognize our own thought tracts

and yet they still seem to sweep us up.

Yet the deer does not think of its appetite as it consumes the flora,

not in the way we must ponder how, why, where, when.

Perhaps we have not yet actualized the neuronal connections necessary to break from the daily adventures of the mind

and must surrender to their rhythms for now.

Or else take up Zen Buddhism and get beaten with wooden sticks

every time the mind leads us down a colorful hill or two.

I, for one, find surrender a much easier concept to bear.

And so I trek outward,

tufted up hair adventurous and unruly,

to wonder at the pulse of the universe as I slip into dreams.

[thescienceandbeauty-blog]

Call Of The Past

More double helix strands than can be counted

are wrapped up inside my body.

They formed the formless:

created

this chin

this brain

these fingertips.

The iron in my blood

sings stories of the past

of millenia after millenia gone by,

of destruction,

of the creation that comes from it.

The calcium in my bones,

so intelligent in its unconscious maintenance of homeostasis,

whispers secrets of its origins,

of the exploding star that created it.

If I close my eyes and place my hand over my heart,

I can almost hear it,

almost make out those whispers.

My ancestors echo my footsteps

every time I walk on the earth,

and by ancestors I mean every hominin before me.

I feel their thoughts tug at the soles of my feet,

asking me to find and tell their stories.

I imagine them dancing barefoot as I do

underneath an orange, warm-blooded sky,

I imagine them falling in love as I,

gazing up at the glowing spheres revolving above them.

I study how one of these distant ancestors,

the homo naledi,

may have buried their dead,

may have gently laid them down to rest

underneath beautiful cavernous walls

so that their loved ones could sleep easier next to the earth’s heartbeat.

How beautiful,

to be human.

How beautiful,

to have the questions.

How beautiful,

these brains and bodies

to give us these expansive experiences of love,

of connection,

of knowledge,

of compassion.

When I close my eyes and feel the blazing sphere of sun warm my forehead,

my feet firmly on the ground,

I think about our generations past,

every footstep,

every dance,

every tear,

every sorrow,

every death,

every life.

And how it all lead to this moment,

here,

us,

Now.