You Are an Animal

anti-civilisation || environmentalism || anti-psychiatry || trauma theory || embodiment || feminism

[daughterearth]

you have to be satisfied now. happy now. peaceful now. There are no perfect conditions ever. It's one thing after another and life just trickles out if you don't find joy in presence.

[volatilesimiannervoussystem]

imagine a universe where men advocated en masse and with great gusto for women's mental health and were extremely concerned with, invested in, and vocal about the female loneliness epidemic

[genderqueerdykes]

people who can't pass credit checks still need housing. people who don't have credit at all still need housing. people who can't pass criminal background checks still need housing. people who have been evicted before still need housing. people with past unpaid rent still need housing. people who can't take out loans still need housing. people who can't pay off their mountains of debt still need housing. people who don't or can't work still deserve housing. housing is not an "investment". housing is not the act of "borrowing" property from someone else.

housing is necessary for human survival, no matter how poor, disabled, addicted, insane, or bad with money someone is. every single person on this planet requires housing. everyone. money does not belong in the affairs of housing. housing does not wait for money to come. housing is a human right, that EVERY human deserves, regardless of how much money they make, if any.

[glowcowboy]

is this a life? i don’t know. i make another cup of coffee. stare at a tree from my balcony. write in my journal. take a hot shower. i call my sister and say nothing of value. she listens anyway. i make another coffee. read a book that gives me bad dreams. pick up my pen to write and put it back down. another flip of the calendar i carry in the center of my chest. i am learning to let my heart open up again

[saja-star]

I've had a hard time articulating to people just how fundamental spinning used to be in people's lives, and how eerie it is that it's vanished so entirely. It occurred to me today that it's a bit like if in the future all food was made by machine, and people forgot what farming and cooking were. Not just that they forgot how to do it; they had never heard of it.

When they use phrases like "spinning yarns" for telling stories or "heckling a performer" without understanding where they come from, I imagine a scene in the future where someone uses the phrase "stir the pot" to mean "cause a disagreement" and I say, did you know a pot used to be a container for heating food, and stirring was a way of combining different components of food together? "Wow, you're full of weird facts! How do you even know that?"

When I say I spin and people say "What, like you do exercise bikes? Is that a kind of dancing? What's drafting? What's a hackle?" it's like if I started talking about my cooking hobby and my friend asked "What's salt? Also, what's cooking?" Well, you see, there are a lot of stages to food preparation, starting with planting crops, and cooking is one of the later stages. Salt is a chemical used in cooking which mostly alters the flavor of the food but can also be used for other things, like drawing out moisture...

"Wow, that sounds so complicated. You must have done a lot of research. You're so good at cooking!" I'm really not. In the past, children started learning about cooking as early as age five ("Isn't that child labor?"), and many people cooked every day their whole lives ("Man, people worked so hard back then."). And that's just an average person, not to mention people called "chefs" who did it professionally. I go to the historic preservation center to use their stove once or twice a week, and I started learning a couple years ago. So what I know is less sophisticated than what some children could do back in the day.

"Can you make me a snickers bar?" No, that would be pretty hard. I just make sandwiches mostly. Sometimes I do scrambled eggs. "Oh, I would've thought a snickers bar would be way more basic than eggs. They seem so simple!"

Haven't you ever wondered where food comes from? I ask them. When you were a kid, did you ever pick apart the different colored bits in your food and wonder what it was made of? "No, I never really thought about it." Did you know rice balls are called that because they're made from part of a plant called rice? "Oh haha, that's so weird. I thought 'rice' was just an adjective for anything that was soft and white."

People always ask me why I took up spinning. Isn't it weird that there are things we take so much for granted that we don't even notice when they're gone? Isn't it strange that something which has been part of humanity all across the planet since the Neanderthals is being forgotten in our generation? Isn't it funny that when knowledge dies, it leaves behind a ghost, just like a person? Don't you want to commune with it?

[diaryofandnwoman]

[whetstonefires]

I do have a piece of writing advice, actually.

See, the first time I grew parsnips, I fucked it up good. I hadn't seen parsnips sprouting before, right, and in my eagerness I was keeping a close eye on the row. And every time I saw some intruding grass coming up, I twitched it right out, and went back to anticipating the germination of my parsnips.

But it turns out parsnips take a bit longer than anything else I'd ever grown to distinguish themselves visually. It's just the two little split leaves, almost identical to a newly seeded bit of kentucky bluegrass when they first come up, and they take a good bit to establish themselves and spread out flat before the main stem with its first distinctive scallopy leaf gets going.

I didn't get any parsnips, not that year, because I'd weeded them all out as soon as they showed their faces, with my 'ugh no that's grass' twitchy horticulture finger.

The next year, having in retrospect come to suspect what had happened, I left the row alone and didn't weed anything until all the sprouts coming up had all had a bit to set in and show their colors, and I've grown lots of parsnips since. They're kind of a slow crop, not a huge return, but I like them and watching them grow and digging them up, and their papery little seeds in the second year, if you don't harvest one either on purpose or because you misjudged the frost, so it's worth it.

Anyway, whenever I see someone stuck and struggling with their writing who's gotten into that frustration loop of typing a few words, rejecting them, backspacing, and starting again, I find myself thinking, you gotta stop weeding your parsnips, man.

[fairyysoup]

reading this post be like

[greenwavefeminism]

i am struggling to adapt. I feel crazy because I am pretty sure I am experiencing culture shock. But asking other people, they haven't experienced any. Or so they say. Maybe they are unaware or lying or just culturally similar! It feels like nobody makes small talk or asks other people about themselves. There is a dearth of culture sharing. I asked about multiculturalism and got an ok but not fleshed out answer. I feel like I am the only one peering behind the cloth. Does this make me arrogant? Am I assuming the worst where there is none? They want to be inclusive only to people who contribute in some way. But what I have to contribute will ruffle feathers: You can't only care about people who contribute. Real community loves people just for being, and celebrates differences. THAT is sustainable. THAT is forging an alternative. THAT is leaving Omelas. And I am not even a fucking hippie!! I am a pragmatist!!

[daughterearth]

Thank you podcasts. Thank you books. Thank you dog and cat videos on the internet . Thank you ebooks. Thank you flowers. Thank you sunlight through the kitchen window. Thank you girls and women. Thank you friends. Thank you soft beds. Thank you coffee. Thank you people who love others. Thank you people who are kind. Thank you writers. Thank you poets. Thank you painters. Thank you djs. Thank you jewellery makers. Thank you web weavers. Thank you people who reblog with great tags. Thank you clouds . Thank you sun. Thank you moon. Thank you laughter. Thank you good jokes. Thank you music. Thank you.

[sukimas]

my career advice isn't "do what you love" it's "do what will give you the most money without making you want to kill yourself"

[sukimas]

yes.

[rf-times]

"There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper."- pedophile apologist and self proclaimed (though truly anti) feminist Camille Paglia.

This is one of the most infuriating ideas I have come across. Oh yes men commit horrific atrocities, but it's actually because men as a whole are such variable creatures capable of such great heights of genius in both evil and creativity, unlike dull, passive, placid women without the brains or the energy to do anything clever or evil. Never mind all the female geniuses who were ignored, plagiarised, crushed and subjugated (including Mozart's own sister Nannerl Mozart) because of men and their atrocities. In this way even the worst atrocities may be celebrated as part of a tradition of male excellence while female peace, compassion and empathy (women are far more likely to get involved in activism and charities) is assumed to be a result of mediocrity.

[puttingherinhistory]

I will never ever understand why anyone would want to make another human being upset on purpose. I never have and never will understand the appeal of "getting a rise out of" another human being. I will never understand why some people find joy or amusement over another human being's suffering and distress.

And the fact that this behavior is so widely acceptable and tolerated really is the root of so, so many problems. Sexual assault and abuse wouldn't be so rampant if this behavior wasn't so socially acceptable, you can't change my mind. Today's "he's just trying to get a rise out of you because he thinks it's fun to make you upset, but it's not a big deal and it's completely harmless that he likes to make you upset for fun" is tomorrow's rapist and/or abuser.

[depsidase]

[guerrillatech]

[ambitusk]

Jesus. I first read the comic thinking of today. Then I read the "20 year anniversary" part and my brain froze. But of course this is 20 years old. The genocide has been happening since the 1940s

[theconcealedweapon]

[eggsdoodz]

thought abt this quote too much so now you have to

[loneberry]

Ibn ʿArabi on water and divine lowness

Commentary on Ibn ʿArabi's The Bezels of Wisdom

I guess I just love this because I've been thinking about the directionality of the divine lately, feeling a bit of an aversion to the privileging of the heavenward direction above all else—which I associate with hierarchy, ascension, Plotinus. I've been thinking against Simone Weil's conception of grace as that which enables ascent against the force of gravity, a hoisting upward, which is often a kind of turning away from the created world, a disavowal of earthy existence. What can I say. I love the earth. I'll keep on loving the earth. I want to think with the low, the mineral, with water, which always finds the lowest point. Water is that which supports life from beneath.

How did I find my way to Islamic mysticism? In the Abrahamic traditions, it really does offer the most affirming view of creation. We're all the breath of God.

What would it mean to find God below?

If you let a rope fall down, it will fall on God.

As I wrote in my review of the experimental film Last Things by Deborah Stratman:

Why not found a religion based on fear and respect of the mineral kingdom? Death is not ascent but descent, a return to our mineral form, as Mallo and Cixous know. 

From Agustín Fernández Mallo's The Book of All Loves: “The fact that teeth and bones are all that remains of us after death is proof that our ultimate identity is mineral. We do not ascend, we are not on some track towards that which the ancients formulated as spiritual; on the contrary, we sink down into the most durable physical matter. A kind of periodic table of elements is what we are; more of the earth even than earth itself.”

From Hélène Cixous’s Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing: “There is passage through the animal state, then through the vegetal state, and so we move away from humankind; from the vegetal we descend into the earth, by the stem, by the root, until we reach what doesn’t concern us, although it exists and inscribes itself, which is of the mineral order, although it doesn’t hold together since we are aiming toward disassembly, toward decomposition.”

*

Ibn ‘Arabī, speaking of divine intention, writes in the Futūhāt:

"It is like water. Its station is that it descends or flows on the earth."