dreamer434

[dreamer434]

The Double Shame, Stephen Spender

You must live though the time when everything hurts When the space of the ripe, loaded afternoon Expands to a landscape of white heat frozen And trees are weighed down with hearts of stone And green stares back where you stare alone, And the walking eyes throw flinty comments, And the words which carry most knives are the blind Phrases searching to be kind. Solid and usual objects are ghosts The furniture carries cargoes of memory, The staircase has corners which remember As fire blows reddest in gusty embers, And each empty dress cuts out an image In fur and evening and summer and spring of her who was different in each. Pull down the blind and lie on the bed And clasp the hour in the glass of one room Against your mouth like a crystal doom. Take up the book and stare at the letters Hieroglyphs on sand and as meaningless – Here birds crossed once and a foot once trod In a mist where sight and sound are blurred. The story of others who made their mistakes And of one whose happiness pierced like a star Eludes and evades between sentences And the letters break into eyes which read The story life writes now in your head As though the characters sought for some clue To their being transcendently living and dead In your history, worse than theirs, but true. Set in the mind of their poet, they compare Their tragic sublime with your tawdry despair And they have fingers which accuse You of the double way of shame. At first you did not love enough And afterwards you loved too much And you lacked the confidence to choose And you have only yourself to blame.

[dreamer434]

“To see an example of a specialized structure, let’s look at the bright red eyespot on the euglena. Also called a stigma, the eyespot is not actually an eye. It’s more like a sunglass for the true photorecptor. That structure is located close to the euglena’s flagella, and it’s made up of around 50 layers of stacked membranes that hold hexagonal arrangements of roughly a million photoreceptor proteins. The stigma shades the photoreceptor, but just on one side of the euglena. And as the microbe rotates and different wavelengths of light filter through and then get shaded by the stigma, the euglena is actually getting information on where it can find light.”

Journey to the Microcosmos- Can Microbes See Without Eyes?

Images Originally Captured by Jam’s Germs

[dreamer434]

Drew Yuu (Bloom into you) 😙

[dreamer434]

[dreamer434]

“The Pirahãs are firmly committed to the pragmatic concept of utility. They don’t believe in a heaven above us, or a hell below us, or that any abstract cause is worth dying for. They give us an opportunity to consider what a life without absolutes, like righteousness or holiness and sin, could be like.”

— Daniel L. Everett, Don’t Sleep There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle

[dreamer434]

. crown shyness

. The sky is cracked above our heads We plant our feet in monochrome shadow Puff our cheeks with salt air and the spoils of birdsong

. When the wind moves us . we sway . we seesaw . we come within reach bent at the waist like shore pine and pillars of rust always just shy of touch

We tell ourselves it’s better this way The light gets in The love stays buried

We keep the rumors from spreading

- Cora Finch

[dreamer434]

[dreamer434]

the walking dead, game of thrones, and breaking bad were just superwholock for men

[dreamer434]

No matter how yesterday unfolded before your eyes and no matter the stacks of worries burdening you mind that have left you unsettled or confused, Light is still pouring in reminding you over and over again to surrender, to let go, for these troubles are bound to shadows that cannot survive in this new light. Bask in these beams of sun as you find your new beginnings, a new way of seeing, a grace-filled way of living.

Morgan Harper Nichols - All Along You Were Blooming

[dreamer434]

Oh no, you got isekaied into the last media you read/watch. You are now a background character dead center in the plot. Are you surviving.

Yes

No

[dreamer434]

“It is one of those simple but beautiful paradoxes of life: When a person feels that he is truly accepted by another, as he is, then he is freed to move from there and to begin to think about how he wants to change, how he wants to grow, how he can become different, how he might become more of what he is capable of being.”

— Dr. Thomas Gordon, The Power of the Language of Acceptance

[dreamer434]

A collection, for a well loved garf

A bonus picture for anyone who wants it

[dreamer434]

““Men do not invent those mysterious relationships between external material objects, and between objects and feelings or ideas, which it is the function of poetry to reveal. These relationships exist independently, not indeed of Thought, but of any individual thinker. And according to whether the footsteps are echoed in primitive language or, later on, in the made metaphors of poets, we hear them after a different fashion and for different reasons. The language of primitive men reports them as direct perceptual experience. The speaker has observed a unity, and is not therefore himself conscious of relation. But we, in the development of consciousness, have lost the power to see this one as one. Our sophistication, like Odin’s, has cost us an eye; and now it is the language of poets, in so far as they create true metaphors, which must restore this unity conceptually, after it has been lost from perception. Thus, the ‘before-unapprehended’ relationships of which Shelly spoke, are in a sense 'forgotten’ relationships. For though they were never yet apprehended, they were at one time seen. And imagination can see them again.””

— Owen Barfield Poetic Diction, A Study in Meaning

[dreamer434]

LIFE ON EARTH

The odds are we should never have been born.

Not one of us. Not one in 400 trillion to be

exact. Only one among the 250 million

released in a flood of semen that glides

like a glassine limousine filled with tadpoles

of possible people, one of whom may

or may not be you, a being made of water

and blood, a creature with eyeballs and limbs

that end in fists, a you with all your particular

perfumes, the chords of your sinewy legs

singing as they form, your organs humming

and buzzing with new life, moonbeams

lighting up your brain’s gray coils,

the exquisite hills of your face, the human

toy your mother longs for, your father

yearns to hold, the unmistakable you

who will take your first breath, your first

step, bang a copper pot with a wooden spoon,

trace the lichen growing on a boulder you climb

to see the wild expanse of a field, the one

whose heart will yield to the yellow forsythia

named after William Forsyth—not the American

actor with piercing blue eyes, but the Scottish

botanist who discovered the buttery bells

on a highland hillside blooming

to beat the band, zigzagging down

an unknown Scottish slope. And those

are only a few of the things 

you will one day know, slowly chipping away

at your ignorance and doubt, you

who were born from ashes and will return

to ash. When you think you might be

through with this body and soul, look down

at an anthill or up at the stars, remember

your gambler chances, the bounty 

of good luck you were born for.

DORIANNE LAUX

[dreamer434]

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/02/13/cosmic-distance-ladder-video-with-grant-sanderson-3blue1brown-commentary-and-corrections/

3b1b and terence tao teaming up to animate the history of astronomy, we are eating well today

even knowing the broad strokes of this story, seeing in detail what kepler did literally made me go 'oh shit' out loud. it's amazing that, without so many of the conveniences for taking measurements and keeping in communication we have today, or our general conviction that science works (eventually) to motivate us to stick with it, people were able to come up with arguments like these and gather literally centuries of planetary observations that turned out to be precise enough to pinpoint the tiny eccentricity of planetary orbits using this method, and how that laid a path to newton's mechanics and all the rest of it.

when i read about history of science, it keeps hitting me how recent so much of this stuff turns out to be. in my grandparents' lifetime we went from having no idea about plate tectonics (the best theory was iirc that the earth had expanded), to deducing it from mysterious magnetic stripes in the ocean, to measuring the movement of continents with millimetre precision using satellites carrying quantum mechanical clocks, correcting of course for spacetime being curvy.

i know i can sound kind of corny going on about how much i love science, we all lived through the 2000s lmao, and you know, biopower, ideology, empire, etc., you know nothing in this world can be uncomplicated; but i still get that feeling of 'wow, how did they ever come up with that trick??' and 'wow, it all came together so quickly'. like what a crazy series of weird ape tricks it took for you to be able to read these words on your device right now.

those damn alchemists did, in a way, find their philosopher's stone, their secret keys to power. just not as they ever imagined it.