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Maori Rock Carvings near Lake Taupo, New Zealand.

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“But why are trees such social beings? Why do they share food with their own species and sometimes even go so far as to nourish their competitors? The reasons are the same as for human communities: there are advantages to working together. A tree is not a forest. On its own, a tree cannot establish a consistent local climate. It is at the mercy of wind and weather. But together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity. And in this protected environment, trees can live to be very old. To get to this point, the community must remain intact no matter what. If every tree were looking out only for itself, then quite a few of them would never reach old age. Regular fatalities would result in many large gaps in the tree canopy, which would make it easier for storms to get inside the forest and uproot more trees. The heat of summer would reach the forest floor and dry it out. Every tree would suffer. Every tree, therefore, is valuable to the community and worth keeping around for as long as possible. And that is why even sick individuals are supported and nourished until they recover. Next time, perhaps it will be the other way round, and the supporting tree might be the one in need of assistance. When thick silver-gray beeches behave like this, they remind me of a herd of elephants. Like the herd, they, too, look after their own, and they help their sick and weak back up onto their feet. They are even reluctant to abandon their dead.”

— The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World Peter Wohlleben,

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“It’s not that the sacred is here and the profane is over there. Everything is profane if you live on the surface of it, and everything is sacred if you go into the depths of it - even your sin.”

— Richard Rohr (via liminalblessings)

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Carl Otto Czeschka, 1908, paper, India ink, white and golden colour

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“There’s a great Yiddish expression that says, “If I knew God, I’d be God.” In fact, I think that claiming that you “know God’s will” is an act of incredible hubris. Instead, what we say about God has much more to say about us than about God. There are, in fact, a whole range of different theologies within Judaism (you can find some of them in the terrific books “Finding God“ and “The God Upgrade,” both of which describe a whole range of differing, and sometimes even conflicting, theologies.) And while I can only speak personally here, to me, “God” isn’t really a noun at all — it’s a verb. Here’s why. The most common name that God gives Godself in the Torah is “YHVH,” a name that is sometimes thought to be so holy that no one was allowed to pronounce it. But that’s not exactly right — it’s not that “YHVH” was not allowed to be pronounced, it’s that it is literally unpronounceable, since it consists of four Hebrew vowels (yod, hay, vav and hay). By the way, that’s also why some people incorrectly call this name “Yahweh,” since (as Rabbi Lawrence Kushner once said), if you tried to pronounce a name that was all vowels, you’d risk serious respiratory injury. But even more importantly, the name YHVH is actually a conflation of all the tenses of the Hebrew verb “to be.” God’s name could be seen as “was-is-will be,” so God isn’t something you can’t capture or name — God is only something you can experience. And indeed, when Moses is at the burning bush, having just been told by God that he will be leading the Israelites out of Egypt, he says, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” God responds that God’s name is “Ehyeh asher ehyeh,” which is often translated as “I am what I am.” But it could also be translated as, “I am what I will be.” So God is whatever God will be — we simply have no idea. Indeed, for my own theology, I believe that God is found in the “becoming,” transforming “what will be” into “what is.””

— Rabbi Geoffrey A. Mitelman,

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"Mama" by Kelly Latimore. 100% of proceeds from all sales of this piece will be donated to local St. Louis BLM organizations.

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so MassDOT is planning on bulldozing a 10,000 year old village near Northampton, Massachusetts after they discovered it last year trying to build a roundabout. im putting some info about it here, and i will reblog this post with a link to a petition and the twitter thread if you want to read up a little bit on what’s happening

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“Years ago a First Nations shaman told me about college students who in the summer months come by the hundreds to the reservations in order to experience sweat lodges and ritual dancing. He called them spiritual orphans. Indeed, their spiritual hunger has to be taken seriously but not the “fast food” with which they seek to satisfy their hunger. If I understand the New Age movement correctly, its adherents believe that they can do without…the institution. They misunderstand the signifigance of tradition and attachment.”

Dorothee Soelle | The Silent Cry

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In case you haven't seen it yet, our local LGBTQ organization used a drone to put a pride flag on the sword of the 102m-tall Motherland monument in Kyiv.

They shared the video with the hash tag #momwillunderstandandsupport.

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“What I am trying to say to this country, to us, is that we must know this. We must realize this, that no other country in the world have been so fat and so sleek, and so safe, and so happy, and so irresponsible, and so dead. No other country can afford to dream of a Plymouth and a wife and a house with a fence, and the children growing up safely to go to college and to become executives, and then to marry, and have the Plymouth and the house and so forth. A great many people do not live this way, and cannot imagine it, and do not know that when we talk about “democracy,” this is what we mean. 

The industry is compelled, given the way it is built, to present to the American people a self-perpetuating fantasy of American life. Their concept of entertainment is difficult to distinguish from the use of narcotics. To watch the TV screen for any length of time is to learn some really frightening things about the American sense of reality. We are cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly. These images are designed not to trouble, but to reassure. They also weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is, ourselves as we are.

All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism. This means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority. […] For a very long time, America prospered. This prosperity cost millions of people their lives. Now, not even the people who are the most spectacular recipients of the benefits of this prosperity are able to endure these benefits. They can neither understand them nor do without them. Above all, they cannot imagine the price paid by their victims, or subjects, for this way of life, and so they cannot afford to know why the victims are revolting.”

-James Baldwin

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i hope this makes sense but i always get kinda uncomfortable when people talk about colonization and put a huge emphasis on the accomplishments of the people who were colonized as if that’s the reason they shouldn’t have been subject to colonization. like when talking about sustainable farming practices or gender equality some folks still have this gross mindset, kind of like “these people shouldn’t have been colonized because they meet MY standard of a progressive society”. there are always people who won’t meet that standard and while it is important to talk about the history and culture of precolonial societies its so uncomfortable to see us to zero in on the ways these societies are “better”. like maybe my ancestors weren’t kings, maybe they weren’t agriculturally savvy, maybe their accomplishments wouldn’t impress an outside audience but no matter what they did not deserve to be enslaved and have their nations and land decimated. yall get me??

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Ілюстрації Вишинського І. до казки “Іванко - цар звірів”

I. Vyshinsky , illustration for the  tale “Ivanko - the king of animals”

Source https://xn–80aaukc.xn–j1amh/ivanko-tsar-zviriv.html

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“Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you are a 22-year-old college student in Kampala, Uganda. You’re sitting in class and discreetly scrolling through Facebook on your phone. You see that there has been another mass shooting in America, this time in a place called San Bernardino. You’ve never heard of it. You’ve never been to America. But you’ve certainly heard a lot about gun violence in the U.S. It seems like a new mass shooting happens every week. You wonder if you could go there and get stricter gun legislation passed. You’d be a hero to the American people, a problem-solver, a lifesaver. How hard could it be? Maybe there’s a fellowship for high-minded people like you to go to America after college and train as social entrepreneurs. You could start the nonprofit organization that ends mass shootings, maybe even win a humanitarian award by the time you are 30. Sound hopelessly naïve? Maybe even a little deluded? It is. And yet, it’s not much different from how too many Americans think about social change in the “Global South.” If you asked a 22-year-old American about gun control in this country, she would probably tell you that it’s a lot more complicated than taking some workshops on social entrepreneurship and starting a non-profit. She might tell her counterpart from Kampala about the intractable nature of our legislative branch, the long history of gun culture in this country and its passionate defenders, the complexity of mental illness and its treatment. She would perhaps mention the added complication of agitating for change as an outsider. But if you ask that same 22-year-old American about some of the most pressing problems in a place like Uganda — rural hunger or girl’s secondary education or homophobia — she might see them as solvable. Maybe even easily solvable. I’ve begun to think about this trend as the reductive seduction of other people’s problems. It’s not malicious. In many ways, it’s psychologically defensible; we don’t know what we don’t know. If you’re young, privileged, and interested in creating a life of meaning, of course you’d be attracted to solving problems that seem urgent and readily solvable. Of course you’d want to apply for prestigious fellowships that mark you as an ambitious altruist among your peers. Of course you’d want to fly on planes to exotic locations with, importantly, exotic problems. There is a whole “industry” set up to nurture these desires and delusions — most notably, the 1.5 million nonprofit organizations registered in the U.S., many of them focused on helping people abroad. In other words, the young American ego doesn’t appear in a vacuum. Its hubris is encouraged through job and internship opportunities, conferences galore, and cultural propaganda — encompassed so fully in the patronizing, dangerously simple phrase “save the world.””

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“The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems” by Courtney Martin

(via

dietcokebisexual

)

Capitalism can’t save the world, but it can simulate the experience and sell it to you.

(via newwavenova)

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« Biological Darwinism perceives animal music as advertising jingles in a concerto of efficiency. According to the accepted view, animals’ utterances obey the demand to enlarge their own elbow space with as little power and the greatest return possible. Nightingales sing, so the dogma goes, only because they want to indicate the boundaries of their territory; in order to successfully do so, they must outperform contenders. Vocal crescendos are their weapons in the war of biological survival. The strongest female responds to the proudest tenor, or so we are taught. 

With their strict rule to take only functions seriously, to ignore every feeling and to view diverse features and behaviors solely as a means to attain the higher goal of survival, contemporary biologists have inverted the burden of proof even for the most blatant aesthetic phenomena. The more strangely beautiful a body feature is, the more deeply functional it must be. The long ornamental tail of a bird of paradise, the spotted fur of a leopard, the spiral colors on a snail’s shell must be examples of an extra functionality, without which there would be no space for them in the concept of efficient survival. […] While the poet was able to find life in nature’s most delicate manifestations, modern evolutionary theory nearly always uses death, the dying out of the less fit competing species, as its explicative horizon. For a Darwinist, life is war.

[… But] whales sing to themselves. And contrary to the prejudice of mainstream biology, which is so fixated with the struggle for survival, for many hours a day whales are not occupied with feeding. They have free time and they use it to sing. They repeat their unearthly songs in endless modulation. Song can be a sign that purposeful existence is being suspended. Elephants roaming in the bush groan and rumble out of sheer well-being, doing nothing, and certainly nothing useful. There are many moments when the animals’ sounds have no function; they just are. »

— Andreas Weber, Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science

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N. Bukanova

“Myths and Legends of Ancient Slavs’, 2007

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Із книги Лідії Орел “Мальоване дерево в Україні”

From the Lydia Orel`s book “Painted wood  in Ukraine”