thecloudsoup

[thecloudsoup]

animal familiars

Looking up the basis for the popular image of the devil/angel on your shoulder, I came upon this quote from a shaman:

“Once I was asleep on my sick-bed, when a spirit approached me. It was a very beautiful woman. Her figure was very slight, she was no more than half an arshin (71 cm.) tall. Her face and attire were quite as those of one of our Gold women… She said: 'I am the ayami of your ancestors, the Shamans. I taught them shamaning. Now I am going to teach you… I love you, I have no husband now, you will be my husband and I shall be a wife unto you. I shall give you assistant spirits. You are to heal with their aid, and I shall teach and help you myself…' Sometimes she comes under the aspect of an old woman, and sometimes under that of a wolf, so she is terrible to look at. Sometimes she comes as a winged tiger… She has given me three assistants-the jarga (the panther), the doonto (the bear) and the amba (the tiger). They come to me in my dreams, and appear whenever I summon them while shamaning. If one of them refuses to come, the ayami makes them obey, but, they say, there are some who do not obey even the ayami. When I am shamaning, the ayami and the assistant spirits are possessing me; whether big or small, they penetrate me, as smoke or vapour would. When the ayami is within me, it is she who speaks through my mouth, and she does everything herself”

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early fifties sci-fi art.  early fifties philip k dick.  what a universe!

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“Although my only companions were scorpions and wild beasts, time and again I was mingling with the dances of girls.  My face was pallid with fasting and my body chill, but my mind was throbbing with desires; my flesh was as good as dead, but the flames of lust raged in it.”

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Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy. And yet being alive is no answer to the problems of living. To be or not to be is not the question. The vital question is: how to be and how not to be? The tendency to forget this vital question is the tragic disease of contemporary man, a disease that may prove fatal, that may end in disaster.

Abraham Heschel

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Man of the Hour: Charlie Clements.

Zinn spells his name wrong in People’s History, but I’m glad he mentioned him.  A true hero.  One (wo)man can change the world, one interaction at a time.

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RINDERPEST!!! “The disease is believed to have originated in Asia, later spreading through the transport of cattle. Other cattle epizootics are noted in ancient times: a cattle plague is thought to be one of the ten plagues of Egypt described in the Hebrew Bible.”   RINDERPEST !!!  

thanks Moses.

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amazing!

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My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.

Nietzsche  

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my weariness amazes me, i’m branded on my feet

i have no one to meet

and the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming

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And don't worry about losing.  If it is right, it happens--the main thing is not to hurry.  Nothing good gets away.

John Steinbeck on love

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it’s a magical world out there

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maybe there’s glory in all the things i’m not.

[thecloudsoup]