Recent Posts

Europe’s oldest pagans: the deep forest life of Mari people – in pictures

Europe’s oldest pagans: the deep forest life of Mari people – in pictures

Ikuru Kuwajima photographed the Mari El republic in Russia over the course of a year, learning about everything from witchcraft to paranormal activity. Read and see the photos here: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/dec/21/europes-oldest-pagans-mari-people-ikuru-kuwajima

THE DESERT IS A STATE OF MIND CAST OVER THE EARTH

THE DESERT IS A STATE OF MIND CAST OVER THE EARTH

The desert is an invention, a creation of emptiness in the plentitude of existence, an introduction of barrenness into the fecundity of being. However dry this biome, it is never entirely vacant. Besides containing rocks or sand, the actual desert from Atacama to the Sahara and from the Gobi to Mojave is propitious to certain animals (coyotes and scorpions, chipmunks and rattlesnakes) and plants (barrel cacti and Joshua trees, tumbleweeds and ironwood) that find themselves at home there. It would be the height of arrogance to deem these and countless others of its inhabitants so insignificant that they are sidelined or forgotten, leaving only the vast vacuum, the expanding nothingness, that the ecosystem in question has come to denote. An automatic association of the desert with lifelessness betrays precisely such forgetting and neglect, which are, in my view, the side effects of a devastating project—refashioning the earth in the image of abstract thought. “The” desert is abstraction realized, cast over the world at the expense of biological, ecological, and ontological diversity.

Read The Rest Here: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/63/marder.php

The Adorable Custom of ‘Telling The Bees’

The Adorable Custom of ‘Telling The Bees’

The bee friend, a painting by Hans Thoma (1839–1924) There was a time when almost every rural British family who kept bees followed a strange tradition. Whenever there was a death in the family, someone had to go out to the hives and tell the 

I Never Figured How to Get Free

I Never Figured How to Get Free

By Donika Kelly

The war was all over my hands.
I held the war and I watched them
die in high-definition. I could watch

anyone die, but I looked away. Still,
I wore the war on my back. I put it
on every morning. I walked the dogs

and they too wore the war. The sky
overhead was clear or it was cloudy
or it rained or it snowed, and I was rarely

afraid of what would fall from it. I worried
about what to do with my car, or how
much I could send my great-aunt this month

and the next. I ate my hamburger, I ate
my pizza, I ate a salad or lentil soup,
and this too was the war.

At times I was able to forget that I
was on the wrong side of the war,
my money and my typing and sleeping

sound at night. I never learned how
to get free. I never learned how
not to have anyone’s blood

on my own soft hands.

What an Extinct Bird Re-Evolving Says About “Species”

What an Extinct Bird Re-Evolving Says About “Species”

You may have heard the news of what sounds like a resurrection story on the small island of Aldabra, off the coast of Madagascar. Around 136,000 years ago, the island was submerged in water and a layer of limestone captured the rails—a species of flightless 

The Shield of Achilles

The Shield of Achilles

W. H. Auden – 1907-1973     She looked over his shoulder       For vines and olive trees,    Marble well-governed cities       And ships upon untamed seas,    But there on the shining metal       His hands had put instead    An artificial wilderness       And a sky like lead. A plain without a feature, bare and brown,   No blade of grass, 

The Still Face Experiment

The Still Face Experiment

Using the “Still Face” Experiment, in which a mother denies her baby attention for a short period of time, Tronick describes how prolonged lack of attention can move an infant from good socialization, to periods of bad but repairable socialization. In “ugly” situations the child does not receive any chance to return to the good, and may become stuck.