Armed & Ready [2024]

Hindsight’s 20/20, which is why I normally take a photo of birthday and winter holiday gifts as I’ve often found they provide divinatory hints about the year ahead.

(Armed and ready for 44. 💪)

see also: #birthday

i keep wanting these to come out more naturalistic and they keep veering into 'tie-dye-colored nightmare-book-of-Kells illumination' instead, which inevitably sets off the impostor syndrome off on a No One Will Take You Seriously With These Palettes rant, except by that point it's done & I'm moving on because they're all tiny so ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

My summer time embroideries.

MY BERRY BEST STRAWBERRY RECIPES

Follow for recipes

Is this how you roll?

@pagan-stitches

Yass!!! It’s strawberry season here!! 🍓 🍓 🍓

Iil mushroom patch

@luc3

Y'all are amazing. Reblog to hug the person you’re reblogging from.

Dirtymas [2024]

Feast of the Birth of Dirty. 🎂

see also: #altar, #birthday

Earth Day [2024]

Intermittent rain cancelled Earth Day's plant crime this year (digging up wild cherry suckers), but it was just dry enough to shuffle out into garden and snap some photos of previous heists.

see also: #garden, #plant crime

Art Deco Aphrodite and Venus by Erté aka Romain De Tirtoff, detail.

The Saffron Goddess (1600 B.C.) is a detail from a Minoan fresco depicting a saffron harvest, Akrotiri, Santorini island, Greece

This is not a goddess, that’s an incorrect description of the art that circulated for decades after the murals were first discovered in the late 1960s. The Thera Foundation, which oversees the excavation site at Akrotiri, lists her as a saffron gatherer, and academic research that was done in the early 2000s classifies her as most likely being a regional administrator who oversaw the saffron harvest, as she is depicted like men who held similar overseeing responsibilities (i.e. the bird is an indication of authority, but not deity)

I don't think it really "means" anything, but I think it's kind of interesting that a lot of human societies have been quite squeamish about sex—in particular viewing it as a worldly pleasure which is gross, sinful, or unvirtuous to engage in—while generally not feeling squeamish about eating in the same way.

I think this is interesting because, conceptually, sex is actually pretty tame. It is (or at least should be) pleasurable for both parties, it's connected with both romantic love and the creation of new life (things which people generally valorize), etc. Obviously I understand the practical reasons why cultures might frown on unrestrained expression of sexuality in a world without birth control, but on a purely conceptual level sex seems pretty wholesome all around.

On the other hand, eating is rather disturbing as an idea, isn't it? Eating necessarily involves killing—even eating plants. As heterotrophs we literally cannot eat anything without ending life in order to do it. And of course most people now and throughout history have eaten meat, which means that eating involves slaughter. It's a gruesome thing; the pleasure we take from food is intimately and inherently tied to death. Eating is an act of destruction which is necessary to nourish the physical body. Surely this should be regarded, by the sorts of people inclined to the idea, as the greatest symbol of the fallen nature of the material world as compared to the spiritual. Surely it is hunger and not lust that should be the archetype of sinful material desire.

While ascetics of various backgrounds do seem to have mentioned gluttony (it is after all one of the seven deadly sins), my impression is that usually lust is a much greater concern for them. Why? Because lust is more tempting, a greater threat? I don't think so. I think it's because food is more tempting. Because you can go a lifetime without sex if you actually decide to, but a few days without food and your brain will basically shut down your capacity for higher reasoning and make you eat. Even when desire for food is railed against, it is generally merely excessive desire (gluttony), and not, as with lust, desire-at-all (hunger). I think only the most hardcore Buddhist monks take umbrage with hunger. Because lust is small potatoes; hunger has us all in its thrall. No matter how pacifistic we think ourselves to be, hunger drives us to kill and kill and kill. Isn't there a little more inherent horror in that than in, uh, people having sex?

At least the Jains seem to have taken the inherent-horror-in-eating stuff seriously.

Artist:

Lavestelu

“Walpurgis Night”

✨🌜🔥🌛✨

Collective Dismay

Sviatyj Yuri [Saint George] overseeing potato planting on his Western feast day to the collective dismay of our Orthodox and Protestant ancestors.

see also: #potato, #saint george

common swift

Sleepwalking by Katherine Boiarkina