And Now I Understand What George Rodrigue Was On About With All The Blue Dogs.

TIL so much thanks 👆👆👆👆👆

Link for full article below.

Girl Scout Cookie Time!

You can buy cookies online from any troop with a page set up.  People bought so many cookies from troop 6000 (who is based out of a homeless shelter in NYC) that is broke the counter on the website.

Here’s six troops from high poverty areas that may struggle to reach their goals. Individual troops list on their page what they’re doing with funds. for many of these its simple things like badges or craft supplies. Get yourself some cookies.

troop 168 Sabra Grande, Puerto Rico 

 Troop 3559 Chinlee, Az (Navajo nation)

 Troop 31897 Meadow Bridge, West Virginia 

Troop 70115 Rena Lara, Mississippi 

 Troop9626 Kykotsmovi Village, AZ  -Hopi Nation

Troop 30349 Darien, GA 

You can also just donate cookies on there and they’ll be distributed to the local community. (I work at food pantry here and clients are always excited to see cookies on the shelves)

You can look up your local troop by zip code on https://www.girlscouts.org/   If they’re similarly struggling to raise funds, reblog and add ‘em on to the chain.

I got to hold a 500,000 year old hand axe at the museum today.

It's right-handed

I am right-handed

There are grooves for the thumb and knuckle to grip that fit my hand perfectly

I have calluses there from holding my stylus and pencils and the gardening tools.

There are sharper and blunter parts of the edge, for different types of cutting, as well as a point for piercing.

I know exactly how to use this to butcher a carcass.

A homo erectus made it

Some ancestor of mine, three species ago, made a tool that fits my hand perfectly, and that I still know how to use.

Who were you

A man? A woman? Did you even use those words?

Did you craft alone or were you with friends? Did you sing while you worked?

Did you find this stone yourself, or did you trade for it? Was it a gift?

Did you make it for yourself, or someone else, or does the distinction of personal property not really apply here?

Who were you?

What would you think today, seeing your descendant hold your tool and sob because it fits her hands as well?

What about your other descendant, the docent and caretaker of your tool, holding her hands under it the way you hold your hands under your baby's head when a stranger holds them.

Is it bizarre to you, that your most utilitarian object is now revered as holy?

Or has it always been divine?

Or is the divine in how I am watching videos on how to knap stone made by your other descendants, learning by example the way you did?

Tomorrow morning I am going to the local riverbed in search of the appropriate stones, and I will follow your example.

The first blood spilled on it will almost certainly be my own, as I learn the textures and rhythm of how it's done.

Did you have cuss words back then? Gods to blaspheme when the rock slips and you almost take your thumbnail off instead? Or did you just scream?

I'm not religious.

But if spilling my own blood to connect with a stranger who shared it isn't partaking in the divine

I don't know what is.

"We follow the comet," Dany told her khalasar. Once it was said, no word was raised against it. They had been Drogo's people, but they were hers now. The Unburnt, they called her, and Mother of Dragons. Her word was their law.

A Clash of Kings - Daenerys I

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Does anyone remember this Rapunzel from Shelly Duval’s Faerie Tale Theater. This was THE Rapunzel adaptation of my childhood. I regularly have intrusive thoughts about this episode. Every story that FTT produced was a piece of art and love. Thank You Shelly Duval, and Rest in Peace and Love.

Most beautiful quote of all ASOIAF

—and for the first time in hundreds of years, the night came alive with the music of dragons.

classic

Your body is an ancestor. Your body is an altar to your ancestors. Every one of your cells holds an ancient and anarchic love story. Around 2.7 billion years ago free-living prokaryotes melted into one another to form the mitochondria and organelles of the cells that build our bodies today. All you need to do to honor your ancestors is to roll up like a pill bug, into the innate shape of safety: the fetal position. The curl of your body, then, is an altar not just to the womb that grew you, but to the retroviruses that, 200 million years ago taught mammals how to develop the protein syncytin that creates the synctrophoblast layer of the placenta. Breathe in, slowly, knowing that your breath loops you into the biome of your ecosystem. Every seven to ten years your cells will have turned over, rearticulated by your inhales and exhales, your appetites and proclivity for certain flavors. If you live in a valley, chances are the ancient glacial moraine, the fossils crushed underfoot, the spores from grandmotherly honey fungi, have all entered into and rebuilt the very molecular make up of your bones, your lungs, and even your eyes. Even your lungfuls of exhaust churn you into an ancestor altar for Mesozoic ferns pressurized into the fossil fuels. You are threaded through with fossils. Your microbiome is an ode to bacterial legacies you would not be able to trace with birth certificates and blood lineages. You are the ongoing-ness of the dead. The alembic where they are given breath again. Every decision, every idea, every poem you breathe and live is a resurrection of elements that date back to the birth of this universe itself. Today I realize that due to the miracle of metabolic recycling, it is even possible that my body, somehow, holds the cells of my great-great grandmother. Or your great-great grandmother. Or that I am built from carbon that once intimately orchestrated the flight of a hummingbird or a pterodactyl. Your body is an ecosystem of ancestors. An outcome born not of a single human thread, but a web of relations that ripples outwards into the intimate ocean of deep time.

Your Body is an Ancestor, Sophie Strand