“The less love you put into things the more they resemble one another. The same goes for stories, everyone knows them by heart, but when someone tells them with love, I don’t know, they seem new…that’s what I think anyway.”
— Andrés Neuman, Traveller of the Century (trans. Nick Caistor & Lorenza Garcia)
Zapotec Bride from Juchitán de Zaragoza - Pieter Hugo
the legendary DMX and his orchid growing hobby.
“Ask permission. Before cutting the branch of a tree or removing a flower, tell the spirit of the tree or plant what you are going to do, so that they can withdraw their energy from that place and not feel the cut so strong. When you go to nature and want to take a stone that was in the river, ask the river keeper if he allows you to take one of his sacred stones. If you have to climb a mountain or make a pilgrimage through the jungle, ask permission from the spirits and guardians of the place. It is very important that you communicate even if you do not feel, do not listen or do not see. Enter with respect to each place, since Nature listens to you, sees you and feels you. Every movement you make in the microcosm generates a great impact on the macrocosm. When you approach an animal, give thanks for the medicine it has for you. Honor life in its many forms and be aware that each being is fulfilling its purpose, nothing was created to fill spaces, everything and everyone is here remembering our mission, remembering who we are and awakening from the sacred dream to return home.”
— Getting To The Root
how to organize a community fridge from iohnyc on instagram
this is the coolest thing!!
“As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”
— From the essay ‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury’ in Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
From a documentary about Akha people (an indigenous tribe to mountain forests in Thailand). Like many other indigenous people in the world, they are blamed for environmental destruction (despite taking care of the land and maintaining biodiversity), and were forcefully relocated so loggers and industrial farmers could use the land and use impoverished Akha people as laborers.
Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen (2018) directed by Heperi Mita