People From A Planet Without Flowers Would Think We Must Be Mad With Joy The Whole Time To Have Such

a sluge 😔

This is actually so creative I can't even

Dandelion

You open your eyes and look around So bright and blue, the sky You’re in your mother’s embrace, so safe and sound Till the wind blows out and makes you fly

You fly around in the wind’s embrace You see a child running after you With giggles and a big grin on his face You’ve never felt so special, have you?

Suddenly, you’re grabbed by a hand, so wild And you close your eyes in fear But when you open your eyes you see a beautiful child And you know that it’s going to be safe here

The child smiles and whispers down in your ear And you feel so contented to hear his secret You feel happier when he says “you’re beautiful, oh dear” As he continues wishing for a little pet

He blows you away and the wind catches you  But now you finally understood That there’s nothing else that you want to do Because being a dandelion feels so good

i think all quiet on the western front and the lord of the rings are in direct conversation with each other, as in theyre the retelling of the same war with one saying here’s what happened, we all died, and it did not matter at all and another going hush little boy, of course we won, of course your friends came back

thinking about when i was small, how my mom told me that pipe cleaners were just a tool until people started idly shaping things with them and it grew so popular that they were marketed as crafting materials. and that story about how the original frisbees were disposable pie plates that students flattened to throw. and how when i was a child i had a wooden mancala set with shiny, colorful stones, but on invention it was played with rocks and grooves dug into the dirt. and middle school, paper football and tic-tac-toe and mash and mad libs, games that just need pen and paper. and before that, games of pretend with pirates and princes and masked marauders. how at slumber parties after lights out, we used to whisper storytelling games, i say one sentence and you say the next. and shadow puppets. and the way all the kids in the neighborhood used to divide into teams and throw fallen pine cones at one another. and the floor is lava game, and the quiet game, and the games i play with my coworkers that are just words and retention. and "put a finger down" on the high school bus. and little girls clapping together, and how the first jump-rope was undoubtedly just a length of rope who knows how long ago, and how natural it is to play, how we seek play at every age and with any resources we have and with whatever time we can squeeze it into in a day. i'm not an anthropologist or a psychologist but i think after food and shelter and water and air what comes next is games and stories and laughter. i think that there is nothing -- not sex or fighting or forming unlikely bonds with animals -- there is nothing more human than to play.

I bought a quarterly needlepoint magazine from 1991 today for $1 at an op shop, and there’s a four page spread about a woman who completely faithfully remakes samplers from the 1600s and the part that blows me away is that she was keeping women in history alive.

The original sampler maker was a teenaged girl called Loara she’s the only one known of seven siblings in that family. She was born approximately 1632 and had passed before her father had in 1656 which they know because it was mentioned in his will.

So in the 1630-40s a girl made a sampler, in 1991 a woman had put in years of research before recreating the sampler as Loara had 350 years earlier , and I’m reading about it in 2024.

Embroidery keeps women alive in history, and it’s part of why I love samplers so much.

Here’s a quote from samplers that I think about often:

September approaching…I feel I owe myself a brief respite of leisure and no rushing around. I can't face the dead reality. I want rainy days, lanterns and a hundred moons twining in dark leaves, music spilling out and echoing yet inside my head.

Sylvia Plath, from a letter to Aurelia Plath written c. August 1951

you cant even begin poems with "i will sodomise and facef uck you" anymore. because of woke .

fish song