Theme
6:52am June 17, 2015
“Nacimiento de una Dryas iulia, Mariposario de Icod de los Vinos, Tenerife, España, 2012-12-13, DD 03” by Diego Delso. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons[Image description:  Photograph of a dryas iulia butterfly ecloding – emerging from its chrysalis.  It is upside-down and its pinkish-red wings look like pieces of cloth.]Please don’t delete the image description, it’s there for visually impaired people and other screenreader users.More about this type of butterfly, from Wikipedia:Dryas iulia (often incorrectly spelled julia),[1] commonly called the Julia Butterfly, Julia Heliconian, The Flame, or Flambeau, is a species of brush-footed butterfly. The sole representative of its genus Dryas, it is native from Brazil to southern Texas and Florida, and in summer can sometimes be found as far north as eastern Nebraska. Over 15 subspecies have been described.Its wingspan ranges from 82 to 92 mm, and it is colored orange (brighter in male specimens) with black markings; this species is somewhat unpalatable to birds and belongs to the “orange” Batesian Mimicry mimic complex.[2]This butterfly is a fast flier and frequents clearings, paths, and margins of forests and woodlands. It feeds on the nectar of flowers, such as lantanas (Lantana) and Shepherd’s-needle (Scandix pecten-veneris), and the tears of caiman, the eye of which the butterfly irritates to produce tears.[3] Its caterpillar feeds on leaves of passion vines including Passiflora affinis and Yellow Passionflower (P. lutea) in Texas.The species is popular in butterfly houses because it is long-lived and active throughout the day.

“Nacimiento de una Dryas iulia, Mariposario de Icod de los Vinos, Tenerife, España, 2012-12-13, DD 03” by Diego Delso. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

[Image description:  Photograph of a dryas iulia butterfly ecloding – emerging from its chrysalis.  It is upside-down and its pinkish-red wings look like pieces of cloth.]

Please don’t delete the image description, it’s there for visually impaired people and other screenreader users.

More about this type of butterfly, from Wikipedia:

Dryas iulia (often incorrectly spelled julia),[1] commonly called the Julia Butterfly, Julia Heliconian, The Flame, or Flambeau, is a species of brush-footed butterfly. The sole representative of its genus Dryas, it is native from Brazil to southern Texas and Florida, and in summer can sometimes be found as far north as eastern Nebraska. Over 15 subspecies have been described.

Its wingspan ranges from 82 to 92 mm, and it is colored orange (brighter in male specimens) with black markings; this species is somewhat unpalatable to birds and belongs to the “orange” Batesian Mimicry mimic complex.[2]

This butterfly is a fast flier and frequents clearings, paths, and margins of forests and woodlands. It feeds on the nectar of flowers, such as lantanas (Lantana) and Shepherd’s-needle (Scandix pecten-veneris), and the tears of caiman, the eye of which the butterfly irritates to produce tears.[3] Its caterpillar feeds on leaves of passion vines including Passiflora affinis and Yellow Passionflower (P. lutea) in Texas.

The species is popular in butterfly houses because it is long-lived and active throughout the day.

2:10am December 9, 2014

Owl Eyes

my dad holding wide eyed baby me on our porch in the redwoods

I was born
In the doorway of the delivery room
At change of shift
My mother had to lift the sheets
To show them I was here

I didn’t cry
I just stared
With big eyes 
And big pupils

“Owl Eyes”
My dad nicknamed me
As my parents wondered
“Who the hell is in there
Behind those big black eyes?”

I guess they found out
Slowly enough
As I learned to communicate better
But I feel like my father and me 
Never fully understood each other
Until he was dying

Because there was something he feared
About opening up to love
But he trusted me enough to do it
And I trusted him enough to do the same
And suddenly it was as if everything in our hearts
Was known to the other
On a level too deep for words

I was born during so many transitions
But death is the biggest of all
And I know my dad was scared
But I told him:

When it gets to its worst
Or when the pain gets too much
Lean on Love
It will not let you down
And he did
And we could see more
In each other’s eyes
Than we’d seen in a lifetime before

And my mom said when he died
He trusted us enough
To walk into the Light unafraid

Owl Eyes I was at birth
And Owl Eyes I was again
When my father took me out at night
To listen to the owls in the woods
And my eyes got big every time
I heard an owl hoot

And when my father was dying
All I wished was that
My Owl Eyes could get big enough
To see, and capture, his soul
In my memory
Forever

[This was in response to the writing prompt “Allies”. I doubt this is what the person had in mind, at all. But every time I came back to the writing prompt, “Allies” sounded like “Owl Eyes” in my head. And yet I still couldn’t write the poem. Every attempt was so unsatisfactory that I rarely bothered saving my drafts. My father, who had given me this nickname, was dying of cancer. And I just found out tonight why I couldn’t write the poem before: His death was a necessary part of the story, a part that hadn’t happened yet the last time I tried to write this. It’s too bad. I would have liked him to see it. He and my mom followed my poetry blog, because that’s where I communicated the most how I was feeling about his illness and upcoming death, and my feelings in general. I just wish he’d been around to see this one. He was the one who called me Owl Eyes, after all.]

2:12am October 31, 2014

A Series Of Short Poems About Rocks

This was originally posted to my main poetry blog, and due to the images it looks better over there. And that blog has a comment section.

These aren’t quite haikus, though they’re heavily inspired by them. To my mind, they’re too subjective, and tell too much of a story taken together. I like them both individually and all together. So I put pictures in between them to divide them up in the reader’s eye. So that you can see this is not one long poem with many stanzas, but many short poems on a common theme. And the theme is rocks, and my relationship to them. I hope you enjoy reading at least some of these, as much as I enjoyed writing them. Just take the time to read them as separate poems, one at a time.

madeofpatterns: Watch for the final picture… All of my current close rock friends together in one hand! Anyway, enough babbling, here’s the poetry:

Rocks sing constant songs
Avalanches, quarries, lava
Songs from where they came


Rocks sing constant songs
Sand and dust and memories
Songs for where they’ll go

Rocks understand
Eruption is birth to them
Rocks know birth


Rocks understand
Sand is death to them
Rocks know death

Rocks understand
Sand can form into sandstone
Rocks know rebirth


Rocks resonate with
The rocks in the ground
Rocks are social

Rocks in my hand
Sing only in tactile ways
Rocks talk through touch


I can feel a rock
Telling me and other rocks
Of its secret past

I can feel a rock
Resonating with my bones
I can speak rock


Bones are made of rock
We are each carrying round
Rocks inside us all

One can throw a rock
One can make a stone castle
Rocks hurt and protect


Rocks are made into
Stonehenge and cathedrals
Rocks make things sacred

Holy is not made
Holy already exists
Rocks are holy


In my pocket
Pieces of sacredness
Kept in form of rocks


Agate is my friend
Fiery, smooth, and translucent
She sits in my hand


Schorl egg in hand
Black with a soap-like texture
Warding off bad dreams

When I close my eyes
Amethyst has same color
As the Mother Tree


Amber holds the sun
Yellow, red, and fiery orange
Sunset sparkles depth.

Lapis is a world
Deep blue with islands of gold
Yet fits in my hand


Unobtrusive brown
Spectrolite is secretive
Flashing blue and orange

Tiger eye’s well named
Glints flow from depth to surface
Like a cat’s eyes


Sitting by the road
I splay my legs to the sides
Stack rocks on my knees

Grey pebbles have
Just as interesting stories
As precious gemstone


It was plain grey rocks
Who kept me company
When no one else would

Grey rocks said I had
Place in the world beyond
Human social world


Grey rocks sang
Of avalanche and mudslide
Of death sand and love

When grey rocks sang
All the ground seemed to rumble
With their wisdom


Grey rocks are not dull
They are underestimated by
Those who look with eyes

Rocks beneath our feet
Rumble to each other now
All around the world


Rocks in my hands
Tell me that I am real
Rocks in pockets too

Sitting in my hands
Rocks keep silent company
Unobtrusive friends

5:38am July 10, 2014
[Click through the link to see the blog of the original artist.] My father never got to have grandchildren.  When I was a child, though, everyone thought my brother was my father, and that my father was my grandfather.  My brother was 14 years older than me, I looked young for my age, and my father had a grey beard since before I was born.  Now he’ll never have grandchildren when he’s alive, and I wonder if he regrets that.  I know how powerful the urge is to see your genes go on.  I have it myself, despite having decided not to have children.  I still want to know what it would be like to have biological children, who they would be, who they would turn into.  It’s probably a moot point.  I haven’t had a period since I was twenty-eight, and I’ve been told I wouldn’t survive pregnancy.  But I still wonder.  And I wonder how he feels. In the hospital, every time a baby was born, they’d play Brahm’s Lullaby over the loudspeakers.  My father, in there for terminal cancer, said every time, “They’re sending in another one to replace me when I’m gone.” I have a view of the world where it’s not just your own genes that count, everything is connected.  My father must, too, to some degree, or he wouldn’t have been saying things like that. Somewhere, there’s a single piece of redwood sorrel, pushing its way through the earth.  Unfolding its leaves, it feels sunlight for the first time.  It’s a feeling that non-photosynthetic creatures can only imagine.  Yet I’m certain sometimes that I’ve climbed trees, and pressed myself into the branches, and felt the sunlight pour nourishment into my hair.  They say autistic people have no empathy, but when’s the last time you saw a neurotypical person with that much involuntary empathy for a plant? The redwood sorrel comes from the redwood soil, and the redwood soil is sacred to me.  The soil is the place where you can most readily see the processes of death, decay, and rebirth taking place over and over again on a daily basis.  When I think of my father dying, I think of the redwood soil, and I wonder what plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria he will turn into — and what they will turn into.   Because there’s our literal descendants, the ones that come from spreading our genes through sex and reproduction.  But in death, we have a chance to have an entirely different kind of descendants.  They feed off of our bodies, our ashes, our composted remains, and whatever else is left of us.  We are conditioned to view this process as ugly.  There are good evolutionary reasons for our disgust at the sight or smell of a decaying body.  I am not immune to that disgust. But it’s also profoundly beautiful.  And beautifully profound.  No matter what happens to any of us, once we die we will have more descendants than we know what to do with.  And those descendants won’t be limited to our species, or even to the animal kingdom.  It will be everything that feeds on us — and everything that feeds on them — and that is how life continues, and that is another way of having descendants. I want to be a redwood tree when I grow up.  I want to be put in one of those Swedish compost machines and then buried under the Mother Tree.  Barring that, I want to be cremated and my ashes scattered on the Mother Tree and in the surrounding forest.  I want to become part of the forest that has given me everything important in my life. Some people believe that once you are dead, your body isn’t you anymore.  I have mixed feelings about that.  I’ve seen recently-dead spirits, and had other people see exactly what I saw, often enough that I know there’s something of us that goes on beyond our death, although I believe that this is a short-term state, that ultimately, if everything goes right, it gets reabsorbed into Love, in the same way that our bodies get reabsorbed into the ecosystem.  But I also believe that our bodies are made of all these parts that have tried to stay alive for so long.  We are not just a mind, and not just a brain, and not just intelligence (and our brain is not the only intelligent part of our body).  We are cells that want to go on living, that go on cooperating with each other, that are important, that most humans in Western society pooh-pooh because they don’t want to see how much of themselves is collections of cells working together in amazing and wonderful ways, ways that show that the cells themselves have a drive to life as extreme as any our brain can concoct. And when we die, and those cells begin to break down, they are what get eaten up by all the plants, fungi, bacteria, and animals that break down our remains.  We can do things to slow down this process, but not by much, and it wouldn’t be good to slow it down too far anyway.  We don’t belong taken out of the cycle of life and death.  We exist there for a reason. And somewhere, right now, a single redwood sorrel plant, surrounded by all of its redwood sorrel friends, is reaching up to the light, feeling what only a plant can feel.  For the very first time. And somewhere, right near it, a human being is picking another redwood sorrel plant and eating it.  And as sie eats that plant, the plant becomes part of hir.   Nearby, another redwood sorrel plant dies of old age, turning brown, wilting back into the soil it was born from, becoming food for all kinds of microbes and plants and other creatures. As long as we are tangled up in this cycle, we are never dead.  We go on to feed someone else, who feeds someone else, who feeds someone else.  And those are our descendants just as surely as any genetic grandchildren are.  And however much we may turn up our noses at the stench of decay, the fact of decay is one of the most beautiful and elegant solutions life has ever come up with.  Without it, we would have no life. And the whole thing is run by Love.  And Love is in the soil, the soil is where I can see this aspect of Love operating the most, and that is why redwood soil is so sacred to me. Every time I think of my father’s death, I think of what he will become.  He will be absorbed into the highest Love there is.  He will be absorbed into the plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria that consume his body.  And these are not contradictions.  These are not the ‘higher’ and 'lower’ aspects of death.  They are one and the same thing, and they are beautiful.

[Click through the link to see the blog of the original artist.]

My father never got to have grandchildren.  When I was a child, though, everyone thought my brother was my father, and that my father was my grandfather.  My brother was 14 years older than me, I looked young for my age, and my father had a grey beard since before I was born.  Now he’ll never have grandchildren when he’s alive, and I wonder if he regrets that.  I know how powerful the urge is to see your genes go on.  I have it myself, despite having decided not to have children.  I still want to know what it would be like to have biological children, who they would be, who they would turn into.  It’s probably a moot point.  I haven’t had a period since I was twenty-eight, and I’ve been told I wouldn’t survive pregnancy.  But I still wonder.  And I wonder how he feels.

In the hospital, every time a baby was born, they’d play Brahm’s Lullaby over the loudspeakers.  My father, in there for terminal cancer, said every time, “They’re sending in another one to replace me when I’m gone.”

I have a view of the world where it’s not just your own genes that count, everything is connected.  My father must, too, to some degree, or he wouldn’t have been saying things like that.

Somewhere, there’s a single piece of redwood sorrel, pushing its way through the earth.  Unfolding its leaves, it feels sunlight for the first time.  It’s a feeling that non-photosynthetic creatures can only imagine.  Yet I’m certain sometimes that I’ve climbed trees, and pressed myself into the branches, and felt the sunlight pour nourishment into my hair.  They say autistic people have no empathy, but when’s the last time you saw a neurotypical person with that much involuntary empathy for a plant?

The redwood sorrel comes from the redwood soil, and the redwood soil is sacred to me.  The soil is the place where you can most readily see the processes of death, decay, and rebirth taking place over and over again on a daily basis.  When I think of my father dying, I think of the redwood soil, and I wonder what plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria he will turn into — and what they will turn into.  

Because there’s our literal descendants, the ones that come from spreading our genes through sex and reproduction.  But in death, we have a chance to have an entirely different kind of descendants.  They feed off of our bodies, our ashes, our composted remains, and whatever else is left of us.  We are conditioned to view this process as ugly.  There are good evolutionary reasons for our disgust at the sight or smell of a decaying body.  I am not immune to that disgust.

But it’s also profoundly beautiful.  And beautifully profound.  No matter what happens to any of us, once we die we will have more descendants than we know what to do with.  And those descendants won’t be limited to our species, or even to the animal kingdom.  It will be everything that feeds on us — and everything that feeds on them — and that is how life continues, and that is another way of having descendants.

I want to be a redwood tree when I grow up.  I want to be put in one of those Swedish compost machines and then buried under the Mother Tree.  Barring that, I want to be cremated and my ashes scattered on the Mother Tree and in the surrounding forest.  I want to become part of the forest that has given me everything important in my life.

Some people believe that once you are dead, your body isn’t you anymore.  I have mixed feelings about that.  I’ve seen recently-dead spirits, and had other people see exactly what I saw, often enough that I know there’s something of us that goes on beyond our death, although I believe that this is a short-term state, that ultimately, if everything goes right, it gets reabsorbed into Love, in the same way that our bodies get reabsorbed into the ecosystem.  But I also believe that our bodies are made of all these parts that have tried to stay alive for so long.  We are not just a mind, and not just a brain, and not just intelligence (and our brain is not the only intelligent part of our body).  We are cells that want to go on living, that go on cooperating with each other, that are important, that most humans in Western society pooh-pooh because they don’t want to see how much of themselves is collections of cells working together in amazing and wonderful ways, ways that show that the cells themselves have a drive to life as extreme as any our brain can concoct.

And when we die, and those cells begin to break down, they are what get eaten up by all the plants, fungi, bacteria, and animals that break down our remains.  We can do things to slow down this process, but not by much, and it wouldn’t be good to slow it down too far anyway.  We don’t belong taken out of the cycle of life and death.  We exist there for a reason.

And somewhere, right now, a single redwood sorrel plant, surrounded by all of its redwood sorrel friends, is reaching up to the light, feeling what only a plant can feel.  For the very first time.

And somewhere, right near it, a human being is picking another redwood sorrel plant and eating it.  And as sie eats that plant, the plant becomes part of hir.  

Nearby, another redwood sorrel plant dies of old age, turning brown, wilting back into the soil it was born from, becoming food for all kinds of microbes and plants and other creatures.

As long as we are tangled up in this cycle, we are never dead.  We go on to feed someone else, who feeds someone else, who feeds someone else.  And those are our descendants just as surely as any genetic grandchildren are.  And however much we may turn up our noses at the stench of decay, the fact of decay is one of the most beautiful and elegant solutions life has ever come up with.  Without it, we would have no life.

And the whole thing is run by Love.  And Love is in the soil, the soil is where I can see this aspect of Love operating the most, and that is why redwood soil is so sacred to me.

Every time I think of my father’s death, I think of what he will become.  He will be absorbed into the highest Love there is.  He will be absorbed into the plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria that consume his body.  And these are not contradictions.  These are not the ‘higher’ and 'lower’ aspects of death.  They are one and the same thing, and they are beautiful.

9:02am October 30, 2013
tom-sits-like-a-whore: whengreenmetblue: searchingforknowledge: d2fang: faroresferrari: allthingshyper: wanderingquill: These guys can no longer claim, women don’t know true pain.  I enjoy this post WAY too much Call me malicious but I want every male politician who’s against birth control and abortion to get hooked up to one of these. A+ gif usage Omg this was on tv in Holland. OMG. One of the men actually stopped because he couldn’t take the pain. (Flashing response gif removed so I don’t have to tag it.)

tom-sits-like-a-whore:

whengreenmetblue:

searchingforknowledge:

d2fang:

faroresferrari:

allthingshyper:

wanderingquill:

These guys can no longer claim, women don’t know true pain. 

I enjoy this post WAY too much

Call me malicious but I want every male politician who’s against birth control and abortion to get hooked up to one of these.

A+ gif usage

Omg this was on tv in Holland. OMG.

One of the men actually stopped because he couldn’t take the pain.

(Flashing response gif removed so I don’t have to tag it.)