People only give a shit when they need help and you are convenient to them.Whether it be a good time, a shoulder to cry on, a verbal punching bag, a dinner date, a familiar face…
When it’s your day to feel shit, all of the above will be magically forgotten.
Lesson: Don’t expect anything from anyone but yourself.
Community needs to be inclusive. All children need a family, not only those who have a biological family. The differently-abled can always contribute, and deserve group support. Single adults deserve to be included, not just when they are partnered. Atypical sexuality is just part of human variation, no need to ghettoize it. Planting gardens, painting old houses, holding a community feed are activities where everyone is needed, and everyone can contribute. When we see the full range of our human variety we know ourselves better, and can love ourselves, and each other, more. #rowegreentree
Bobby completed her matric and later on even got a teaching degree. She has been working with an NGO for quite sometime now and is one of the many people striving to find a decent job. She doesn’t want to sing or dance, she actually despises doing that. But that’s a source of income for her so she has little choice left.
She works day and night to fend for herself. Goes all the way to chaanga maanga, gets clothes which she sells by going door to door. She finds one way or another to earn. This is just amongst the many things she has done in the past years.
Bobby expressed her grief about people not seeing them as anything more. Going to the mosque, some would say “masjid ko tou baksh dou” not for once thinking that they might actually be there to pray just like any of us. We have left them no choice but to sing and dance to earn. Why does this have to be their identity when they can be so much more?
She has worked under a doctors supervision and learnt how to pass a catheter, how to put an I.V and provides this service around the neighbourhood in case of an emergency for which she gets paid.
Her brother having shunned her, she had little choice left but to leave the house and make a little one of her own. One room and one bath.
After we were done talking, she gave me her number and insisted that I contact her if I find any job that she can do. I Cant help but think how different her life would be had she been given the same opportunities as any of us.
Sunflowers (sunyashniki) are especially loved in Ukraine, where golden fields of them face the sunrise in the east. They are Ukraine’s national flower, and in folk imagery represent the warmth and power of the sun, which was worshipped by pre-Christian Slavs.
Please reblog the following post about the disaster, Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia are facing right now and through that raise awareness! These countries need every help they can get!
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia are experiencing the worst floods in the last 120 years. Houses and bridges have been swept away. Many have died and a full-scale evacuation of thousands of people has been carried out. Improvised dams and embankments have been built in order to save people’s lives and infrastructure. Because of the horrifyingly high levels of water, landslides have appeared and destroyed everything in their way – houses, roads, bridges. Countless people have been evacuated and are now accommodated in sports halls, warehouses, etc. After the flood waters recede, people will have no home to go back to and the affected areas will face a serious health risk. Thousands of people are helping in mitigating the effects of this disaster.
I hereby ask you for your help: you can donate financially to the Ministries of Finance or the Red Cross in Serbia and BiH (http://helpfloodedserbia.org/donate/) and also reblog and share this information with others.
Show your humanity, show your support for the people who lost everything. At the end of the day, we are all the same, without gender, class or race. Human beings. Walking talking minerals.
Some Good My Gentle Master for God’s Sake, acrylic on canvas, 2019
Source: Three skulls showing the effects of leprosy (middle images). Title references the text above a medieval illumination of a leper holding a bell (bottom image).
Lepers weren’t stigmatized in medieval Europe, and in fact were held in high regard. Their suffering on earth guaranteed them a place in heaven without having to spend time in purgatory first. The reason they were pictured with bells was because the disease affected the vocal chords which made speaking difficult. The bell was used for communication, not as a warning.
pronunciation | ‘lE-tOst note | the extended definition appears in writer Milan Kundera’s work; a more general English translation is sorrow or regret.
Vasily Vereshchagin depicted war atrocities in many of his paintings. He illustrated many wars including the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-88, 1857 Indian War of Independence titled ‘Blowing from Guns in British India’. His painting “The State Procession of the Prince of Wales into Jaipur.” , inside Kolkata’s Victoria Memorial is the third largest painting in the world. Vasily always depicted real side of war despite the rising propaganda of obscuring failures and highlighting glories. Due to this, he experienced opposition from Russian Empire, some countries of western Europe and British rule in India. He painted ‘Apotheosis of War’ in 1871. The painting depicts a pyramid of human skulls on the background of the ruined city and denuded trees among the red hot plain. Flocks of hungry birds of prey fluttering over the pyramid, picking at their remains. Death and destruction are conveyed with extreme detail through skulls. The denuded trees represent a civilisation without humanity. The leaves of kindness and compassion have fallen. The ravens symbolises irrationality. People driven by their self interest and insatiable thirst for power, iniate wars that leads to people becoming victim of their insanity. In the background, we can see ruined remains of a fortress, conveying grief and destruction that war brings on their families. Vasily used yellow and light brown colour for the barren plain and background, juxtaposing the horrors of war. Contrasting the dull plain, clear blue sky and shining sun only emphasizes the dreadness of the picture and present us a world where we don’t want to live in. Vasily not only portrays the abhorrent nature of mass death but also emphasizes a single lost life. The pyramid of skulls shows a fragile social and political strucure built on the foundation of mistrust, self interest and hate.
Vasily is trying to show the realistic picture of war to poets and prophets who dreamt of a utopia in which war will not exist and peace will reign on earth. It can be misunderstood by some as glorification of war, but he condemns the war by showing us its brutal nature. He tries to show that men are dynamic creatures who can’t live contended merely with peace. These men don’t think about the post calamities of war but are guided by their accumulated energy filled with ignorance and hate. The tendency of modern wars becoming global is pretty disturbing to us. The fact that radical difference in policies and abhorrent political ideologies of countries cannot always be settled by mere discussion, puts us as a civilisation into a bleak and uncertain future. I do not know how many wars could be prevented by art, but i do know that any stable, lasting peace depends on creating societies with a richness of opportunity and variety that can meet human needs.
“Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear—the earth remains slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break. Under the desert sun, in that dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. The air is clean, the rock cuts cruelly into flesh; shatter the rock and the odor of flint rises to your nostrils, bitter and sharp. Whirlwinds dance across the salt flats, a pillar of dust by day; the thornbush breaks into flame at night. What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore, sublime.”
Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness: A Celebration of the Beauty of Living in a Harsh and Hostile Land — Edward Abbey
I’ve always loved old fashioned things, but lately there’s so much more being brought to me by the internet it’s easier to see into the past, but at the same time, you can never really see the past. antique things for sale on the internet just don’t feel the same as they did in the olden days. recreations are beautiful and fun, but we can never take away all of our stuff and just show theirs. things in museums are very fascinating, but they’re all taken apart and isolated and looked at and lonely. but I still love to see things that really existed a hundred or so years ago, it sparks me to imagine what it’s life was like, what it’s been through. I had an idea, I wonder if anyone has dug up any time capsules and put pictures on the internet for us to see? I’d love to see what people buried in their backyards, it’s like another way of freezing time like photographs do. so I looked up “interesting time capsules dug up” and I found a blog post, which became a time capsule itself because it was made before 2009, it even says “The deadline [for a space time capsule which will come back to earth in 50000 years] is December 31, 2009. Messages can be posted here.”
apparently there was a digital time capsule from 2006, which was opened in march 2020, but I couldn’t find anything about it except people talking about it before it was opened, and saying that it was opened. I really love the 2000’s, and I didn’t have the internet back then, so I’ve been catching up and it looked like so much fun on the internet in 2006, so I’d love to see it.
and, I found out that the world’s largest time capsule from 1975 is supposed to be opened in 2025, that’s in just 3 years! it’s so big because they buried 2 cars in it. but another time capsule where they buried a brand new car in concrete for 50 years, the concrete room leaked and the car came out all completely rusted and rotten. they chose a special kind of car, because they thought it was a good example of the bestest and smartest modern technology… which makes me imagine people today burying a tesla as a symbol of how totally brilliant we are and then a little water destroys it like the invention was no match for nature.
another interesting thing I read on this blog, was that Albert Einstein wrote a note in a time capsule that is supposed to be opened in 5000 years, he said “Our time is rich in inventive minds, the inventions of which could facilitate our lives considerably. We are crossing the seas by power and utilize power also in order to relieve humanity from all tiring muscular work. We have learned to fly and we are able to send messages and news without any difficulty over the entire world through electric waves. However, the production and distribution of commodities is entirely unorganized so that everybody must live in fear of being eliminated from the economic cycle, in this way suffering for the want of everything. Further more, people living in different countries kill each other at irregular time intervals, so that also for this reason any one who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror. This is due to the fact that the intelligence and character of the masses are incomparably lower than the intelligence and character of the few who produce some thing valuable for the community. I trust that posterity will read these statements with a feeling of proud and justified superiority.”
it’s really sad that it’s already been almost a hundred of those 5000 years, and those things haven’t changed. but some things have changed. I guess some people can look back and feel proud and justified superiority, but there were good people back then too. I am not proud of all the people in the world, so I don’t like to say “we” when I’m talking about everyone. but I am very lovingly proud of everyone who tried to make the world better, and everyone who has made the world better, and everyone who wants to make the world better. they can look around at the world in 1939 or 6939 and feel proud and justified superiority. we don’t need to wait for the cruel ones to catch up to be proud of ourselves, and we don’t need to feel their shame. I feel ashamed of them, but not ashamed for them.
