#THAT is why our wildlife is dying

[jarvis-cockhead]

I need Americans to stop weighing in on the UKs indoor vs outdoor cat debate until they read up on our biodiversity crisis and learn exactly why our wildlife decline is so serious (spoiler: it's not the cats)

#im all for advocating for indoor cats but americans please listen to us when we tell you its not what will save our wildlife. please #except in scotland with scottish wildcats. if youre gonna go hard on us for indoor cats focus on that. please #the UKs situation is entirely different to america and wont listen when we tell them this but they love to talk as if we're stupid #hold our government accountable. hold our landowners accountable. please #13% woodland cover left in the uk and only 25% is ancient. 71% farmland cover and agriculture is so intensive it cannot sustain our wildlife #the government is polluting our waters. pesticides are polluting our waters #THAT is why our wildlife is dying #cats have been here for 1600 years and the wildlife decrease has only been significant within the last 100 or so. 41% since 1970 #it aint the cats. i know its hard for americans to accept. but listen to us. it aint the cats #would it help? yes of course and thats why im still for it. is it going to solve our biodiversity crisis? absolutely not and it never will

[without-ado]

Dying mountain gorilla Ndakasi in the arms of her Congolese caregiver of 13 years, Andre Bauma l Virunga National Park, Congo(DRC)

Ndakasi, who was rescued by Virunga park rangers at the age of just 2 months old after her troop was massacred by a charcoal mafia, a criminal group involved in the illegal charcoal trade, in 2007.  After the massacre, Ndakasi was taken to a rescue center where she first met Bauma, who held her close all night long to keep her warm and comfort her.

 "It was Ndakasi's sweet nature and intelligence that helped me to understand the connection between humans and [other] great apes and why we should do everything in our power to protect them," Bauma said, "I am proud to have called Ndakasi my friend. I loved her like a child." more read

l Brent Stirton l 2022 Wildlife Photographer of the Year Winner

#gorillas #animals #wildlife #congo #photogaphy #photos #wild animals #gorilla #democratic republic of the congo #africa #animal #friendship #apes

[ffcrazy15]

Headcanon: Boimler is significantly better with a phaser rifle than a phaser pistol.

So. Two things about growing up in farm country mean that most people there learn how to shoot at a relatively young age. The first reason is that coyotes (and sometimes mountain lions) will absolutely try to fuck up your shit if you're a farmer. They will try to steal your pets and/or smaller livestock, and if there's a mountain lion in the area you really don't want to go walking around in a field without protection.

The second and more important reason is that hunting is big in farming communities because the state Game and Fish department relies on licensed hunters to keep the local wildlife populations healthy. Too many deer this season means not enough food, which means a lot of sick and dying deer next season. Hunters help to keep the wildlife population in check in places where humans have driven off their natural predators (since they're also unfortunately our natural predators).

The thing is, though, generally you don't use handguns for hunting (whether for protection or food); you use a rifle or a shotgun. So I think the majority of Boimler's pre-Starfleet experience with firearms would probably have been with whatever the 2300s version of a hunting rifle would be. This would explain why he seems to prefer them and knows about how to clean and take care of them, as we see in the beginning of Where Pleasant Fountains Lie.

EDITED TO ADD: A helpful person in the comments has given more relevant information/correction on the matter; I encourage y'all to check it out! Thank you @mutualweirdcalledlove!!

#obviously my “Boimler is a farm boy who wanted adventure” thesis continues #no I'm not projecting you're projecting #I wasn't a farm kid myself but I grew up in a place much like Modesto—medium-sized city surrounded by farmland—and I knew farming families #no shade to anyone who likes living in places like that but to me it was crazy boring I can see why he bailed #it's also why he's so diligent about getting his work done on the ship #the guy definitely had to wake up at 5:00 to get the chores done before school #lower decks #star trek lower decks #brad boimler #tw guns

[vainvenus]

⌲;꒰ Hypnotic ꒱ ⌲;꒰ Pt.2 ꒱

Pairing - Peacekeeper!Sejanus x Fem!Reader

Synopsis - You and Lucy Gray spend the day at the lake with Sejanus and Coriolanus as an apology for what happened the night before.

Includings - You don't have to read part one to read this!, Sejanus is still smitten (literally adores you), stripping to underwear, teasing/flirting, kisses, healthy!Snowbaird, everyone is so silly and happy, literally nothing but fluff, it's a little short

An - An apology as the Peeta fic I posted before this!

"Just what is taking them so long?" Lucy Gray huffed, leaning her back against the wall as she looked around the corner again but there was still no sight of the two.

You shrugged your shoulders, a small frown on your face. "Maybe they fluked on us?"

"Fluked on who?" A soft voice hummed and the two of you turned in the opposite direction to see the two boys dressed down much more casually than the uniforms they had to wear while off but still kind of on duty.

A smile broke your worried expression as Sejanus smiled down at you. You should have known there was no need for you to worry about him not showing up, he seemed more than elated to be back in your presence.

"Well it certainly took you boys long enough, c'mon were burning daylight!" Lucy Gray rolled her eyes playfully as the four of you started to walk. Lucy Gray told the two that it wouldn't be that far of a walk which was true if you were use to twelve which by now the two weren't.

You were walking through the grass, passing by Lucy Gray's favorite spot to come alone to sing when she needed to clear her head or just needed a bit of alone time. The grass was growing rapidly and fading in color, it was pretty even if it was noticeably dying out.

You smile down at the small wildlife that's growing, there's nothing special just a few yellow dandelions. You bend over, grabbing a few.

You grabbed one that wasn't fully in bloom, still in the form of a few clear seeds. You look over to Sejanus and hold it out to him.

"I haven't seen one of these in forever." He chuckled and your brows raised in slight surprise.

"Really?"

He nods. "Can't remember the last time I saw one at the Capitol. It's mostly tulips and roses there."

You hum in acknowledgement, pointing towards the small flower. "Well, blow and make a wish."

Sejanus softly blows at the dandelion, the seeds flowing through the windy air and he drops the stem to the ground. You glance up at him after watching a few float around.

"What'd ya' wish for?"

He sucks his teeth and gives you a frown of concern. "Sorry, I can't tell you."

You gasp, jaw dropping in fake offense. "Why not?"

"Wish rules. If you say it out loud it doesn't come true."

You giggle at his childish explanation for why he couldn't tell you. Something about the way he talks feels familiar as if he wasn't brought up the same as Coriolanus. It's comforting.

As the four of you start to grow closer to the lake your brows furrowed as a thought came to your mind;

"Doesn't y'all sneaking around with us go against your Peacekeeper code a little?" You asked Sejanus and he chuckled, shaking his head.

Even if it did, Sejanus would have took the risk just to see you one last time even if it was just a glimpse. He would take the chances no matter what consequence he would of had to face.

"We're not doing anything illegal." He shrugged, which was true. Partially. They weren't supposed to be this far out away from the district but what the others didn't know wouldn't hurt them.

"Plus, it'll boost our morale or whatever the commander says."

"Aw, hanging out with little ol' me boosts your morale?" You asked with a teasing smile and Sejanus's smile grew as he nodded his head.

"One hundred percent. I feel so much better already."

"You're just too sweet. Are you this charming to everyone you meet?" You questioned with a raised brow.

"Not everyone I've met has been as captivating as you." He answered, noticing how you tried to cover up your smile that had grew even more. His eyes glanced around the area as the four of you had finally arrived at the lake and Sejanus stared in awe for a moment.

It looked so peaceful, far out from the troubles of district twelve. It was also breathtakingly pretty, maybe because it has been untouched from any machinery, the trees allowed just the right amount of shade under them.

"Do you two come here a lot?" Coriolanus asked while Sejanus was enjoying the scenery while you started to set your bags down next to Lucy Gray's and you both nodded your head.

"Yeah, us and the other covey members. We come here on hot days to relax or just get away from twelve for a bit." You replied, slipping out of your shoes and Lucy Gray sighed happily, staring up at the sky as a few birds flew past. "It's perfect, ain't it?"

"It is." The two boys replied, softly staring at the both of you with small grins.

"Well we're not gonna have any fun just standin' around admiring!" Lucy Gray chimed, pulling her dress down and you giggled softly as you rushed to take off the tank top you had on.

Sejanus quickly looked the other way as the two of you stripped from your clothes and Coriolanus suddenly found the sky much more interesting and the two of you couldn't help but laugh at how much they were trying to be polite.

"You can look, sweetheart. S'not like my sets anything fancy." You giggled, tossing your clothes aside before you ran along the boardwalk and jumped into the water, resurfacing after a short while.

Lucy Gray had splashed next to you as she jumped in next, pushing her hair back from out of her face as she looked at the two boys who were standing there with slightly surprised expressions.

"Well? What're you waiting for? Cmon in, the waters jut fine!"

The two of them got rid of their clothes and shoes, tossing them next to your discarded ones as they ran down the boardwalk and jumped into the water.

The four of you laughed together, the sound being the cherry on top of the day for Sejanus. He could have listened to you laugh a thousand times and he swore he would never grow sick or it.

As you swam over to Sejanus, he couldn't help but note how cute you looked. Your eyelashes seemed more full from the amount of water splashed upon them, your face was ridden from any makeup and he now had a chance to see anything you would have deemed an 'imperfection'.

He loved it all, he didn't care.

Sejanus realized that it didn't really matter what you looked like, he would always stare at you like that. Like he was meeting you for the first time and it was his first time looking at you.

"What? Is there something on me?" You asked, patting and rubbing at the bare parts of your body even checking your hair for a moment but Sejanus smiled warmly and shakes his head.

"No it's not that, it's just.."

"Just what?"

"You're so beautiful." He finished and you shook your head, a nervous chuckle leaving your lips.

"You don't have to flatter me, Sejanus." You muttered, glancing away from the male yet his gaze stayed focused on you like you would have disappeared if he looked away.

"I'm not trying to, I'm just speaking my mind and the truth. Ma' didn't raise a liar." He replied and you looked over at him, tilting your head a bit.

"Ma?"

He nodded.

"You're different than Blondie, I knew it." You smiled as if upon the realization you were going to win a prize. "None of those fancy Captiol boys call their ma's ma."

He gave a small shrug. "Maybe because I'm not a fancy Captiol boy. I was born in the districts, district two. My family bought our way into the Captiol."

You nodded, that's why the way he spoke felt like home and why he didn't have the same edge and eerieness of most Peacekeepers.

"That makes much more sense." You hummed, swimming back towards him and leaning against his back, drawing small hearts on the back of his skin.

"I was wonderin' why you were so different from your little friend." You nodded towards Coriolanus who was counting how long Lucy Gray could hold her breath under water and you giggled.

"They're such an odd pair." You commented while moving to wrap your arms around Sejanus's neck and he hummed, nodding before looking back over at you.

"And what about us?"

You tilted your head, smiling softly. "What about us, hun?"

"Do you think we're an odd pair?"

You met his soft dark eyes and a wide smile spread across your lips as you leaned over his shoulder so that you could place a kiss on his cheek.

"I think we're odd but lucky for you, I like odd."

For those who wanted to be tagged: @iamforeverandalwaystired @inf4ntdeath @burnthoneydrops @fia1711 @iluvsejanusplinth

[hedgiwithapen]

Request Jaime Reyes in Pokemon Arceus setting for dammit hedgi day

Jaime carefully adjusted the satchel that the supply corps had issued him a little lower on his back, so that it wouldn’t press against Khaji Da. It was certainly strange. It looked like standard canvas, the kind of thing tourists wore to hold their valuables, only bulkier. It wouldn’t fit under clothes, that was for sure. It was also easy enough to take off and drop before the Scarab’s armor ate it.

“I do not eat your clothing,” Khaji Da said, when he pointed that out.

“Yeah, well, it goes somewhere doesn’t it? Anyways. I’m just glad this thing fits…way more than it should.” He was already spending most of the money he got for catching pokemon for the professor on clothes. It helped that he could store a couple of spare pairs of pants and kimono-like tops in the waist-pouch, on top of all of the pokeballs, potion bottles, and snacks.

“Like the pokeballs, it appears to be a hyperspace pocket,” Khaji Da explained. “Alert. There is a large Luxio approaching from your left.”

“Oh, gatito enojado.” Jaime grumbled, getting ready to dodge. The pulse of lighting crashed down where he’d been, turning parts of the sandy soil into a much more glassy soil than Jaime was comfortable with.  Even Less Comforting was Khaji’s ‘helpful’ note on just how powerful the strike had been. Back home, it could have powered the neighborhood for a night.

“Suggested course of action: deploy wings.”

“Yeah, but we still gotta find out what this thing’s weak to, for the Professor’s notes.”

“According to my data, Luxio and associated creatures are weak to: plasma blasts.”

“And what else?” Jaime asked, ducking behind a rock formation. “Specifically things that other people here can use?”

“The one we saw earlier did not handle the rockslide caused by the: Geodude  trying to kill us very well.”

“Great. Rock type stuff. Good. See, that’s the kind of thing I can report back without us getting kicked out of the village. Between your observations and my, uh… not dying, we’ll have this pokedex thing done in no time.”

“Indeed. Deploying pokeball now?” Khaji Da waited for Jaime to throw the ball at the confused Luxio.  The orb, unfathomably made of a fruit husk and a bit of polished stone, let out a spark as it locked. Jaime retrieved it.  Jaime had impressed the professor who’d found them, and his assistant Akari, with his aim. He had not let on that Khaji Da had shown him a display calculating the exact trajectory of the pokeball. While the Professor seemed more along the lines of Jenny’s dad than her aunt, he wasn’t inclined to take any risks, especially not with the grumpy captain and commander of the village who already mistrusted him for having the misfortune to fall out of the sky.

“So, are we keeping this one?” he asked.

“Negative, Jaime. It attempted your murder.”

“Angry kitty,” Jaime sighed again. “Most of them do, Khaji. We’re going to need some pokemon on our team at some point, or Zizu is going to get suspicious.”

“We can have pokemon that do not attempt to do you harm,” Khaji relented.

“Starly and Bidoof are not going to cut it, hermano.”

“That is why you have me. I suggest turning east. Notes from other sources [*evesdropping on Akari]  suggest some kind of horse lives on the plains. Perhaps they will be…friendlier.”

The horse, actually a 20 foot tall fire-breathing unicorn, had Not Been Friendlier. Jaime had waved off the Galaxy Team Nurse’s offer to look at the burn on his shoulder, retreating to the ‘room’ that Captain Cyllene had issued him.  As much as he wanted to go home--he missed his family and knew they had to be worried-- he had to admit, he wasn’t going to find a studio apartment as nice as this one for the price of ‘go look at wildlife and tell us about it after’ in Palmera.

As long as no one found out about Khaji Da, this wasn’t the worst way to spend a summer. 

#dammit hedgi day 2023 #See i can be nice! #i mean of course they DO find out about Khaji and it goes REAL BAD but i didn't write that part because I'm nice! #Blue Beetle #Khaji Da #Jaime Reyes #Pokemon AU

[reborrowing]

this silly vampire idea kept rolling around my head so that's how I chose to spend my free time tonight. it's not really edited or polished, to the point where idk that I'd even call it finished, but here it is anyway. will I develop it more or will this get it out of my system? who knows.

I was very fuzzy, very suddenly.

No, not me. Or, I was, but...that was normal, I think, it was... My thoughts. My thoughts were fuzzy. Indistinct. I couldn't think straight, I wasn't—where was I?

I'd been flying. I didn't want to spend any more time on the ground in this wretched city than They required of me, I remembered that well enough.

They?

I was they, wasn't I? A swarm of me, of bats, or...

What city?

It was dark, even darker than I liked, and a frigid mist hung overhead. I went to push to my feet but not of my limbs would cooperate. My chest burned.

Why did it hurt? Had I been attacked? Were there hunters in this mystery city? Was I dying?

My heart raced, whatever the cause. But before I could solve any of my worries, the light disappeared and something went to smother me.

~

I really would do anything to put off writing that report.

Not that I was doing this to procrastinate, of course, I was being a good person. I'd been out for a late-night walk (not procrastinating—I needed that candy as a focus incentive) and found a bat crawling across the cold pavement about a block from my apartment. Even without getting too close, I could tell it was pretty badly injured. Its left wing was crumpled and out of sync with the rest of its movements.

What kind of asshole would I be if I left it there like that?

A dozen warnings about rabies echoed in my head, but none quite loud enough to give me more than a moment's pause. I used my hoodie to catch it. It didn't seem to struggle much and once I got it wrapped up, it gave up completely. I wanted to think that it knew I was trying to help it. Mostly I hoped it hadn’t died in my hands before I even had a chance to call the wildlife center.

I dumped a scattering of clutter out of a closet shoebox, swearing to myself that I’d deal with the mess later, and gently placed the bundled-up bat inside. I tentatively pulled back one edge of my sweatshirt to steal a look at the little guy. It was breathing, at least, if not conscious.

The wildlife center told me I’d (more or less) done the right thing so far, and told me to drive it down there as soon as I had the chance. I turned off the car radio for quiet as suggested, but couldn’t help whispering reassurances to the little guy as I drove. I guess it wouldn’t understand me, even if it were awake to hear me, but the silence in the car unnerved me otherwise, especially as I left the bright lights of the city for the preserve on the outskirts.

Inside, a friendly-looking man took the box off my hands. He didn’t tell me to stick around, but he didn’t tell me to leave either, so I stayed. I had other things I didn't want to do, after all, and it would be nice to know what was going to happen to the bat.

I wasn’t expecting to get my box back, but the man stepped back into the lobby with it tucked beneath an arm. His smile looked forced now, as he thrust the shoebox back to me.

“Ma’am, we’re very busy here. I don’t know what you were thinking, but please, don’t waste our time,” he said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I opened the box and fell silent. The bat was gone. It had been replaced with a small, pale doll. 

“Is this some kind of joke?” I asked.

“Like I said, we’re very busy. If there’s nothing I can actually do for you…?”

I put up a hand and apologized for…I didn’t entirely know what I’d done here, but there was clearly no injured bat for him to help me with. I closed the box and awkwardly shuffled back out to my car to try and figure out what had just happened.

~

When I next woke, my head was clearer.

I was sure that I’d been captured by some manner of capture because God almighty, that light was blinding. No reasonable vampire would ruin a room with such a miserable lamp, save those few with a soft spot for their thralls’ visual needs. 

I was still blinking back tears to try and adjust to the artificial blaze when someone scoffed and the light disappeared altogether. An unknown force threw me to the ground. I tried to collect myself several times before I realized the room itself was shaking, at which point I simply settled into the fleece around me as comfortably as I could and waited for the chance to face my attacker.

There was an especially rough quake that shoved me up against the wall, and then the earth was still at last. I flinched as a sliver of light appeared overhead only to be mercifully bathed in moonlight. 

I didn’t recognize where I was, not even what sort of building this might be. The ceiling was distant and carpeted. There were windows all around, as if we were in a poorly shaped dome. Even the box I’d been transported in was strange. The wood was unnaturally smooth and I saw no hinges for the top side that had been pulled away.

As I was considering the low wall before me, a cloud passed over the moon and cast me in shadow. At least, I assumed that was the source until she gasped. I twisted to face the noise and gasped back. A massive woman, larger than some buildings, gawked down at me and at once, the pieces fell together. I had been not only captured, but cursed. I doubted I would be more than a half foot tall, were I to measure.

Her scent engulfed me as she leaned even closer, intoxicatingly sweet. The steady rhythm of her heart was near enough it almost enthralled me. I wanted her. And I would have her. But first, my dignity.

I opened my mouth to demand she turn me back and release me, or, if she couldn’t, return me to the one who could. I intended to order her to serve me as I deserved. The words died in my throat. 

My charm, my magic didn’t even make it that far. I needed to see my victims’ eyes if I wanted to bewitch them and I couldn’t bear to meet hers. I faltered after less than a half a second. but her whiskey stare combined with the sheer size of the behemoth looming over me was too much, too intense. My knees buckled; I was as helpless in her gaze as she ought to be in mine. 

“What are you?” she whispered.

#g/t #giant/tiny #g/t writing #my writing #vampire g/t #honestly just trying to get back into the rhythm of writing I did so little w covid and all that #amwt

[itsnotmyfaultsomepeoplecantread]

How to be an omen (Part 1)

Do you ever feel like you want to be representative of the mysterious forces that are signaling the inevitable impending doom?

Well look no further! Here are five basic steps to making yourself into an ethereal being with the capacity to stir deep unrest into the hearts of the wicked.

Step 1: Be anything but the norm.

I cannot emphasize this enough. In order to fully live up to your potential, and truly create fear in the hearts of men, you have to be different. People hate anything that is different (though I can’t fathom why). So in order to successfully be an omen, you really have to make yourself scary.

Wearing black and dying your hair a bright color is sometimes a good place to start. But don’t worry if this is not your aesthetic! Anyone can be an omen. As long as a conservative white man is afraid of you, you are successfully doing your job.

Step 2: Make a list of mysterious sayings

The best human omens are ones that can cause discomfort by having the perfect response to normal conversations. Think long and hard about what makes you an omen. This should help you prepare for your conversations with the afflicted. Your existence itself is sign enough that the end is nigh, but how you represent that is entirely up to you!

Step 3: Frequently look off into the distance

In order to fully accept yourself as an ethereal being, you have to ensure that you do not come off as too engaged. A great way to start is to practice immersing yourself in your innermost thoughts. What truly lies beyond the surface, deep down in the pits of your soul? What kind of horrors within you will make the gods shiver and quake at the sound of your name?

Step 4: Commune with nature

Nature is an important part of being an omen. Crows and cats are known for their innate abilities as creatures of darkness. Immersing yourself in nature is a great way to embrace your new status. If you live in the city, you may still have access to wildlife. Start by feeding the crows. Then become friends with the crows. When you feel comfortable, unleash the storm of crows upon your enemies. Finally, become a crow and complete your transformation into a chaotic force of the universe.

Step 5: Have fun and be yourself!

The most important part of being an omen is to remember that at your core, you are already an omen. No matter what happens, you are a force to be reckoned with. Your existence is already scary enough to cause fear in the hearts of the wicked, and powerful enough to fight the gods. Don’t let the petty evildoers bring you down, because you are our chance at making the world a better place.

#writing #blog #omen #witchcraft #witchcore #witch aesthetic #witchblr #satire #wholesome #new to this #first post #women #lgbtq community #lgbtq positivity #crowscare #fuck conservatives #capitalism #leftist #how to be an omen #rambles into the void #void #yelling into the void #i wrote this #disabilties #capitalist hell #gothcore #existential dread #impending doom #make a difference #you are beautiful

[brendanthebomber]

Major League Baseball should be the first sport to incorporate silverback gorillas

Major League Baseball should be the first sport to incorporate silverback gorillas

“But why? What team would it be the mascot for? The Dodgers, the Yankees, and the Angels are the only teams without mascots, and they have nothing to do with gorillas.” (technically, the Angels have the Rally Monkey but monkeys are obviously not apes)

No. That’s not what I’m talking about.

I believe Manfred should give an adult male lowland silverback gorilla a spot on an MLB team’s active roster.

I’m sure you’re thinking, “Why? How?”

Have no fear. Let’s start with the “why.”

A recent surge is baseball viewership is the perfect time to capitalize on the market.

While still our national pastime, baseball is not the most popular sport in America. With the “Three True Outcomes” approach becoming dominant in recent years, fans have found the sport to be even more dull than usual. Strikeouts, home runs, and walk rates are all on the rise while the amount of balls-in-play is dropping. Small ball is dying in favor of the big-power approach. Introducing gorillas, even for just a season, would revamp fan excitement and give baseball the kick it needs to get back into the spotlight.

Gorillas are endangered.

A large portion of the revenue that would be created by this new addition would be donated to gorilla/wildlife preservation organizations, and team owners would also be required to donate a payroll-adjusted fee to each of these non-profit organizations yearly.

No longer critically endangered, gorilla populations have been slowly but steadily increasing. Increased funding to nonprofit wildlife foundations could give gorilla populations an enormous boost in numbers, allowing them to thrive in their natural habitat.

Now that we all agree we should do this, the next question is “how?”

I'm so glad you asked! There's see two clear options for how we could incorporate a gorilla into the game:

Option 1: The gorilla is taught to play the sport (includes conditions/restrictions)

The gorilla could neither pitch nor field. At some point in human evolution, we developed the ability to aim and throw objects with a decent level of accuracy & at a high velocity. This is due to our tall waist, shoulder placement, and the way our elbow and humerus rotate together. This allows us to hold and subsequently release large amounts of energy at once in the form of throwing. Gorillas lack these attributes and cannot throw a baseball anywhere near the professional level.

To avoid technical fielding skills, our gorilla would have to function as a Designated Hitter. This would likely involve conditioning a silverback gorilla to learn how to hit a ball from birth (baby gorillas begin to move objects at three months and explore at eight months). I believe Steve Cohen would easily be able to fund this project.

If teaching the gorilla to swing a baseball bat proves to be unsuccessful, it could be given the spot of Designated Runner instead, where its only job would be to run the basepath.

Despite their size, gorillas have been known to reach speeds of 20-25 mph. That's faster than Corbin Carroll, who, according to BaseballSavant, clocks in at 21 mph (league average 18.4 mph). As long as the gorilla can be taught to stay within the basepaths, stealing bases should be a breeze, providing immense value in BSR and SB.

Here are the top five MLB players by sprint speed:

​

|Player|Sprint Speed | |Corbin Carroll|30.7 ft/s| |Bubba Thompson|30.4 ft/s| |Jose Siri|30.4 ft/s| |Bobby Witt Jr.|30.4 ft/s| |Trea Turner|30.3 ft/s|

​

Our furry 350 lb superstar tops out between 30.8 to 36.67 ft/s, well above the elite MLB speedsters.

As seen with the famous zoo Gorilla “Koko”, gorillas are able to understand a limited form of sign language, which can be used to communicate in basic ways with humans. On the basepaths, third-base coaches and managers in the dugout can communicate with runners through signs (not ASL, but signs nonetheless). Teaching the gorilla how to differentiate sign language and baserunning signs should not be difficult, as Koko was able to communicate effectively through basic signs.

To make up for a lack of finesse and technical ability, the MLB should lean into the gorilla’s raw power and allow it the option to use PEDs. This would be coupled with a strict workout regimen to improve muscle mass and reach the gorilla’s full potential.

Adult gorillas are estimated to possess the strength of 20 adult male humans WITHOUT PEDs, so with enough time and patience, we could see a gorilla putting up a historic 80 home run season.

It's worth noting that depending on the workout regiment and the parts of the body that are focused on, we could see either an increase OR decrease in sprint speed.

Option 2: The gorilla is used as an environmental hazard/win condition during games.

For this option, I propose that once per game, each team has the ability to “Kong” the other team by placing two silverback gorillas on the field while the opposing team is fielding to cause chaos.

The gorillas can be placed in any spot, and fielders must play normally as if nothing has changed.

However, at any point that a team is getting Kong’d, any single member of the fielding team can request a 1v2 bare-knuckle boxing match against both gorillas. They would be risking their lives, but if they win, their team automatically wins the game and is instantly guaranteed a spot a postseason playoff spot.

This should not be a competitive concern because any human being would definitely not survive a fight with two furious gorillas.

If the safety of mutual parties becomes too much of a concern, this rule would be removed, as the safety of the gorilla is of the utmost importance.

Only good things can come from expanding into gorilla baseball. This experiment could lead to other animals in other sports, with charitable funding saving wildlife populations.

And remember, if this experiment doesn’t work out, we always have the apes running the Rockies’ FO to keep us entertained.

#mlb #baseball #mlb fandom

[female-malice]

For two decades, researchers worked to solve a mystery in West Coast streams. Why, when it rained, were large numbers of spawning coho salmon dying? As part of an effort to find out, scientists placed fish in water that contained particles of new and old tires. The salmon died, and the researchers then began testing the hundreds of chemicals that had leached into the water.

A 2020 paper revealed the cause of mortality: a chemical called 6PPD that is added to tires to prevent their cracking and degradation. When 6PPD, which occurs in tire dust, is exposed to ground-level ozone, it’s transformed into multiple other chemicals, including 6PPD-quinone, or 6PPD-q. The compound is acutely toxic to four of 11 tested fish species, including coho salmon.

Mystery solved, but not the problem, for the chemical continues to be used by all major tire manufacturers and is found on roads and in waterways around the world. Though no one has studied the impact of 6PPD-q on human health, it’s also been detected in the urine of children, adults, and pregnant women in South China. The pathways and significance of that contamination are, so far, unknown.

Still, there are now calls for regulatory action. Last month, the legal nonprofit Earthjustice, on behalf of the fishing industry, filed a notice of intent to sue tire manufacturers for violating the Endangered Species Act by using 6PPD. And a coalition of Indian tribes recently called on the EPA to ban use of the chemical. “We have witnessed firsthand the devastation to the salmon species we have always relied upon to nourish our people,” the Puyallup Tribal Council said in a statement. “We have watched as the species have declined to the point of almost certain extinction if nothing is done to protect them.”

The painstaking parsing of 6PPD and 6PPD-q was just the beginning of a global campaign to understand the toxic cocktail of organic chemicals, tiny particles, and heavy metals hiding in tires and, to a lesser extent, brakes. While the acute toxicity of 6PPD-q and its source have strong scientific consensus, tire rubber contains more than 400 chemicals and compounds, many of them carcinogenic, and research is only beginning to show how widespread the problems from tire dust may be.

While the rubber rings beneath your car may seem benign — one advertising campaign used to feature babies cradled in tires — they are, experts say, a significant source of air, soil, and water pollution that may affect humans as well as fish, wildlife, and other organisms. That’s a problem because some 2 billion tires globally are sold each year — enough to reach the moon if stacked on their sides — with the market expected to reach 3.4 billion a year by 2030.

(Researchers weigh a salmon that died after four hours in a tank filled with road runoff.)

Tires are made from about 20 percent natural rubber and 24 percent synthetic rubber, which requires five gallons of petroleum per tire. Hundreds of other ingredients, including steel, fillers, and heavy metals — including copper, cadmium, lead, and zinc — make up the rest, many of them added to enhance performance, improve durability, and reduce the possibility of fires.

Both natural and synthetic rubber break down in the environment, but synthetic fragments last a lot longer. Seventy-eight percent of ocean microplastics are synthetic tire rubber, according to a report by the Pew Charitable Trust. These fragments are ingested by marine animals — particles have been found in gills and stomachs — and can cause a range of effects, from neurotoxicity to growth retardation and behavioral abnormalities.

“We found extremely high levels of microplastics in our stormwater,” said Rebecca Sutton, an environmental scientist with the San Francisco Estuary Institute who studied runoff. “Our estimated annual discharge of microplastics into San Francisco Bay from stormwater was 7 trillion particles, and half of that was suspected tire particles.”

Tire wear particles, or TWP as they are sometimes known, are emitted continually as vehicles travel. They range in size from visible pieces of rubber or plastic to microparticles, and they comprise one of the products’ most significant environmental impacts, according to the British firm Emissions Analytics, which has spent three years studying tire emissions. The company found that a car’s four tires collectively emit 1 trillion ultrafine particles — of less than 100 nanometers — per kilometer driven. These particles, a growing number of experts say, pose a unique health risk: They are so small they can pass through lung tissue into the bloodstream and cross the blood-brain barrier or be breathed in and travel directly to the brain, causing a range of problems.

According to a recent report issued by researchers at Imperial College London, “There is emerging evidence that tyre wear particles and other particulate matter may contribute to a range of negative health impacts including heart, lung, developmental, reproductive, and cancer outcomes.”

The report says that tires generate 6 million tons of particles a year, globally, of which 200,000 tons end up in oceans. According to Emissions Analytics, cars in the U.S. emit, on average, 5 pounds of tire particles a year, while cars in Europe, where fewer miles are driven, shed 2.5 pounds per year. Moreover, tire emissions from electric vehicles are 20 percent higher than those from fossil-fuel vehicles. EVs weigh more and have greater torque, which wears out tires faster.

Unlike tailpipe exhaust, which has long been studied and regulated, emissions from tires and brakes — which emit significant amounts of metallic particles in addition to organic chemicals — are far harder to measure and control and have therefore escaped regulation. It’s only in the last several years, with the development of new technologies capable of measuring tire emissions and the alarming discovery of 6PPD-q, that the subject is receiving much needed scrutiny.

Recent studies show that the mass of PM 2.5 and PM 10 emissions — which are, along with ozone and ultrafine particles, the world’s primary air pollutants — from tires and brakes far exceeds the mass of emissions from tailpipes, at least in places that have significantly reduced those emissions.

The problem isn’t just rubber in its synthetic and natural form. Government and academic researchers are investigating the transformations produced by tires’ many other ingredients, which could — like 6PPD — form substances more toxic than their parent chemicals as they break down with exposure to sunlight and rain.

“You’ve got a chemical cocktail in these tires that no one really understands and is kept highly confidential by the tire manufacturers,” said Nick Molden, the CEO of Emissions Analytics. “We struggle to think of another consumer product that is so prevalent in the world, and used by virtually everyone, where there is so little known of what is in them.”

“We have known that tires contribute significantly to environmental pollution, but only recently have we begun to uncover the extent of that,” said Cassandra Johannessen, a researcher at Montreal’s Concordia University who is quantifying levels of tire chemicals in urban watersheds and studying how they transform in the environment. The discovery of 6PPD-q has surprised a lot of researchers, she said, because they have learned that “it’s one of the most toxic substances known, and it seems to be everywhere in the world.”

Regulators are playing catch up. In Europe, a standard to be implemented in 2025, known as Euro 7, will regulate not only tailpipe emissions but also emissions from tires and brakes. The California Environmental Protection Agency has passed a rule requiring tire makers to declare an alternative to 6PPD-q by 2024.

(A worker takes apart a tire at a recycling shop in Mit al-Harun, Egypt.)

Tire companies are conducting their own studies of 6PPD, which they have long considered critical for tire safety, and seeking alternatives. In response to new regulations and the emerging research on tire emissions, 10 of the world’s large tire manufacturers have formed the Tire Industry Project to “develop a holistic approach to better understand and promote action on the mitigation” of tire pollution, according to a statement by the project. The group has committed to search for ways to redesign tires to reduce or eliminate emissions.

One critical area of research is how long tire waste, and its breakdown products, persist in the environment. “A five-micron piece of rubber shears off the tire and settles on the soil and sits there a while,” said Molden. “What, over time, is the release of those chemicals, how quickly do they make their way into the water, and are they diluted? At the system level, how big of a problem is this? It is the single biggest knowledge gap.”

Another area of research centers on the impacts of aromatic hydrocarbons — including benzene and naphthalene — off-gassed by synthetic rubber or emitted when discarded tires are burned in incinerators for energy recovery. Even at low concentrations, these compounds are toxic to humans. They also react with sunlight to form ozone, or ground-level smog, which causes respiratory harm. “We have shown that the amount of off-gassing volatile organic compounds is 100 times greater than that coming out of a modern tailpipe,” said Molden. “This is from the tire just sitting there.”

When tires reach their end of life, they’re either sent to landfills, incinerated, burned in an energy-intensive process called pyrolysis, or shredded and repurposed for use in artificial turf or in playgrounds or for other surfaces. But as concern about tire pollutants grows, so do concerns about these recycled products and the hydrocarbons they may off-gas. There is ongoing debate over whether crumb rubber, made from tire scraps, poses a health threat when used to fill gaps in artificial turf. Based on several peer-reviewed studies, the European Union is instituting stricter limits on the use of this material. Other studies, however, have shown no health impact.

Besides California’s requirement to study alternatives to 6PPD, there are a number of efforts worldwide to redesign tires to counter the problems they pose. More than a decade ago, tire makers hoped that dandelions, which produce a form of rubber, and soy oil could provide a steady and sustainable supply of rubber. But tires made from those alternatives didn’t live up to expectations: they still required additives. The Continental Tire Company, based in Hanover, Germany, markets a bicycle tire made of dandelion roots. Tested by Emission Analytics, it emitted 25 percent fewer carcinogenic aromatics than conventionally made bike tires, but the plant-powered tire still contained ingredients of concern.

(Rubber made from dandelions.)

Other companies are searching for ways to address the problem of tire emissions. The Tyre Collective, a clean-tech startup based in the U.K., has developed an electrostatic plate that affixes to each of a car’s tires: The plates remove up to 60 percent of particles emitted by both tires and brakes, storing them in a cartridge attached to the device. The particles can be reused in numerous other applications, including in new tires.

In San Francisco, scientists studying the pollutants in storm runoff found a potential solution: Rain gardens, installed in yards to capture stormwater, were also trapping 96 percent of street litter and 100 percent of black rubbery fragments. In Vancouver, B.C. researchers found that rain gardens could prevent more than 90 percent of 6PPD-q from running off roads and entering salmon-bearing streams.

Tire waste particles, says Molden, of Emissions Analytics, are finally getting the attention they deserve, thanks in part to California’s rule requiring a search for alternatives to 6PPD. The legislation “is groundbreaking,” he says, “because it puts the chemical composition [of tires] on the regulatory agenda.” For the first time, he adds, “Tire manufacturers are being exposed to the same regulatory scrutiny that car manufacturers have been for 50 years.”

#if you use tires or spend any time near a tire... read this #cc

[basementdwellerinthestars]

A prototype dandelion made by Tekka, the very parasite that they’d haphazardly added in, and had choked out civilization and life while they weren’t looking.

Takes the form of the white dandelion fluff, but dyed a deep golden yellow. Very infectious, popping up new ‘flowers’ (although there’s no petals, only seeds) anywhere they land. This plant is insanely stubborn and will take root anywhere,

Feeds like a normal plant, taking in nitrogen. However, instead of converting it to oxygen, they convert the nitrogen to LFC. This is believed to be why the atmosphere in Munova is so high in LFC, and why it’s such a common rift location.

The parasite works via airborne pollen, secreted by the stem rather than the golden seeds. When breathed in, the parasite works its way through the creature’s body to implant into the brain.

Once rooted, Golden Absolution makes the creature protective of it and willing to spread its seeds, often via taking it to new locations and blowing the seeds from it’s stem. This is it’s main form of reproduction as there is no natural winds in the majority of the cavern system.

Creatures infected with Golden Absolution are dangerous when the Absolution is threatened in any way, even if one just accidentally steps on the roots. Considering it’s roots are everywhere, multiple feet into the ground, this is extremely easy to do.

Creatures will die for the Golden Absolution, many species extremely fast producing or extremely hardy in order the make up for this weakness. The majority of remaining creatures are herbivores, feeding on the purple tinted leaves of trees, or scavengers who feast on the animals killed by the Golden Absolution.

It’s not perfect, however. The parasite automatically is drawn towards the brain, but if the brain isn’t in the head then it gets confused and often falls dormant. This is how a few species managed to escape control. Their brains were not in their heads, or simply not stereotypical brains.

Roots better in low LFC areas, often creeping out of portals into our world. Fortunately, due to the atmospheric differences, such as a lack of head and ‘greenhouse’ effect, the plant is harmless. If it doesn’t wither and die, it merely acts as a sign of Munova being through the portal.

While you shouldn’t eat it or try to root it, the Golden Absolution can be general ignored by travelers and scientists. Just be careful not to piss off the native wildlife and everything will be fine.

That being said, it is very easy to piss off the wildlife. Unless a seasoned and trained adventurer, stay in one place until help arrives.

Uninflected wildlife isn’t safe either, evolving both immunity to Golden Absolution as well as the ability to hide, ensuring it’s safety. They are extremely skittish.

#Munova #fantasy #original fantasy #fantasy flora #flora #plant #plant design #dandelion #but evil #parasitic plant #at fault for everything #the original sin #Does not deserve life #but also #yes

[richardsphere]

Leverage Redemption Log: The Walk In the Woods Job

Army guy is with his doctor (shoulder/arm injury is healing). Doctor is trying to convince Armydude to go to a support group for people who have been through similar.

Come to Therapy, We Have Cookies! Army guy left, other doctor has bills and a message from a Kurt Lander (frumples note). We're really going out of our way to make the Boss Doctor seem likeable with how much he cares about other peoples mental health.

Camera follows second doctor on way out, lingers on picture of elliot on the wall. Throw a hand-egg, bomb. PAUL!!! --- Panama, 4 years ago (so during the timeskip) Elliot and Dr. Paul are having a drink. Austin Kurt Lander (why does this guy get three names? Im gonna stick to Kurt) is footing the bill for the clinic. I think the "He" that Austin wants Elliot to make peace with is his father? But im shit at context clues and also sick of getting faked out there. --- Dr Guy recognises Elliot at the funeral. "highly decorated veteran", Translation: Warcriminal.

Ok lets not double-book our acronyms please? I get there are only so many 3-letter combinations (17.576) so there is bound to be overlap but lets not open our communications up to potential future confusion. I'll refer to the Bomb type as "Thermite bomb" (TB) and the other oen as "Warcrimes Incorporated". (WI) if this becomes a running gag for the episode. getting to the stuff that even US Propagandists think is "bad stuff", corruption scandals, friendly fire in Kabul, and bodyguarding for Saudi Princes.

Something definitly happened on that bridge (and Elliot was definitly there to see it happen) --- Parker Breanna and Sophie are trying to get into Silverguard HQ, Elliot and Harry are looking at Doctor's stuff.

They bombed Elliots Picture. (which opens a secret room, he was preparing to killl Kurt) --- Target is on the move, to a place called "Orpheus Grove" (ominous name)

And Breanna just hit Sophie with the truck. Which... well it's certainly a good distraction.

Well we knew he was a warcriminal, now we know he's an asshole. --- He killed some miners, (not a shock) Orpheus grove is apparently a secret conspiracy located on a confederate generals old plantation. Its a fratclub for racists and wealthy clansmen basically.

there are no satelites images at the plantation, no cell reception and presumeably no wifi. (we're going in blind, But Kurt will be blind as well) little heart-to-heart between Elliot and Harry. (he's stealing the shuriken) --- Meanwhile in Millwater (or whatever the place is called) Breanna sees a sign about endangered frogs. (protected species, shut down the plantation by making it a wildlife preserve.) Local historian is about to give us a history lesson on the frogs and their habitats (presumably including the plantation)

Coms are live for people in the grove but cant reach Breanna until the cloak is down.

Ok when i said it was a "fratclub for racists and Klansmen" i meant it as a joke. Turns out its an actual fratclub for racists and Klansmen. Oh they're peeing in the river. But thats where the frogs live! (the piss is Fricking up the PH of the water, its why they're dying).

Little contest: Who can steal the phone! Guy is spinning his two things lie again.

Guy-with-a-harp-round-his-neck is "in charge". I find the goat-horn to be a bit cult-y. Parker has the Phone. (or at least the Walky Talky) Ok so the "un-pickable safe" is just a ban on phones. Three keys. Phone is in the vault and Parker just spotted a sniper. (Kurt is "doing an audition", he's staging an assasination so he can rescue Frick from the assasin and be welcomed into the Cult) --- Back from commercial: Doctor was the sniper HE ISNT DEAD. Thought that lying about what happened on the bridge would be a lesser evil to justify his office. "im Harry, im with him. Glad you're not dead, what do we do now" 9/10.

Huh, the frogs might have legitimate national security value. ("the secret to curing bacterial infections") A potential cure for a biowarfare threat. The woman wasnt even entirely exagerating.

Also Breanna has put the flyers on the internet. Make a niche topic, post on a few specific forums. They're taking soil and water samples. They'll find beer-urine is messing with the PH and they'll shut the grove down. I just unpaused and the local historian just said the PH levels are rising form unknown reasons? Am I actually right?

Imagine a powerfull mystic cult of senators and private armies getting shut down by a local historian and her pet frog.

Breanna wants to have a froggy hat. (its a good hat.) --- Parker snips the wire on a keychain while the drunken wearer is pissing against a tree. Sophie distracts Kurt by getting him to brag about his 2 things line some more. Harry falls from a tree, Parker elbow-drops a guy getting a massage. Harry vanishes with the ghilly, Parker steals the final key dressed as a dancer. Sophie has been spotted. --- Sophie is going for "venezualan government agent" here for the mine collapse, begins priming Kurt for Elliot. Meanwhile Harry pretends to be Elliot as a distraction. Parker suffers a minor complication in needing to turn 3 keys simultaniously. Harry steals some of Elliots lines so Elliot can call this guy out by proxy. A bad Rocky monologue stalls for enough time for Paul and Elliot to show up. --- Paul is here to confess to the lies on a wire. Harry here to unionise the guards and tell them of their legal rights. Ok good use of the bridge.

The frogs. I was right about the Piss and the frogs. I wrote that so i had an excuse to make a joke about Frick's name. And i was right.

call-back to the MIC joke (thank frick that wasnt a running gag) Final toast between Elliot and Paul

#leverage #leverage redemption #leverage redemption season 2 #the walk in the woods job

[arcxnumvitae]

★ fill in the questions as if you are being interviewed for an article and you were your muse.

TAGGED BY:  Stole it

TAGGING: Steal it

1. WHAT IS YOUR NAME?

A:  Camhlaidh Moireasdan

R:  Ruaidhri Allanach

E:  Eilidh Deòireach

I: Iomhar Mèinnearach

Ao: Aodh Murdoc

2. WHAT IS YOUR REAL NAME?

A: Sharing one’s true name so casually is folly.

R: Exactly. And allow yourself to be put at the mercy of the holder? No thank you.

E: Yeah yeah, all in all a bad idea.

Ao: I shudder to think of the ramifications.

I: Haha, yes, an awful idea, truly.

3. DO YOU KNOW WHY YOU’RE CALLED THAT?

A: ‘Relic’.

R: ‘Red king’.

E: ‘Radiant one’.

Ao: Fire.

I: Archer. Yet it is our king who prefers the bow!

A: I suppose our parents’ wishes and wants can be found in our names, er, usually.

E: Maybe, but for this bunch...

I: Minus the little flame’s, however. Quite straightforward with that one.

Ao: Hmph.

R: Perhaps your parents were imbuing their hopes in you for their precious child to live to a ripe, old age?

A: Perhaps...

4. ARE YOU SINGLE OR TAKEN?

A: *clears throat* I know what you all are about to--

E: ‘Your Majesty, when will you begin popping out babies and marrying all of the eligible Seelie gentry! The Council demands it posthaste, the royal jewels are not getting any younger!’

A: *sighs*

5. WHAT ARE YOUR POWERS AND ABILITIES?

A: Even as a prince, there is some magic or connection through the royal blood that granted me certain abilities. Colloquially it is called ‘one beloved by the land’ or anything along those lines. Even without my memories, when I was in the mortal plane, plants and even wildlife were drawn to me of their own accord, and I could manipulate plants as I wish.

E: And now as king he can use his powers to spy on us!

A: W-well not ‘spy’ exactly, I have hardly used them for any seedy or underhanded manner. I am able to see through any part of Seelie that I wish and I am connected to the land in ways that are difficult to explain.

I: The land whispers sweet nothings into his ear apparently.

R: Oh, how salacious! 

Ao: This is ridiculous.

A: I agree.

Ao: ...How much can you see through the land? Into our homes? Can you hear things as well?

A: *groans*

6. WHAT COLOR ARE YOUR EYES?

A: Red and gold.

I: Eyes of two colors like that have often meant either the bearer would bring great fortune, or great disaster.

Ao: Yes, there has been much unease throughout the gentry considering recent...events in Seelie and its royal family.

A: You mean the assassination of its two reigning monarchs, the near death of its newest king, the sudden absence of its crown princess to the mortal world, and said newly crowned king deciding to buck millennia of tradition by opening Seelie’s borders and reaching out to other nations, yes? There is little use in dancing around the subject when it is clear what you mean.

Ao: Er....

E: What an incredibly awkward air all of a sudden!

R: Ha, our king can have quite the sharp tongue when he wishes it.

7. HAVE YOU EVER DYED YOUR HAIR?

All: No.

I: None among us have wholly ‘natural’ mortal hair colors anyways.

E: Riri has flowers in his hair, I don’t think he could even dye it if he wanted to anyways! At least...not without dyeing the flowers too.

A: Besides, I doubt any of us could stand the mortal chemicals for an extended period of time.

8. DO YOU HAVE ANY FAMILY MEMBERS?

I: Here we go. My parents became one with the earth some time ago.

Ao: My mother still lives.

E: I have my mother and father.

R: I have my father as well, for better or worst.

A: ...My mother passed when I was young, and my father as well recently. I have one younger sibling, Tara.

I: An unusual thing, to have a sibling.

E: Maybe we all have siblings and we simply don’t know it!

Ao: Please do not suggest such a thing. As if we could deal with two Ruaidhris running about.

R: Ah, Seelie would be all the more blessed by it.

9. DO YOU HAVE ANY PETS?

I: I--

Ao: Claim me as a pet and I run you through with you sword.

I, laughing: Such sharp words! Would you like me to put the sword in your hand then, little flame?

Ao: Ugh, at least react properly when someone threatens you!

A: Anyways...

10. TELL ME ABOUT SOMETHING YOU DON’T LIKE.

R: Duty.

A: Duty.

I: Duty.

E: Duty.

Ao: Goodness, do you all hate the prospect of working on the Council that much?

I: Less the Council and more what the rest of our lineage entails.

11. DO YOU HAVE ANY HOBBIES OR ACTIVITIES YOU DO IN YOUR SPARE TIME?

R: Decorating, shopping, finding new mortals to toy with–

A: *clears throat*

R: The last of which I have not engaged in quite some time as per the orders of our new king.

A: Mhm... As for me, reading books, stargazing, and wandering around are things I enjoy. Though free time has not been in abundance as of late.

I: I--

All: We know.

12. HAVE YOU EVER HURT ANYONE BEFORE?

A: Yes. During my years with the Bastion of the Veil, saving some people entailed hurting others.

I: Yes.

Ao: No.

R: Emotionally? Physically? What kind of ‘hurt are we referencing?’

E: I know you had your fun with mortals before the king forbade it but yeesh.

R: *shrugs*

13. HAVE YOU EVER… KILLED ANYONE?

A: Yes.

I: Yes.

R, E, and Ao: No.

14. WHAT KIND OF ANIMAL ARE YOU?

E: Riri’s obviously a snake! I mean, you have the eyes and the tongue!

A: Eilidh is a fox, deceptively playful but cunning when she wants to be.

R: The king is…a stag I would say. One who fittingly leads the herd.

Ao: Iomhar is an ox.

I: Perhaps you meant that as an insult but oxen are rather sturdy and dependable!

R: And our sweet little Aodh here is as stubborn and unpleasant as a mule.

Ao: Hmph!

15. NAME YOUR WORST HABITS.

E: Riri is incredibly self-absorbed, a little bit stupid, very useless, barely able to take care of himself–

R: This is feeling very targeted now!

E: I’m not done yet.

R: You have said enough!

E: The king is a pessimist. Iomhar is brash. And Aodh is clingy!

Ao: *winces*

R: Why was I the only one to receive an entire  list!

16. DO YOU LOOK UP TO ANYONE?

I: Role models are few and far between among the gentry.

R: Tell me about it.

E: Same.

A: I looked up to my mother.

Ao: I also look up to my mother, we have a good relationship-- why is everyone staring?

E: Two mamma’s boys...

17. GAY, STRAIGHT, OR BISEXUAL?

A: The mortal labels?

R: I have no preference, whatever you may call it in those terms.

E: Yeah yeah!

A: Mhm.

I: Heh, yes I am a lover of all--

A: If we do not stop him now, he will go on all day.

18. DO YOU GO TO SCHOOL?

I: Some were more attentive students than others, like our king here.

A: Or  perhaps I simply spent my time with my tutors studies rather than goofing off doing who knows what like you two.

I: Or, more like ‘who’, ha!

R: Precisely. Those days of our youth were halcyon ones indeed. The parties were certainly some of the best parts.

E: A stunning example of the education system among the gentry.

Ao: Honestly....

19. DO YOU EVER WANT TO MARRY AND HAVE KIDS SOMEDAY?

Ao: I do.

R: Probably the most straightforward answer you will receive from this bunch and it is from Aodh of all people.

Ao: What was that?

R: Nothing.

A: ‘Want’ is the key term here, many of us feel beholden to our families and tradition to marry and have children.

I: Hm...

Ao: So silent all of a sudden, Iomhar? How unlike you.

I: Yes, I intend to marry and have children one day.

Ao: Wha-- truly? You?

I: Is there a problem?

Ao: Um, no...

21. WHAT ARE YOU MOST AFRAID OF?

A: Failing.

R: Being trapped.

E: Imprisonment.

I: Obligations.

Ao: Not being enough.

22. WHAT DO YOU USUALLY WEAR?

A: Whatever clothing the tailors have made and is set out for me that day. Of course I have some say in the material, color, and things of the like. Compared to some other fae I suppose my taste is somewhat conservative.

Ao: I as well do not tend towards the flashy like some of our other peers do.

R:  Hahaha, whatever fits my stunning visage the best and makes me catch the attention of the whole room!

E: I like whatever accentuates my breasts and legs the most.

R: I adore your candor.

I: I also enjoy wearing things that accentuate my chest!

R: And what a stupidly distractingly large chest it is--

23. DO YOU LOVE SOMEONE?

E: What a question!

24. WHAT CLASS ARE YOU?

All: High

R: With the king a step above even that of course.

E: “Status” isn’t generally something among the fae, but the gentry are the exception, our family histories span back an incredibly long amount of time.

Ao: Truthfully, it is all we hear from our parents sometimes, how storied our histories are.

25. HOW MANY FRIENDS DO YOU HAVE?

A: …

E: Heavy is the head and all.

I: It can be equally as difficult for gentry to make friends with each other. Or at least make genuine friends.

E: I’m friends with Riri!

Ao: And she swoops in to rub it in...

26. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON PIE?

E: Tasty! If it’s the right one.

A: Pie is fine.

R: I have no issues with it.

I: I prefer savory things, but pie as a dessert can be enjoyable.

Ao: Mm.

27. FAVORITE DRINK?

E: Pomegranate juice.

Ao: Honeyed wine.

R: Wine.

I: Mead. Wine is good as well.

A: Water infused with fruits.

29. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE PLACE?

R: Who knows.

E: Hm, I don’t have one.

A: Either the roof of the palace or the meadows and forests surrounding it.

R: Sometimes I truly believe you were meant to be one of the wild and wandering fae of Seelie rather than anchored to its throne.

A: How characteristically astute of you.

I: I am a wanderer! Or at the least, I have found my way into many a beds that were rather delightful.

Ao: Mmmmhmmmm.

30. ARE YOU INTERESTED IN SOMEONE?

E: There are so many people in the world to be interested in!

A: Such a fae answer.

31. WHAT’S YOUR DICK SIZE?

A: I will not be announcing–!

R: What is the point in shame, Your Highness? It is no secret that we have genitalia! I am the proud owner of a glorious seven inches when erect!

A:  Ugh…

I: And I am also eight inches long when erect! And my girth is about six inches!

R: Oh, I should measure my girth as well!

Ao: What on earth... Anyways, mine is six inches, and I have not done anything silly like measuring its ‘girth’.

E: I don’t have one, but I am a fan!

32. WOULD YOU RATHER SWIM IN THE LAKE OR THE OCEAN?

A: Lake.

E: Ocean.

R: Can I say neither?

Ao: I would also say neither.

I: I have no preference.

33. WHAT’S YOUR ‘TYPE’?

A: Someone who I could spend time with and we do not even have to speak. Someone who I can be myself around, whatever that entails.

I: The king is a romantic, who knew!

Ao: Iomhar’s preference is any person that crosses his path and tosses a smile his way.

I: I do not believe in limiting myself, heh. The world is full of beauty of many varieties, why would I deprive myself of any of it?

34. ANY FETISHES?

A: Here we go.

R: Despite the best efforts of many, mine included--

A: What was that?

R: Nothing, Your Majesty! Anyways, despite the best efforts of many gentry, our sweet king has yet to lay with any and is wholly unaware of his likes and preferences.

A: I do not like you answering this question for me.

R: As for me! I enjoy  some roleplay, restraints, domination, being dominated, I am always amenable to being pampered, throw in a little bit of sadism into the mix--

E: We’ll be here all day if we let you list every singly thing you like. I personally enjoy restraining a partner and having some sense of control over them.

I: I enjoy a size difference between me and a smaller partner, talking one into an overstimulated mess, tying a partner or being tied up, I have been called a ‘masochist’ on many an occasion--

Ao: And if we let you go on unchecked, you will be listing things for the entire week! I suppose I will say that my tastes are varied and leave it at that.

E: I’ve heard that you like watching when a partner is being taken by another~

Ao: Wh-where did you hear that!

I: Heh.

Ao: That is it! Give me your sword!

I: Oh gladly!

Ao: You know what I am talking about!

A: ...

35. TOP OR BOTTOM? DOMINANT OR SUBMISSIVE?

A: *shrugs*

I: No preference! I enjoy, er, what were the terms? Topping and being dominant more often than not, but I also enjoy when things are switched around.

R: I feel equal about all things. Variety is the spice of life.

E: I prefer being dominant.

I: The little flame prefers being submissive regardless of whether he is entering or being entered by another.

Ao: Answering for me yet again! 

36. CAMPING, OR INDOORS?

A: Camping.

R and E: Indoors.

I and Ao: Also indoors.

E: Ironic that our king would rather rough it in the wilderness.

37. ARE YOU WAITING FOR THIS INTERVIEW TO BE OVER?

A: I feel in need of a nap. Again.

R: I enjoyed myself!

E: As did I!

Ao: Ugh...

I: Aside from the two sourpusses, we all had a nice time!

#long post #{Aur Headcanon #{Ruaidhri Headcanon #{Eilidh Headcanon #{Aodh Headcanon #{Iomhar Headcanon #{The Gentry} #I did one of these a minute ago but because of eh lore stuff and when I added muses #the first one had just Aur Ruaidhri and Eilidh and a later one had Iomhar and Aodh #But I wanted to have them all together! #The first one was a little outdated anyways so I just redid a new one with all of them (minus Tara still though I know) #this took longer than anticipated

[lepurcinus]

I think for me, the hardest part of writing xenofiction is striking the perfect balance between sapience and animality.

Because really nature is so variable and so strange in its "rules", but many times we are not aware of it. Sometimes we see animals and their worlds as one thing and ignore all their capabilities, all that can be and will be.

The type of story you want to make can also enter a little bit, realism doesn't matter too much if your story doesn't pretend to be one (or in any case go for a more fantastic side than real). On the one hand you have stories of not entirely sapient animals (White Fang, Wild Animals I Have Know, Bambi etc), on the other hand stories that are already entirely fantastic and/or anthropomorphized (Warriors, Redwall, The Jungle Book etc) and those that try to mix both concepts (Watership Down, Gahoole in its beginnings, among others).

For my part, although I have in mind a couple of more fantastic and "cheesy" ideas, my xenofiction is mostly based on the real side of things, I strongly believe that animals themselves create thousands of amazing stories, stories that happen in front of our noses but that we are missing.

So, what I'm referring to with this. It's that we are usually left with only one idea of what animals do. We have those who believe that animals are like in fairy tales where they are all friends where there is peace and love, and then there are those who see nature as a gore horror movie where there is someone dying every second and everything is infinitely horrible and morbid.

And, it is not like that. Animals may not be complete friends all the time, but neither are they machines programmed to just follow an order and be devoid of feelings. It goes far beyond all of this that we as humans have learned. That's why it's so wonderful.

For example, many people know that Capybaras are incredibly calm animals that seem to get along with a lot of wildlife, and they do. But also, among them there is also aggression, male Capybaras fight even to the death just to dominate a territory. They are also hunted by other animals such as pumas, jaguars and crocodiles.

And even with all that, you can see a Capybara enjoying life with his species, passing through the territory of crocodiles without any of them being interested in killing him and even climbing on the back of one to cross streams.

So, you really don't always need to give animals human values or morals in order for them to "get along" or "have peace". They are much more than harems, infanticide and reproduction. They are beings that in their own way feel and think, can fight and at the same time, have peace.

That is all.

#animal #nature #xenofiction #lepur stupid toughts #lepur says #animal stories #i forgot to add some things but whatever

[cpacs-blog]

“Her favorite color was yellow.”

When Levi sat down next to her at the campfire, her entire body stiffened in fear. She was a girl made of twitchy nerve endings around him. His hands could snap her neck like a twig… and he’d tried.

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes you do.”

They were the first words he had spoken to her when they were of a comparable size; it scared the shit out of her. The entire trip Levi was propped up in a corner like an awful, butchered, wordless ghost. He slept fitfully. She caught him staring all the time, but he never spoke until now.

“I’m not going to kill you,” he promised. “I could, though.”

“You couldn’t. Not even then and especially not now.”

He laughed, hollow, but ignored this. “Eld’s favorite color was blue,” was his non sequitur. “He was a such a basic bitch. We teased him all the time for it. Auruo liked green, I think. Gunther’s favorite was purple. He was the most sensitive of us, actually. People think it would’ve been Petra, but no… Gunther never killed a spider. He was always the type to get a jar.”

Levi closed his one remaining eye and rested his head against the tree; the corner of his lip pulled up imperceptibly. “Eld’s fiancée cut his hair; she was the only one allowed to touch it. He hated, *hated* long hair, but only got it cut when he went home to her. It was their thing. Auruo and Gelgar… different guy, you didn’t kill him… dyed Eld’s hair plum purple one night as a joke. We tried to wash it out, but it was lilac for a season before he got leave.

“And Auruo… jeez, that stupid kid! He pretended to be miserable all the time, but we knew better. I caught him whistling up the trees to the sparrows once, when he thought nobody could hear. Just this totally grouchy, guarded kid singing with the wildlife. He only let himself be a good person when he thought nobody was watching. That means something, right?”

She didn’t know; she was unqualified to identify the good in people because she’d never seen it before. In her years trapped as a frozen afterthought, the only news that reached her crystal was violence as everyone she knew became a mass murder. Maybe these four were the noble exception… they must be if they cracked Levi’s iron casing. Well, good riddance then. She did them a favor. This world is not meant for good people. It belongs to the ugly.

“She burned water,” Levi continued, and there was no context needed here: the girl with the copper hair, falling with grace. “She cooked breakfasts full of eggshells. She made flatbread while burning through half of our yeast rations. We only let her in the kitchen on her birthday… she always wanted to prove us wrong. Petra. You didn’t even know their names, did you?”

It didn’t seem like an opportune time to say that she *did* know their names, but only because the others called them out in fear before they died. “We were at war.”

“No. *You* were… you tried to genocide your own community. They just wanted their families to see an actual sunrise.” This was the only time Levi’s voice raised, but it was still a tame thing.

“Why are you telling me this? It’s not going to bring them back.”

“It won’t. I just think about it all the time. Not even the big things (though there’s plenty of that too), but mostly details. Who they were. What they were like. I’ve thought more about how Gunther liked his sandwiches now than I ever did when they were alive.”

Levi struggled to stand and she didn’t offer to help. And of course Levi Ackerman didn’t tower over her… he was short and hunched over from being blown up and losing everyone he loved. Yet there was a dignity that made her, once tall as the forest, feel like a kid at the heel of the Walls again. “They died because I commanded it,” he said flatly. “I killed them just as much as you did. But you did. I did. We share their murders. And so now we both share their lives.”

“What the hell?!” She wished he’d fucking get it over with and throw the first punch. “Stop whining and get to the fucking point! You going to avenge them? Stop fucking around and get to it, then! Get mad! Get angry! Punish me already!”

Levi smiled; nothing lit in his eyes anymore. “I just did.”

For a while, Annie didn’t understand. Levi went to his corner of the camp and collapsed in an exhausted, broken heap by Hanji. If it was an attempt to indimidate her, she thought it was a piss-poor job. The rantings of a soldier pushed past his edge… someone who’d finally seen enough. Pathetic, but inconsequential.

She didn’t think much about it at all until a week later when she saw a patch of yellow dandelions at the foot of a tall tree. Fine, it was dandelions, it was whatever. But starting then and for the rest of her life, she’d see dandelions and hear birdsongs everywhere. She was acutely aware of them, could never ignore them, could not stop her compulsions, could not hide. Even when the spores flew away on the breeze and the birds slept, they echoed. And it was so cruel that their ghosts were so beautiful, so that even music and golden wildflowers haunted her with them… then… her… now.

#levi squad #auruo bossard #oluo bozado #oluo bossard #petra ral #eld jinn #gunther schultz #attack on titan #snk levi

[tseneipgam]

“Wildlife and the Wild Woman are both endangered species. Over time, we have seen the feminine instinctive nature looted, driven back, and overbuilt. For long periods it has been mismanaged like the wildlife and the wildlands. For several thousand years, as soon and as often as we turn our backs, it is relegated to the poorest land in the psyche. The spiritual lands of Wild Woman have, throughout history, been plundered or burnt, dens bulldozed, and natural cycles forced into unnatural rhythms to please others. It's not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild natures fades. It is not so difficult to comprehend why old forests and old women are viewed as not very important resources. It is not such a mystery. It is not so coincidental that wolves and coyotes, bears and wildish women have similar reputations. They all share related instinctual archetypes, and as such, both are erroneously reputed to be ingracious, wholly and innately dangerous, and ravenous.”

“Rather than chairs and tables, I preferred the ground, trees, and caves, for in those places I felt I could lean against the cheek of God. The river always called to be visited after dark, the fields needed to be walked in so they could make their rustle-talk. Fires needed to be built in the forest at night, and stories needed to be told outside the hearing of grown-ups. I was lucky to be brought up in Nature. There, lightning strikes taught me about sudden death and the evanescence of life. Mice lit- ters showed that death was softened by new life. When I unearthed "Indian beads," fossils from the loam, I understood that humans have been here a long, long time. I learned about the sacred art of self-decoration with monarch butterflies perched atop my head, light- ning bugs as my night jewelry, and emerald-green frogs as bracelets. A wolf mother killed one of her mortally injured pups; this taught a hard compassion and the necessity of allowing death to come to the dying. The fuzzy caterpillars which fell from their branches and crawled back up again taught single-mindedness. Their tickle-walking on my arm taught how skin can come alive. Climbing to the tops of trees taught what sex would someday feel like. My own post-World War Il generation grew up in a time when women were infantilized and treated as property. They were kept as fallow gardens ... but thankfully there was always wild seed which arrived on the wind. Though what they wrote was unauthorized, women blazed away anyway. Though what they painted went unrec- ognized, it fed the soul anyway. Women had to beg for the instru- ments and the spaces needed for their arts, and if none were forthcoming, they made space in trees, caves, woods, and closets. Dancing was barely tolerated, if at all, so they danced in the forest where no one could see them, or in the basement, or on the way out to empty the trash. Self-decoration caused suspicion. Joyful body or dress increased the danger of being harmed or sexually assaulted. The very clothes on one's shoulders could not be called one's own. It was a time when parents who abused their children were simply called "strict," when the spiritual lacerations of profoundly exploited women were referred to as "nervous breakdowns," when girls and women who were tightly girdled, tightly reined, and tightly muzzled were called "nice." and those other females who managed to slip the collar for a moment or two of life were branded "bad."

“The memory is of our absolute, undeniable, and irrevocable kinship with the wild feminine, a relationship which may have become ghosty from neglect, buried by over-domestication, out- lawed by the surrounding culture, or no longer understood anymore. We may have forgotten her names, we may not answer when she calls ours, but in our bones we know her, we yearn toward her: we know she belongs to us and we to her. It is into this fundamental, elemental, and essential relationship that we were born and that in our essence we are also derived from. The Wild Woman archetype sheaths the alpha matrilineal being. There are times when we experience her, even if only fleetingly, and it makes us mad with wanting to continue. For some women, this vi- talizing "taste of the wild" comes during pregnancy, during nursing their young, during the miracle of change in oneself as one raises a child, during attending to a love relationship as one would attend to a beloved garden. A sense of her also comes through the vision; through sights of great beauty. I have felt her when I see what we call in the woodlands a Jesus-God sunset. I have felt her move in me from seeing the fish- ermen come up from the lake at dusk with lanterns lit, and also from seeing my newborn baby's toes all lined up like a row of sweet corn. We see her where we see her, which is everywhere. She comes to us through sound as well; through music which vi- brates the sternum, excites the heart; it comes through the drum, the whistle, the call, and the cry. It comes through the written and the spoken word; sometimes a word, a sentence or a poem or a story, is so resonant, so right, it causes us to remember, at least for an instant, what substance we are really made from, and where is our true home. These transient "tastes of the wild" come during the mystique of inspiration--ah, there it is; oh, now it has gone. The longing for her comes when one happens across someone who has secured this wild- ish relationship. The longing comes when one realizes one has given scant time to the mystic cookfire or to the dreamtime, too little time to one's own creative life, one's life work or one's true loves. Yet it is these fleeting tastes which come both through beauty as well as loss, that cause us to become so bereft, so agitated, so longing that we eventually must pursue the wildish nature. Then we leap into the forest or into the desert or into the snow and run hard, our eyes scanning the ground, our hearing sharply tuned, searching under, searching over, searching for a clue, a remnant, a sign”

“when we lose touch with the instinctive Psyche, we live in a semi. developed state and images and powers that are natural to the feminine are not allowed full development. When a woman is cut away from her base source, she is sanitised, and her instincts and natural life  cycles are lost, subsumed by the culture, or by the intellect or the ego- one's own or those belonging to others. Wild woman is the health of all women. Without her, women's psychology makes no sense. This wilderwoman is the prototypical woman... no matter what culture, no matter what era, no matter what politic, she does not change. Her cycles change, her symbolic representations change, but in essence, she does not change. She is what she is and she is whole. She canalizes through women. If they are suppressed, she struggles upward. If women are free, she is free. Fortunately, no matter how many times she is pushed down, she bounds up again. No matter how many times she is forbidden, quelled, cut back, diluted, tortured. touted as unsafe, dangerous, mad, and other derogations, she ema- nates upward in women, so that even the most quiet, even the most restrained woman keeps a secret place for her. Even the most re- pressed woman has a secret life, with secret thoughts and secret feel- ings which are lush and wild, that is, natural. Even the most captured woman guards the place of the wildish self, for she knows intuitively that someday there will be a loophole, an aperture, a chance, and she will hightail it to escape. I believe that all women and men are born gifted. However, and truly, there has been little to describe the psychological lives and ways of gifted women, talented women, creative women. There is, on the other hand, much writ about the weakness and foibles of humans in general and women in particular. But in the case of the Wild Woman archetype, in order to fathom her, apprehend her, utilize her offerings, we must be more interested in the thoughts, feelings, and endeavor which strengthen women, and adequate count the interior and cultural factors which weaken women.”

“ So, in order to apply a good medicine to the hurt parts of the wild­ ish psyche, in order to aright relationship to the archetype of the Wild Woman, one has to name the disarrays of the psyche accurately. While in my clinical profession we do have a good diagnostic statis­tical manual and a goodly amount of differential diagnoses, as well as psychoanalytic parameters which define psychopathy through the or­ganization (or lack of it) in the objective psyche and the ego-Self axis, there are yet other defining behaviors and feelings which, from a woman’s frame of reference, powerfully describe what is the matter. What are some of the feeling-toned symptoms of a disrupted rela­ tionship with the wildish force in the psyche? To chronically feel, think, or act in any of the following ways is to have partially severed or lost entirely the relationship with the deep instinctual psyche. Us­ ing women’s language exclusively, these are: feeling extraordinarily dry, fatigued, frail, depressed, confused, gagged, muzzled, unaroused. Feeling frightened, halt or weak, without inspiration, without anima­ tion, without soulfulness, without meaning, shame-bearing, chroni­ cally fuming, volatile, stuck, uncreative, compressed, crazed. Feeling powerless, chronically doubtful, shaky, blocked, unable to follow through, giving one’s creative life over to others, life-sapping choices in mates, work or friendships, suffering to live outside one’s own cycles, overprotective of self, inert, uncertain, faltering, inability to pace oneself or set limits. Not insistent on one’s own tempo, to be self-conscious, to be away from one’s God or Gods, to be separated from one’s revivification, drawn far into domesticity, intellectualism, work, or inertia because that is the safest place for one who has lost her instincts. To fear to venture by oneself or to reveal oneself, fear to seek men­ tor, mother, father, fear to set out one’s imperfect work before it is an opus, fear to set out on a journey, fear of caring for another or oth­ ers, fear one will run on, run out, run down, cringing before author­ ity, loss of energy before creative projects, wincing, humiliation, angst, numbness, anxiety. Afraid to bite back when there is nothing else left to do, afraid to try the new, fear to stand up to, afraid to speak up, speak against”

“An old witch from Ranchos told me that La Que Sabe knew everything about women, that La Que Sabe had created women from a wrinkle on the sole of her divine foot: This is why women are knowing creatures; they are made, in essence, of the skin of the sole, which feels every­ thing. This idea that the skin of the foot is sentient had the ring of a truth, for an acculturated Kiche tribeswoman once told me that she’d worn her first pair of shoes when she was twenty years old and was still not used to walking con los ojos vendados, with blindfolds on her feet.”

“In a single human being there are many other beings, all with their own values, motives, and devices. Some psychological technologies suggest we arrest these beings, count them, name them, force them into harness till they shuffle along like vanquished slaves. But to do this would halt the dance of wildish lights in a woman's eyes; it would halt her heat lightning and arrest all throwing of sparks. Rather than corrupt her natural beauty, our work is to build for all these beings a wildish countryside wherein the artists among them can make, the lovers love, the healers heal. But what shall we do with those inner beings who are quite mad and those who carry out destruction without thought? Even these must be given a place, though one in which they can be contained. One entity in particular, the most deceitful and most powerful fugi- tive in the psyche, requires our immediate consciousness and containment--and that one is the natural predator.”

“Developing a relationship with the wildish nature is an essential part of women's individuation. In order to accomplish this, a woman mus go into the dark, but at the same time she must not be irreparably trapped, captured, or killed on her way there or back. The Bluebeard story is about that captor, the dark man who inhab its all women's psyches, the innate predator. He is a specific and it controvertible force which must be memorized and restrained. To restrain the natural predator? of the psyche it is necessary for women to remain in possession of all their instinctual powers. Some of these are insight, intuition, endurance, tenacious loving, keen sensing, tas vision, acute hearing, singing over the dead, intuitive healing, and tending to their own creative fires.”

“Like wolf pups, women need a similar initiation, one which teaches that the inner and outer worlds are not always happy-go-lucky places. Many women do not even have the basic teaching about pred- ators that a wolf mother gives her pups, such as: if it's threatening and bigger than you, flee; if it's weaker, see what you want to do; it it's sick, leave it alone; if it has quills, poison, fangs, or razor claws, back up and go in the other direction; if it smells nice but is wrapped around metal jaws, walk on by.”

“Learning even more mindfully to let go of the overly positive mother. Finding that being good, being sweet, being nice will not cause life to sing. (Vasalisa becomes a slave, but it does not help.)Experiencing directly one's own shadow nature, particularly the exclusionary, jealous, and exploitative aspects of self (the stepmother and stepsisters). Acknowledging these unequivocally. Making the best relationship one can with the worst parts of oneself. Letting the pres- sure build between who one is taught to be and who one really is. Ultimately working toward letting the old self die and the new intuitive self be born. The stepmother and stepsisters represent the undeveloped but pro- vocatively cruel elements of the psyche. They are shadow elements, meaning aspects of oneself which are considered by the ego to be un- desirable or not useful and are therefore relegated to the dark. On one hand, shadow material can be quite positive, for often a woman's gifts are pushed into the dark, hidden there and waiting to be discovered. On the other hand, negative shadow material--that which busily kills off or detains all new life-_ can also be turned to one's use, as we shall see. When it erupts, and we finally identify its aspects and sources, we are made all the stronger and wiser. In this stage of initiation, a woman is harassed by the petty demands of her psyche which exhort her to comply with whatever anyone wishes. Compliance causes a shocking realization that must be registered by all women. That is, to be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves. It is a tormenting tension and it must be borne, but the choice is clear.”

“Whatever can happen to a garden can happen to soul and psyche—too much water, too little water, infestations, heat, storm, flood, invasion, miracles, dying back, coming back, boon, healing, blossoming, bounty, beauty. During the life of the garden, women keep a diary, recording the signs of life-giving and life-taking. Each entry cooks up a psychic soup. In the garden we practice letting thoughts, ideas, preferences, desires, even loves, both live and die. We plant, we pull, we bury. We dry seed, sow it, moisten it, support it, harvest. The garden is a meditation practice, that of seeing when it is time for something to die. In the garden one can see the time coming for both fruition and for dying back. In the garden one is moving with rather than against the inhalations and the exhalations of greater wild Nature. Through this meditation, we acknowledge that the Life/Death/Life cycle is a natural one. Both life-giving and death-dealing natures are waiting to be befriended, forever loved. In this process, we become like the cyclical wild. We have the ability to infuse energy and strengthen life, and to stand out of the way of what dies.”

“To amplify further, if you are presented with an opportunity to bur a bicyele, or an opportunity to travel to Egypt and see the Pyramit, you have to set the opportunity aside for the moment, enter into yourself, and ask, “What am I hungry for? What do I long for Maybe I'm hungry for a motorcycle instead of a bicycle. Maybe i'm hungry for a trip to see my grandmother, who's coming up in years" The decisions do not have to be so large. Sometimes the matter to be weighed is taking a walk versus making a poem.”

“"In the consensual reality, we all have access to little wild mothers in the flesh. These are women who, as soon as you see them, some- thing in you leaps, and something in you thinks, "MaMa." You take one look and think, "I am her progeny, I am her child, she is my mother, my grandmother." In the case of un hombre con pechos- figuratively, a man with breasts--you might think, "Oh grandfather" or "Oh my brother, my friend." You just know that this man is nur- turing. (Paradoxically they are strongly masculine and strongly femi- nine at the same time. They are like fairy godmother, like mentor, like the mother you never had, or did not have long enough; that is an un hombre con pechos.)31 All these human beings could be called little wild mothers. Usually everyone has at least one. If we are lucky, throughout a lifetime we will have several. You are usually grown or at least in your late ad- olescence by the time you meet them. They are vastly different from the too-good mother. The little wild mothers guide you, burst with pride over your accomplishments. They are critical of blockages and mistaken notions in and around your creative, sensual, spiritual, and intellectual life. Their purpose is to help you, to care about your art, and to reat- tach you to the wildish instincts, and to elicit your original best. They guide the restoration of the intuitive life. And they are thrilled when you make contact with the doll, proud when you find the Baba Yaga, and rejoicing when they see you coming back with the fiery skull held out before you.”

“The Koran wisely advises that we will be called upon to account for all the permitted pleasures in life we did not enjoy while on earth.”

“I don't want to be transformed without first knowing in ab- solute detail what I will look like/feel like afterward."

“There is a vast difference between the need for solitude and re- newal, and the desire to "take space" to avoid the inevitable inter- course with Skeleton Woman. But intercourse, meaning exchange with and acceptance of the Life/Death/Life nature, is the next step in order to strengthen one's ability to love. Those who enter into rela- tionship with her will gain an enduring skill for love. Those who won't, won't. There is no way around it.4 All the "not readies," all the "I need times," are understandable, but only for a short while. The truth is that there is never a "completely ready," there is never a really "right time." As with any de- scent to the unconscious, there comes a time when one simply hopes for the best, pinches one's nose, and jumps into the abyss.”

“What must I give more death to today, in order to generate more life? What do I know should die, but am hesitant to allow to do so? What must die in me in order for me to love? What not-beauty do I fear? Of what use is the power of the not-beautiful to me today? What should die today? What should live? What life am I afraid to give birth to? If not now, when? If we sing the song of consciousness till we feel the burn of truth, we throw a burst of fire into the darkness of psyche so we can see what we're doing ... what we're truly doing, not what we wish to think we're doing. This is the untangling of one's feelings and the be- ginning of understanding why love and life are to be lived by the bones”

“This state of wise innocence is entered by shedding cynicism and protectionism, and by reentering the state of wonder one sees in most humans who are very young and many who are very old. It is a prac- rice of looking through the eyes of a knowing and loving spirit, in- stead of through those of the whipped dog, the hounded creature, the mouth atop a stomach, the angry wounded human. Innocence is a state that is renewed as one sleeps. Unfortunately, many throw it aside with the coverlet as they arise each day. It would be better to take an alert innocence with us and draw it close for warmth. Though an initial return to this state may require scraping away years of jaded viewpoints, decades of callous and carefully con- structed bulwarking, once one has returned one never has to pry for it, dig for it, ever again. To return to an alert innocence is not so much an effort, like moving a pile of bricks from here to there, as it is standing still long enough to let the spirit find you. It is said that all that you are seeking is also seeking you, that if you lie still, sit still, it will find you. It has been waiting for you a long time. Once it is here, don't move away. Rest. See what happens next.”

“When a life is too controlled, there becomes less and less life to control.”

“Through their bodies, women live very close to the Life/Death/Life nature. When women are in their right instinctual minds, their ideas and impulses to love, to create, to believe, to desire are born, have their time, fade and die, and are reborn again. One might say that women consciously or unconsciously practice this knowledge every moon cycle of their lives. For some this moon that tells the cycles is up in the sky. For others it is a Skeleton Woman who lives in their own psyches. From her very flesh and blood and from the constant cycles of fill- ing and emptying the red vase in her belly, a woman understands physically, emotionally, and spiritually that zeniths fade and expire, and what is left is reborn in unexpected ways and by inspired means, only to fall back to nothing, and yet be reconceived again in full glory.”

“It is good to master the first stages of meeting with the Life/Death/Life nature and let the literal body-to-body experiences come after. I caution women, do not en- gage a lover who wants to go from accidental catching to giving body. Insist on all the phases. Then the last phase will take care of it- self, the time of body union will come in its own right time. When the union is begun in the body phase, the process of facing the Life/Death/Life nature can still be accomplished later ... but it takes much more resolve. It is harder work, for the pleasure-ego must be dragged away from its carnal interest so that the foundation work can be done. The little dog in the Manawee story points out just how hard it is to remember what path one is on when one's nerves are be- ing thrummed by delight.”

“While we can interpret the mother in the story as symbolic of one's external mother, most who are grown up now have as a legacy from their actual mother, an internal mother. This is an aspect of psyche that acts and responds in a manner identical to a woman's experience in childhood with her own mother. Further, this internal mother is made from not only the experience of the personal mother but also other mothering figures in our lives, as well as the images held out as the good mother and the bad mother in the culture at the time of our childhoods. For most adults, if there was trouble with the mother once but there is no more, there is still a duplicate mother in the psyche who sounds, acts, responds the same as in early childhood. Even though a woman's culture may have evolved into more conscious reasoning about the role of mothers, the internal mother will have the same val- us and ideas about what a mother should look like, act like, as those in one's childhood culture.  In depth psychology, this entire maze is called the mother complex. It is one of the core aspects of a woman's psyche, and it is important to recognize its condition, strengthening certain aspects, arighting some, dismantling others, and beginning over again if necessary.”

“In most parts of industrialized countries today, the young moth er broods, births, and attempts to benefit her offspring all by her- self. It is a tragedy of enormous proportions. Because many women were born to fragile mothers, child-mothers, and unmothered moth ers, they may themselves possess a similar internal style of "self- mothering." The woman who has a child-mother or unmothered mother construct in her psyche, or glorified in the culture and maintained at work and in the family, is likely to suffer from naive presentiments, lack of seasoning, and in particular a weakened instinctual ability to imagine what will happen one hour, one week, one month, one year, five years, ten years from now. A woman with a child-mother within takes on the aura of a child pretending to be a mother, Women in this state often have an undif- ferentiated «long live everything" attitude, a "do everything, be ev- erything to everyone" brand of hyper-momism. They are not able to guide and support their children, but like the farmer's children in «The Ugly Duckling" story who are so thrilled to have a creature in the house but do not know how to give it proper care, the child- mother winds up leaving the child battered and bedraggled. Without realizing it, the child-mother tortures her offspring with various forms of destructive attention and in some cases lack of useful attention. Sometimes the frail mother is herself a swan who has been raised by ducks. She has not been able to find her true identity soon enough to benefit her offspring. Then, as her daughter comes upon the great mystery of the wildish nature of the feminine in adolescence, the mother too finds herself having sympathy pangs and swan urges.”

“The remedy is in gaining mothering for one's young internal mother. This is gained from actual women in the outer world who are older and wiser and preferably who have been tempered like steel; they are fire-hardened for having gone through what they have gone through. Regardless of the cost even now, their eyes see, their ears hear, their tongues speak, and they are kind. Even if you had the most wonderful mother in the world, you may eventually have more than one. As I have often told my own daugh- ters, "You are born to one mother, but if you are lucky, you will have more than one. And among them all you will find most of what you need." Your relationships with todas las madres, the many mothers, will most likely be ongoing ones, for the need for guidance and advisory is never outgrown, nor from the point of view of women’s deep creative life, should it ever be”

“the uncombed cat and the crocs-eyed hen find the duckling's aspirations stupid and nonsensical. It gives just the right perspective on the Wuhinessand the values of others who denigrate those who are not He hemselves. Who would expect a cat to like the water? Who would expect a hen to go swimming? No one, of course. But too of. jus, from the exile's point of view, when people are not alike, it is the exile who is inferior, and the limitations and/or motives of the other are not properly weighed or evaluated. Well, in the spirit of not wanting to make one person less and an- other person more, or any more than we have to for the purposes of discussion, let us just say that here the duckling has the same experi- ence that thousands of exiled women have--that of a basic incompat- ibility with dissimilar persons, which is no one's fault, even though most women are too obliging and take it on as though it is their fault personally. When this happens, we see women who are ready to apologize for taking up space. We see women who are afraid to just say "No, thank you," and leave. We see women who listen to someone telling them they are wrongheaded over and over again without understand- ing that cats don't swim and hens don't dive under water. I must admit, I sometimes find it useful in my practice to delineate the various typologies of personality as cats and hens and ducks and swans and so forth. If warranted, I might ask my client to assume for a moment that she is, a swan who does not realize it. Assume also for a moment that she has been brought up by or is currently sur- rounded by ducks. There is nothing wrong with ducks, I assure them, or with swans. But ducks are ducks and swans are swans. Sometimes to make the point I have to move to other animal metaphors. What if you were raised by the mice people? But what if you're, say, a swan. Swans and mice hate each other's food for the most part. They each think the Other smells funny. They are not interested in spending time together, and if they did, one would be constantly harassing the other. But what if you, being a swan, had to pretend you were a mouse? What if you had to pretend to be gray and furry and tiny? What if you had no long snaky tail to carry in the air on tail-carrying day?”

“I worked with a woman who was near the last straw and thinking in circles; suicide. A spider making its web on her porch caught her eye. Pre- e ground, cisely what it was in that wee beastie's act that chopped the ice as if ther around her soul so she could go free and grow again, we will never g up all know. But I am convinced, both as psychoanalyst and as cantadora, the ait, that many times it is the things of nature that are the most healing, and at especially the very accessible and the very simple ones. The medicines rough of nature are powerful and straightforward: a ladybug on the green g uP rind of a watermelon, a robin with a string of yarn, a weed in perfect lace, flower, a shooting star, even a rainbow in a glass shard in the street can be the right medicine. Continuance is a strange thing: it puts out this tremendous energy, it can be fed for a month on five minutes of con- it, templating quiet water.”

“There is probably no better or more reliable measure of whether a woman has spent time in ugly duckling status at some point or all throughout her life than her inability to digest a sincere compliment. Although it could be a matter of modesty, or could be attributed to shyness--although too many serious wounds are carelessly written off as "nothing but shyness"14_-more often a compliment is stuttered around about because it sets up an automatic and unpleasant dia- logue in the woman's mind. If you say how lovely she is, or how beautiful her art is, or com- pliment anything else her soul took part in, inspired, or suffused, something in her mind says she is undeserving and you, the complimentor, are an idiot for thinking such a thing to begin with. Rather than understand that the beauty of her soul shines through When she is being herself, the woman changes the subject and effec- tively snatches nourishment away from the soul-self, which thrives on being acknowledged, on being seen.”

“I have been taken with the way wolves hit their bodies together when they run and play, the old wolves in their way, the young ones in theirs, the skinny ones, the fat ones, the long-legged, the lop-tailed, the floppy-eared, the ones whose broken limbs healed crookedly. They all have their own body configurations and strengths, their own beauty. They live and play according to what and who and how they are. They do not try to be what they are not. Up in the northlands, I watched one old wolf who had only three legs; she was the only one who could fit through a crevasse where blueberries were branching. I once saw a gray wolf crouch and leap in such a flash it left the image of a silver arc in the air for a second afterward. I remember a delicate one, a new mother, still fulsome in the belly, picking her way through the pool moss with the grace of a dancer. Yet, despite their beauty and ability to stay strong, wolves are sometimes talked about in this way: "Ah, you are too hungry, your teeth are too sharp, your appetites too interested." Like wolves, women are sometimes discussed as though only a certain temperament, only a certain restrained appetite, is acceptable. And too often added to that is an attribution of moral goodness or badness accord. ing to whether a woman's size, height, gait, and shape conform to a singular or exclusionary ideal. When women are relegated to moods, mannerisms, and contours that conform to a single ideal of beauty and behavior, they are captured in both body and soul, and are no longer free. In the instinctive psyche, the body is considered a sensor, an infor- mational network, a messenger with myriad communication sys- tems-cardiovascular, respiratory, skeletal, autonomic, as well as emotive and intuitive. In the imaginal world, the body is a powerful vehicle, a spirit who lives with us, a prayer of life in its own right. In fairy tales, as personified by magical objects that have superhuman qualities and abilities, the body is considered to have two sets of ears, one for hearing in the mundane world, the other for hearing the soul; two sets of eyes, one set for regular vision, another for far-seeing; two kinds of strength, the strength of the muscles and the invincible strength of soul. The list of twos about the body goes on. In systems of body work such as Feldenkrais method, Ayurveda, and others, the body is understood variously as having six senses, not five. The body uses its skin and deeper fascia and flesh to record all that goes on around it. Like the Rosetta stone, for those who know how to read it, the body is a living record of life given, life taken, life hoped for, life healed. It is valued for its articulate ability to register immediate reaction, to feel profoundly, to sense ahead. The body is a multilingual being. It speaks through its color and its temperature, the flush of recognition, the glow of love, the ash of pain, the heat of arousal, the coldness of nonconviction. It speaks through its constant tiny dance, sometimes swaying, sometimes a-jitter, sometimes trembling. It speaks through the leaping of the heart, the falling of the spirit, the pit at the center, and rising hope. The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, any- where the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched lightly, a memory may flow out in a stream. To confine the beauty and value of the body to anything less than this magnificence is to force the body to live without its rightful spirit, its rightful form, its right to exultation. To be thought ugly or unac- ceptable because one's beauty is outside the current fashion is deeply wounding to the natural joy that belongs to the wild nature.”

“While compulsive and destructive eating disorders that distort body size and body image are real and tragic, they are not the norm for most women. Women who are big or small, wide or narrow, short or tall, are most likely to be so simply because they inherited the body configuration of their kin; if not their immediate kin, then those a generation or two back. To malign or judge a woman's inherited physicality is to make generation after generation of anxious and neu- rotic women. To make destructive and exclusionary judgments about a woman's inherited form, robs her of several critical and precious psychological and spiritual treasures. It robs her of pride in the body pipe that was given to her by her own ancestral lines. If she is taught To revile this body inheritance, she is immediately slashed away from her female body identity with the rest of the family. If she is taught to hate her own body, how can she love her moth- er's body that has the same configuration as hers?'-her grand- mother's body, the bodies of her daughters as well? How can she love the bodies of other women (and men) close to her who have inherited the body shapes and configurations of their ancestors? To attack a woman thusly destroys her rightful pride of affiliation with her own people and robs her of the natural lilt she feels in her body no matter what height, size, shape she is. In essence, the attack on women's bodies is a far-reaching attack on the ones who have gone before her as well as the ones who will come after her.6 Instead, harsh judgments about body acceptability create a nation of hunched-over tall girls, short women on stilts, women of size dressed as though in mourning, very slender women trying to puff themselves out like adders, and various other women in hiding. De- stroying a woman's instinctive affiliation with her natural body cheats her of confidence. It causes her to perseverate about whether she is a good person or not, and bases her self-worth on how she looks in- stead of who she is. It pressures her to use up her energy worrying about how much food she consumes or the readings on the scale and tape measure. It keeps her preoccupied, colors everything she does, plans, and anticipates. It is unthinkable in the instinctive world that a woman should live preoccupied by appearance this way. It makes utter sense to stay healthy and strong, to be as nourishing to the body as possible.? Yet I would have to agree, there is in many women a "hungry" one inside. But rather than hungry to be a certain size, shape, or height, rather than hungry to fit the stereotype; women are hungry for basic regard from the culture surrounding them. The "hungry» one inside is longing to be treated respectfully, to be ac- cepted,® and in the very least, to be met without stereotyping. If there really is a woman "screaming to get out" she is screaming for cessa- tion of the disrespectful projections of others onto her body, her face, her age.”

“Yet, suffice it to say that various practitioners of psychology con. tinue to hand down this bias against the natural body, encouraging women to turn their attentions to a constant monitoring of body, thereby robbing them of deeper and finer relationships with their given form. Angst about the body robs a woman in some large share of her creative life and her attention to other things. This encouragement to begin trying to carve her body is remarka- bly similar to the carving, burning, peeling off layers, stripping down to the bones the flesh of the earth itself. Where there is a wound on the psyches and bodies of women, there is a corresponding wound at the same site in the culture itself, and finally on Nature herself. In a true holistic psychology all worlds are understood as interdependent, not as separate entities. It is not amazing that in our culture there is an issue about carving up a woman's natural body, that there is a cor- responding issue about carving up the landscape, and yet another about carving up the culture into fashionable parts as well. Although a woman may not be able to stop the dissection of culture and lands overnight, she can stop doing so to her own body. The wild nature would never advocate the torture of the body, cul- ture, or land. The wild nature would never agree to flog the form in order to prove worth, prove "control," prove character, be more vi- sully pleasing, more financially valuable. A woman cannot make the culture more aware by saying "Change." But she can change her own attitude toward herself, thereby causing devaluing projections to glance off. She does this by taking back her body. By not forsaking the joy of her natural body, by not purchasing the popular illusion that happiness is only be- stowed on those of a certain configuration or age, by not waiting of holding back to do anything, and by taking back her real life, and liv- ing it full bore, all stops out. This dynamic self-acceptance and self- esteem are what begins to change attitudes in the culture.”

“We tend to think of body as this "other" that does its thing somewhat without us, and that if we "treat" it right, it will make us "feel good." Many people treat their bodies as if the body is a slave, or perhaps they even treat it well but demand it follow their wishes and whims as though it were a slave nonetheless. Some say the soul informs the body. But what if we were to imag- ine for a moment that the body informs the soul, helps it adapt to mundane life, parses, translates, gives the blank page, the ink, and the pen with which the soul can write upon our lives? Suppose, as in fairy tales of the shapechangers, the body is a God in its own right, a teacher, a mentor, a certified guide? Then what? Is it wise to spend a lifetime chastising this teacher who has so much to give and teach? Do we wish to spend a lifetime allowing others to detract from our bodies, judge them, find them wanting? Are we strong enough to re- fute the party line and listen deep, listen true to the body as a pow- erful and holy being?13 The idea in our culture of body solely as sculpture is wrong. Body is not marble. That is not its purpose. Its purpose it to protect, con- tain, support, and fire the spirit and soul within it, to be a repository for memory, to fill us with feeling-_that is the supreme psychic nour- ishment. It is to lift us and propel us, to fill us with feeling to prove that we exist, that we are here, to give us grounding, heft, weight. It is wrong to think of it as a place we leave in order to soar to the spirit. The body is the launcher of those experiences.”

“remember, at bottom is where the living roots of psy. che are. It is there that a woman's wild underpinnings are. At bottom is the best soil to sow and grow something new again. In that sense, hitting bottom, while extremely painful, is also the sowing ground. Though we would never wish the poisonous red shoes and the sub- sequent decrease of life onto ourselves or others, there is in its fiery and destructive center a something that fuses fierceness to wisdom in the woman who has danced the cursed dance, who has lost herself and her creative life, who has driven herself to hell”

“In this tale, the old woman is a symbol of the rigid keeper of col. lective tradition, an enforcer of the unquestioned status quo, the "be- have yourself; don't make waves; don't think too hard; don't get big ideas; just keep a low profile; be a carbon copy; be nice; say yes even though you don't like it, it doesn't fit, it's not the right size, and it hurts.' And so on. To follow such a lifeless value system causes loss of soul-linkage in the extreme. Regardless of collective affiliations or influences, our challenge in behalf of the wild soul and our creative spirit is to not merge with any collective, but to distinguish ourselves from those who surround us, building bridges back to them as we choose. We de- cide which bridges will become strong and well traveled, and which will remain sketchy and empty. And the collectives we favor with re- lationship will be those that offer the most support for our soul and creative life. If a woman works at a university, she is in an academic collective. She is not to merge with whatever this collective environ may put forth, but add her own special flavor to it. As an integral creature, un- less she has created other strong things in her life to offset this, she cannot afford to deteriorate into a one-sided, peevish, "I do my job, go home, come back ..." kind of person. If a woman attempts to be a part of an organization, association, or family that neglects to peer into her to see what she is made of, one that fails to ask "What makes this person run?" and one that does not put forth effort to challenge or encourage her in any positive manner ... then her ability to thrive and create is diminished. The more harsh the circumstances, the more she is exiled to a salted barrens where nothing is allowed to grow. The separation of a woman's life and mind from flattened-out col- lective thinking and the development of her unique talents are among the most important accomplishments a woman can fashion, for these acts prevent both soul and psyche from sliding into enslavement. A culture that authentically promotes individual development will never make a slave class of any group or gender.”

“Overkill through excesses, or excessive behaviors, is acted out by women who are famished for a life that has meaning and makes sense for them. When a woman has gone without her cycles or creative needs for long periods of time, she begins a rampage of-you name it-alcohol, drugs, anger, spirituality, oppression of others, promiscu- ity, pregnancy, study, creation, control, education, orderliness, body fitness, junk food, to name a few areas of common excess. When women do this, they are compensating for the loss of regular cycles of self-expression, soul-expression, soul-satiation. The starving woman endures famine after famine. She may plan her escape, yet believe that the cost of fleeing is too high, that it will cost her too much libido, too much energy. She may be ill-prepared in other ways too, such as educationally, economically, spiritually. Unfortunately, the loss of treasure and the deep memory of famine may cause us to rationalize that excesses are desirable. And it is, of course, such a relief and a pleasure to finally be able to enjoy sensa- tion . . . any sensation. A woman newly free from famine just wants to enjoy life for a change. Her dulled perceptions about the emotional, rational, physi- cal, spiritual, and financial boundaries required for survival endanger her instead. For her there is a pair of poisonous red shoes glowing out there somewhere. She will take them wherever she finds them. That is the trouble with famine. If something looks like it will fill the yearn- ing, a woman will seize it, no questions asked.”

“Through wildlife studies of various species of captive animals, it was found that no matter how lovingly their zoo plazas are con- structed, no matter how much their human keepers love them, as in- deed they do, the creatures often become unable to breed, their appetites for food and rest become skewed, their vital behaviors dwindle to lethargy, sullenness, or untoward aggressiveness. Zoolo- gists call this behavior in captives "animal depression." Any time a creature is caged, its natural cycles of sleep, mate selection, estrus, grooming, parenting, and so forth deteriorate. As the natural cycles are lost, emptiness follows. The emptiness is not full, like the Bud- dhist concept of sacred void, but rather empty like being inside a sealed box with no windows.”

“sudden anxiety states that are similar to the symptoms animals display when they have been stunned by capture and trauma. Too much domestication breeds out strong and basic impulses to play, re- late, cope, rove, commune, and so forth. When a woman agrees to be- come too "well-bred" her instincts for these impulses drop down into her darkest unconscious, outside her automatic reach. She is said then to be instinct-injured. What should come naturally comes not at all, or after too much tugging, pulling, rationalizing, fighting with herself. When I speak of overdomestication as capture, I do not refer to so- cialization, the process whereby children are taught to behave in more or less civilized ways. Social development is critical and impor- tant. Without it, a woman cannot make her way in the world. But too much domestication is like forbidding the vital essence to dance. In its proper and healthy state, the wild self is not docile or vacuous. It is alert and responsive to any given movement or mo- ment. It is not locked into an absolute and repetitive pattern for any and all circumstances. It has creative choice. The instinct-iniured woman has no choice. She just stays stuck. There are many ways to be stuck. The instinct-injured woman usu- ally gives herself away because she has a difficult time asking for help or recognizing her own needs. Her natural instincts to fight or flee are drastically slowed or extincted. Recognition of the sensations of sati- ation, off-taste, suspicion, caution, and the drive to love fully and freely are inhibited or exaggerated. As in the tale, one of the most insidious attacks on the wild self is to be directed to perform properly, implying a reward will follow (if ever). Though this method may (I emphasize "may") temporarily per- suade a two-year-old to clean her room (no playing with toys until the bed is made) it will never, never work in a vital woman's life. While consistency, follow-through, and organization are all essential to implementing creative life, the old woman's injunction to «be proper" kills off any opportunity to expand. It is play, not properness, that is the central artery, the core, the brain stem of creative life. The impulse to play is an instinct. No play, no creative life. Be good, no creative life. Sit still, no creative life.”

“Injury to instinct cannot be underestimated as the root of the issue when women are acting mad, are possessed by obsession, or when they are stuck in less malignant but nevertheless destructive patterns. The repair of injured instinct begins with acknowledging that a cap ture has taken place, that a soul-famine has followed, that usual boundaries of insight and protection have been disturbed. The pro- cess that caused a woman's capture and the ensuing famine has to be reversed.”

“It is said that in the matriarchal cultures of ancient India, Beyp, parts of Asia, and Turkey- which are believed to have influenced ou concept of the feminine soul for thousands of miles in all directions- the bequeathing of henna and other red pigments to young girls, so that they could stain their feet with it, was a central feature in thresh. old rites." One of the most important threshold rites regarded first menstruation. This rite celebrated the crossing from childhood into the profound ability to bring forth life from one's own belly, to carry the attendant sexual power and all peripheral womanly powers. The ceremony was concerned with red blood in all its stages: the uterine blood of menstruation, delivery of a child, miscarriage, all running downward toward the feet. As you can see, the original red shoes had many meanings.”

“Though the values may change from culture to culture, thereby positing different "negatives" and "positives" in the shadow, typical impulses that are considered negative and therefore relegated to the shadowlands are those that encourage a person to steal, cheat, mur- der, act excessively in various ways, and so forth in that vein. The negative shadow aspects tend to be oddly exciting and yet entropic in nature, stealing balance and equanimity of mood and life from indi- viduals, relationships, and larger groups. The shadow also, however, can contain the divine, the luscious, beautiful, and powerful aspects of personhood. For women especially, the shadow almost always contains very fine aspects of being that are forbidden or given little support by her culture. At the bottom of the well in the psyches of too many women lies the visionary creator, the astute truth-teller, the far-seer, the one who can speak well of herself without denigration, who can face herself without cringing, who works to perfect her craft. The positive impulses in shadow for women in our culture most often revolve around permission for the creation of a handmade life.”

“When a woman pretends to press her life down into a nice tidy lit- tle package, all she accomplishes is spring-loading all her vital enerey down into shadow. "Fine, I'm fine," such a woman says. We look at her across the room or in the mirror. We know she is not fine. Then one day, we hear she has taken up with a piccolo player and has run off to Tippicanoe to be a pool hall queen. And we wonder what hap- pened, because we know she hates piccolo players and always wanted to live on Orcas Island, not in Tippicanoe, and she never before men- tioned anything about pool halls. Like Hedda Gabler in Henrik Ibsen's play, the wildish woman can pretend to live "an ordinary life" while gritting her teeth, but there is always a price to pay. Hedda sneaks a passionate and dangerous life, playing games with an ex-lover and with Death. Outwardly, she pre- tends to be content wearing bonnets and listening to her dry husband cavil about his dusty life. A woman can be outwardly polite and even cynical, but inwardly hemorrhaging. Or, like Janis Joplin, a woman can try to comply until she can't stand it any longer, and then her creative nature, corroded and sick- ened by being forced into the shadow, erupts violently to rebel against the, tenets of "breeding" in reckless ways that disregard one's gifts and one's very life.”

“Captured and starved women sneak all kinds of things: they sneak unsanctioned books and music, they sneak friendships, sexual feeling, religious affiliation. They sneak furtive thinking, dreams of revolu- tion. They sneak time away from their mates and families. They sneak a treasure into the house. They sneak their writing time, their thinking time, their soul-time. They sneak a spirit into the bedroom, a poem before work, they sneak a skip or an embrace when no one's looking. To detour off this polarized path, a woman has to surrender the pretense. Sneaking a counterfeit soul-life never works. It always blows out the sidewall when you're least expecting it. Then it's misery all around. It's better to get up, stand up, no matter how homemade your platform, and live the most you can, the best you can, and forgo the sneaking of counterfeits. Hold out for what has real meaning and health for you.”

“You see, there is something in the wild soul that will not let us sub- st forever on piecemeal intake. Because in actuality, it is impossible for the woman who strives for consciousness to sneak little sniffs of good air and then be content with no more. Remember when you were a child and you found out that you couldn't do yourself in by holding your breath? Though you might try to get by on just a little air or no air at all, some big fist bellows takes over, something fierce and demanding that makes you eventually shovel the air in as fast as you can. You gulp it, bite it down until you are breathing fully again. Blessedly, there is something like that in the soul/psyche as well. It takes us over and forces us to take full breaths of good air. Truly, we know that we can not really subsist on sneaking little sips of life. The wild force in a woman's soul demands that she have access to it all. We can stay alert and take in the things that are right for us.”

“But the wild nature teaches that we meet challenges as they occur. When wolves are badgered, they don't say, "Oh, no! Not again!" They bound, pounce, run, dive, scramble, play dead, go for the throat, whatever needs to be done. So we cannot be shocked that there is entropy, deterioration, hard times. Let us understand that the issues that entrap women's joy will always shift and shape-change, but in our own essential natures we find the absolute stamina, the necessary libido for all necessary acts of heart.”

“Thing to be good, orderly, and compliant in the face of inner or outer perl or in order to hide a critical psychic or real-life situation Setous a woman. le cuts her from her knowing; it cuts her from her babity to act. Like the child in the tale, who does not object out loud, who ties to hide her starvarion, who tries to make it seem as though nothing is burning in her, modern women have the same disorder, normalizing the abnormal. This disorder is rampant across cultures. Normalizing the abnormal causes the spirit, which would normally leap to correct the situation, to instead sink into ennui, complacency, and eventually, like the old woman, into blindness. There's an important study that gives insight into women's loss of self protective instinct. In the early 1960s, scientistsl6 conducted ani- mal experiments to determine something about the "flight instinct" in humans. In one experiment they wired half the bottom of a large cage, so that a dog placed in the cage would receive a shock each time it set foot on the right side. The dog quickly learned to stay on the left side of the cage. Next, the left side of the cage was wired for the same purpose and the right side was safe from shocks. The dog reoriented quickly and learned to stay on the right side of the cage. Then, the entire floor of the cage was wired to give random shocks, so that no matter where the dog lay or stood it would eventually receive a shock. The dog acted confused at first, and then it panicked. Finally the dog "gave up" and lay down, taking the shocks as they came, no longer trying to escape them or outsmart them.”

“We can see from similar events that have occurred over our life- times that when women do not speak, when not enough people speak, the voice of the Wild Woman becomes silent, and therefore the world becomes silent of the natural and wild too. Silent, eventually, of wolf and bear and raptors. Silent of singings and dancings and cre- ations. Silent of loving, repairing, and holding. Bereft of clear air and water and the voices of consciousness. But back in those times, and too often today, even though women were infused with a yearning for a wild freedom, they continued out- wardly to rub SOS on porcelain, using caustic cleansers, staying, as Sylvia Plath put it, "tied to their Bendix washing machines." There they washed and rinsed their clothes in water too hot for human touch and dreamed of a different world.19 When the instincts are in- jured, humans will "normalize" assault after assault, acts of injustice and destruction toward themselves, their offspring, their loved ones, their land, and even their Gods.”

“Psychically, it is good to make a halfway place, a way station, a considered place in which to rest and mend after one escapes a fam- ine. It is not too much to take one year, two years, to assess one's wounds, seek guidance, apply the medicines, consider the future. A year or two is scant time. The feral woman is a woman making her way back. She is learning to wake up, pay attention, stop being naive, uninformed. She takes her life in her own hands. To re-learn the deep feminine instincts, it is vital to see how they were decommissioned to begin with. Whether the injuries be to your art, words, lifestyles, thoughts, or ideas, and if you have knitted yourself up into a many-sleeved sweater, cut through the tangle now and get on with it. Beyond desire and wishing, beyond the carefully reasoned methods we love to talk and scheme over, there is a simple door waiting for us to walk through. On the other side are new feet. Go there. Crawl there if need be. Stop talking and obsessing. Just do it. We cannot control who brings us into this world. We cannot influ- ence the fluency with which they raise us; we cannot force the culture in instantlv become hospitable. But the good news is that, even after injury, even in a feral state, even, for that matter, in an as yet cap. tured state, we can have our lives back. The psychological soul-plan for coming back into one's own is as follows: Take extra special caution and care to loose yourself into the wild gradually, setting up ethical and protective structures by which you gain tools to measure when something is too much. (You are usu- ally already very sensitive to when something is too little.) So the return to the wild and free psyche must be made with bold- ness, but also with consideration. In psychoanalysis we are fond of saying that to be trained as a healer/helper it is as important to learn what not to do as it is to learn what to do. To return to the wild from captivity carries the same caveats. Let us take a closer look. The pitfalls, traps, and poisoned baits laid out for the wildish woman are specific to her culture. Here I have listed those that are common to most cultures. Women from differing ethnic and religious backgrounds will have additional specific insights. In a symbolic sense, we are composing a map of the woods in which we live. We are delineating where the predators live and describing their modi operandi. It is said that a single wolf knows every creature in her ter- ritory for miles around. It is this knowledge that gives her the edge in living as freely as possible. Regaining lost instinct and healing injured instinct is truly within one's reach, for it returns when a woman pays close attention through listening, looking, and sensing the world around herself, and then by acting as she sees others act; efficiently, effectively, and soul fully. The opportunity to observe others who have instincts well in- tact is central to retrieval.”

“If you are striving to do something you value, it is so important to surround yourself with people who unequivocally support your work. It is both a trap and a poison to have so-called friends who have the same injuries but no real desire to heal them. These kinds of friends encourage you to act outrageously, outside of your natural cycles, out of sync with your soul-needs. A feral woman cannot afford to be naive. As she returns to her in- nate life, she must consider excesses with a skeptical eye and be aware of their costs to soul, psyche, and instinct. Like the wolf pups, we memorize the traps, how they are made, and how they are laid. That is the way we remain free. Even so, lost instincts do not recede without leaving echoes and trails of feeling, which we can follow to claim them again. Though a woman may be held in the velvet fist of propriety and stricture, whether she is one breath away from destruction through excesses or has just begun to dive into them, she can still hear whispers of the wild God in her blood. Even in these worst circumstances as por- trayed in "The Red Shoes," even the most injured instincts can be healed. To aright all this, we resurrect the wild nature, over and over again, each time the balance tips too far in one direction or another. We will know when there is reason for concern, for generally balance makes our lives larger and imbalance makes our lives smaller. One of the most important things we can do is to understand life, all life, as a living body in itself, one that has respiration, new cell turnover, sloughing off, and waste material. It would be silly if we ex- pected our bodies not to have waste material more than once every five years. It would be inane to think that just because we ate a day ago we shouldn't be hungry today. It is just as fatuous to think that once we solve an issue it stays resolved, that once we learn, we always remain conscious ever after. No, life is a great body that grows and diminishes in different areas, at different rates. When we are like the body, doing the work of new growth, wading through la mierda, the shit, just breathing or resting, we are very alive, we are within the cycles of the Wild Woman. If we could realize that the work is to keep doing the work, we would be much more fierce and much more peaceful. To hold to joy, we may sometimes have to fight for it, we may have to strengthen ourselves and go full-bore, doing battle in whichever ways we deem most shrewd. To prepare for siege, we may have to go without many comforts for the duration.”

“There is human time and there is wild time. When I was a child in the north woods, before I learned there were four seasons to a year, I thought there were dozens; the time of night-time thunderstorms, heat lightning time, bonfires-in-the-woods time, blood-on-the-snow time, the times of ice trees, bowing trees, crying trees, shimmering trees, breaded trees, waving-at-the-tops-only trees, and trees-drop- their-babies time. I loved the seasons of diamond snow, steaming snow, squeaking snow, and even dirty snow and stone snow, for these meant the time of flower blossoms on the river was coming. These seasons were like important and holy visitors and each sent its harbingers: pine cones open, pine cones closed, the smell of leaf rot, the smell of rain coming, crackling hair, lank hair, bushy hair, doors loose, doors tight, doors that won't shut at all, windowpanes covered with ice-hair, windowpanes covered with wet petals, win- dowpanes covered with yellow pollen, windowpanes pecked with sap gum. And our own skin had its cycles too: parched, sweaty, gritty, sunburned, soft. The psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying”

“One of the central and most potentially destructive issues women face is that of beginning various psychological initiation processes with initiators who have not completed the process themselves. They have no seasoned persons who know how to proceed. When initiators are incompletely initiated themselves, they omit important aspects of the process without realizing it, and sometimes visit great abuse on the initiate, for they are working with a fragmentary idea of initiation, one that is often tainted in one way or another.+ At the other end of the spectrum is the woman who has experienced theft, and who is striving for knowledge and mastery of the situation, but who has run out of directions and does not know there is more to practice in order to complete the learning, and so repeats the first stage, that of being stolen from, over and over again. Through whatever cir- cumstances, she has gotten tangled in the reins. Essentially, she is with- out instruction. Instead of discovering the requirements of a healthy wildish soul, she becomes a casualty of an uncompleted initiation. Because matrilineal lines of initiation-older women teaching younger women certain psychic facts and procedures of the wild teminine- have been fragmented and broken for so many women and Over so many years, it is a blessing to have the archeology of the fairy tale to learn from. What can be derived from those deep templates echoes the innate patterns of women's most integral psychological processes. In this sense, fairy tales and mythos are initiators; they are the wise ones who teach those who have come after.”

“We lose the soulskin by becoming too involved with ego, by being too exacting, perfectionistic," or unnecessarily martyred, or driven by a blind ambition, or by being dissatisfied--about self, family, commu- nity, culture, world--and not saying or doing anything about it, or by pretending we are an unending source for others, or by not doing all we can to help ourselves. Oh, there are as many ways to lose the soulskin as there are women in the world. The only way to hold on to this essential soulskin is to retain an exquisitely pristine consciousness about its value and uses. But, since no one can consistently maintain acute consciousness, no one can keep the soulskin absolutely every moment day and night. But we can keep the theft of it to a bare minimum. We can develop that ojo agudo, the shrewd eye that watches the conditions all around and guards our psychic territory accordingly. The "Sealskin, Soulskin" story, however, is about an instance of what we might call aggravated theft. This big theft can, with consciousness, be mediated in the fu- ture if we will pay attention to our cycles and the call to take leave and return home. Every creature on earth returns to home. It is ironic that we have made wildlife refuges for ibis, pelican, egret, wolf, crane, deer, mouse, moose, and bear, but not for ourselves in the places where we live day after day. We understand that the loss of habitat is the most disas- trous event that can occur to a free creature. We fervently point out how other creatures' natural territories have become surrounded by cities, ranches, highways, noise, and other dissonance, as though we are not surrounded by the same, as though we are not affected also. We know that for creatures to live on, they must at least from time to time have a home place, a place where they feel both protected and free.”

“In Jungian psychology, the ego is often described as a small island of consciousness that floats in a sea of unconsciousness. However, in folklore the ego is portrayed as a creature of appetite, often symbol- ized by a not very bright human or animal surrounded by forces very mystifying to it, and over which it attempts to gain control. Some- times the ego is able to gain control in a most brutish and destructive manner, but in the end, through the heroine's or hero's progress, it most often loses its bid to reign. In the beginning of one's life, the ego is curious about the soul- world, but more often it is concerned with fulfilling its own hungers. The ego is initially born into us as potential, and is shaped, devel- oped, and filled up with ideas, values, and duties by the world around us: our parents, our teachers, our culture. And this is as it should be, for it becomes our escort, our armor, and our scout in the outer world. However, if the wildish nature is not allowed to emanate up- ward through the ego, giving it color, juice, and instinctive respon- siveness, then although the culture may approve of what has been fashioned in this ego, the soul does not, cannot, will not approve such incompleteness of its work. The lonely man in the tale is attempting to participate in the life of the soul. But like the ego, he is not particularly built for it, and tries to grab at the soul rather than develop a relationship with it. Why does the ego steal the sealskin? Like all other lonely or hungry things, it loves the light. It sees light, and the possibility of being close to the soul, and it creeps up to it and steals one of its essential camouflages. Ego cannot help itself. It is what it is; attracted to the light. Even though it cannot live under the water, it has its own yearning for re lationship with the soul. The ego is crude in comparison to the soul. Its way of doing things is usually not evocative or sensitive. But it has a tiny and dimly understood longing for the beautiful light. And this, in some way and for some time, calms the ego.”

“They are dying for new life. They are panting for the sea. They are living just for next month, just till this semesters past, can't wait till winter is finally over so they can feel alive again, just waiting for a mystically  assigned date somewhere in the future when they will be free to do some wondrous thing. They think they will die if they don’t..... you fill in the blank. And there is a quality of mourning to it all.  There is angst. There is bereftness. There is wistfulness. There is a longing. There is plucking at threads in one's skirt and staring long from windows. And it is not a temporary discomfort. It stays, and grows more and more intense over time. Yet women continue in their day-to-day routines, looking shepist, acting guilty and smirky. "Yes, yes, yes, I know," they say. "I should, but, but, but . » It is the buts" in their sentences that are the dead giveaways that they have stayed too long. An incompletely initiated woman in this depleted state erroneously thinks she is deriving more spiritual credit by staying than she thinks she will gain by going. Others are caught up in, as they say in Mex- ico, dar a algo un tirón fuerte, always tugging at the sleeve of the Vir- gin, meaning they are working hard and ever harder to prove that they are acceptable, that they are good people. But there are other reasons for the divided woman. She is not used to letting others take the oars. She may be a practitioner of "kid lit which is a litany that goes like this: "But my kids need this, my kids need that, etcetera."12 She does not realize that by sacrificing her need for return, she teaches her children to make the very same sat- rifices of their own needs once they are grown. Some women are afraid that those around them will not under stand their need for return. And not all may. But the woman mut understand this herself: When a woman goes home according to het Own cycles, others around her are given their own individuaticn work, their own vital issues to deal with. Her return to home allows others growth and development too.”

“There are many ways to go home; many are mundane, some are di- vine. My clients tell me these mundane endeavors constitute a return to home for them . . . although I caution you, the exact placement of the aperture to home changes from time to time, so its location may be different this month than last. Rereading passages of books and single poems that have touched them. Spending even a few minutes near a river, a stream, a creek. Lying on the ground in dappled light. Being with a loved one without kids around. Sitting on the porch shelling something, knitting something, peeling something. Walking or driving for an hour, any direction, then returning. Boarding any bus, destination unknown. Making drums while listening to music. Greeting sunrise. Driving out to where the city lights do not interfere with the night sky. Praying. A special friend. Sitting on a bridge with legs dangling over. Holding an infant. Sitting by a window in a café and writing. Sitting in a circle of trees. Drying hair in the sun. Putting hands in a rain barrel. Potting plants, being sure to get hands very muddy. Beholding beauty, grace, the touching frailty of human beings. So, it is not necessarily an overland and arduous journey to go home, yet I do not want to make it seem that it is simplistic, for there Is much resistance to going home no matter if it be easy or hard.”

“The great healer archetype carries wisdom, goodness, knowing, caregiving, and all the other things associated with a healer. So, it is good to be generous and kind and helpful like the great healer arche- type. But only to a point. Beyond that, it exerts a hindering influence on our lives. Women's "heal everything, fix everything" compulsion is a major entrapment constructed by the requirements placed upon us by our own cultures, mainly pressures to prove that we are not just standing around taking up space and enjoying ourselves, but that we have redeemable value-_in some parts of the world, it is fair to say, to prove that we have value and therefore should be allowed to live. These pressures are introduced into our psyches when we are very young and unable to judge or resist them. They become law to us. unless or until we challenge them. But the cries of the suffering world cannot all be answered by a sin- gle person all the time. We can truly only choose to respond to those that allow us to go home on a regular basis, otherwise our heart- lights dim to almost nothing. What the heart wishes to help is some- times different from what the soul's resources be. If a woman values her soulskin, she will decide these matters according to how close she is to and how often she has been "home." While archetypes may emanate through us for short periods of time, in what we call numinous experience, no woman can emanate an archetype continuously. Only the archetype itself can be ever-able, all giving, eternally energetic. We may try to emulate these, but they are ideals, not achievable by humans, and not meant to be.”

“Women I've worked with who have not been home in twenty or more years always weep upon first setting foot on that psychic ground again. For various reasons, which seemed like good ones at the time, they spent years accepting permanent exile from the home- land; they forgot how immensely good it is for rain to fall on dry earth. For some, home is the taking up of an endeavor of some sort. Women begin to sing again after years of finding reason not to. They commit themselves to learn something they've been heartfelt about for a long time. They seek out the lost people and things in their lives. They take back their voices and write. They rest. They make some corner of the world their own. They execute immense or intense de- cisions. They do something that leaves footprints. For some, home is a forest, a desert, a sea. In truth, home is holo- graphic. It is carried at full power in even a single tree, a solitarv cactus in a plant shop window, a pool of still water.”

“For how long does one go home? As long as one can or until you have yourself back again. How often is it needed? Far more often if you are a “sensitive” and are very active in the outer world. Less so if you have thick skin and are not so “out there.” Each woman knows in her heart how often and how long is needed. It is a matter of assessing the condition of the shine in one’s eyes, the vibrancy of one’s mood, the vitality of one’s senses. How do we balance the need to go home with our daily lives? We pre-plan home into our lives. It is always amazing how easily women can “take time away” if there is illness, if a child needs them, if the car breaks down, if they have a toothache. Going home has to be given the same value, even stated in crisis proportions if necessary. For it is unequivocally true, if a woman doesn’t go when it’s her time to go, the hairline crack in her soul/psyche becomes a ravine, and the ravine becomes a roaring abyss. If a woman absolutely values her going-home cycles, those around her will also learn to value them. It is true that significant “home” can be reached by taking time away from the click-clack of daily rou­ tine, time that is inviolate and solely for ourselves. “Solely for our­ selves” means different things to different women. For some being in a room with the door closed, but still being accessible to others, is a fine return to home. For others though, the place from which to dive to home needs to be without even a tiny interruption. No “Mommy, Mommy, where are my shoes?” No “Honey, do we need anything from the grocery store?” For this woman, the inlet to her deep home is evoked by silence. No me molestes. Utter Silence, with a capital U and a capital S. For her, the sound of wind through a great loom of trees is silence. For her, the crash of a mountain stream is silence. For her, thunder is si­ lence. For her, the natural order of nature, which asks nothing in re­ turn, is her life-giving silence. Each woman chooses both as she can and as she must. Regardless of your home time, an hour or days, remember, other people can pet your cats even though your cats say only you can do it right. Your dog will try to make you think you are abandoning a child on the highway, but will forgive you. The grass will grow a little brown but it will revive.”

“In order to converse with the wild feminine, a woman must tempo rarily leave the world and inhabit a state of aloneness in the oldest sense of the word. Long ago the word alone was treated as two words, all one 20 To be all one meant to be wholly one, to be in one- ness, either essentially or temporarily. That is precisely the goal of sol. itude, to be all one. It is the cure for the frazzled state so common to modern women, the one that makes her, as the old saying goes, "leap onto her horse and ride off in all directions." Solitude is not an absence of energy or action, as some believe, but is rather a boon of wild provisions transmitted to us from the soul. In ancient times, as recorded by physician-healers, religious and mys- tics, purposeful solitude was both palliative and preventative. It was used to heal fatigue and to prevent weariness. It was also used as an oracle, as a way of listening to the inner self to solicit advice and guidance otherwise impossible to hear in the din of daily life. Women from ancient times as well as modern aboriginal women often set a sacred place aside for this communion and inquiry. Tradi- tionally it is said to have been set aside during women's menses, for during that time a woman lives much closer to self-knowing than usual; the membrane between the unconscious and the conscious minds thins considerably. Feelings, memories, sensations that are nor- mally blocked from consciousness pass over into cognizance without resistance: When a woman takes solitude during this time, she has more material to sift through.”

“For myself, solitude is rather like a folded-up forest that I carry with me everywhere and unfurl around myself when I have need. I sit at the feet of the great old trees of my childhood. From that vantage point, I ask my questions, receive my answers, then coalesce my woodland back down to the size of a love note till next time. The experience is immediate, brief, informative. Truly the only thing one needs for intentional solitude is the ability to tune out distractions. A woman can learn to detach from other people, noise, and chatter, no matter if she is in the midst of a con- tentious board meeting, no matter if she is being stalked by a house that needs to be cleaned by bulldozer, no matter if she is surrounded by eighty loquacious relatives, fighting, singing, and dancing their way through a three-day wake. If you have ever been a teenager, you definitely know how to tune out. If you have ever been the mother of an insomniac two-year-old, you know how to take intentional soli- tude. It is not hard to do, just hard to remember to do.”

“Because it is considered such an untoward thing, we have learned to camouflage this interval of soulful communication by naming it in very mundane terms. So, it has been named thusly: "talking to oneself," being "lost in thought," "staring off into space," or "day- dreaming." This euphemistic language is inculcated by many seg ments of our culture, for unfortunately, we are taught from childhood onward to feel embarrassment if found communing with soul, and es- pecially in pedestrian environments such as work or school. Somehow, the educational and business world has felt that such time spent at being "all one," is unproductive, when in fact it is the most fecund. It is the wild soul who channels ideas into our imagina- tion, whereupon we sort through these to find which we will imple- ment, which are most applicable and productive. It is commingling with soul that causes us to glow bright with spirit, willing to assert our talents, whatever they might be. It is that brief, even momentary, but intentional union that supports us to live out our inner lives so that instead of burying them in the self-inversion of shame, fear of re- prisal or attack, lethargy, complacency, or other limiting reasonings and excuses, we let our inner lives wave, flare, blaze on the outside for all to see.”

“Alternatively the voices may whisper, "Only if you have a doctor- ate degree will your work be decent, only if you are lauded by the Queen, only if you receive such and such award, only if you are pub- lished in such and such magazine, only if, if, if." This only-iffing is like stuffing the soul with junk food. It is one thing to be fed with any old thing; it is quite another to be truly nour- ished. Most often the logic of the complex is extremely faulty, even though it will try to convince you otherwise. One of the greatest problems of the creative complex is the accusa- tion that whatever you're doing won't work because you're not think- ing logically, you're not being logical, what you have done so far isn't logical and is therefore doomed to failure. First of all, the primary stages of creating are not logical--nor should they be. If the complex succeeds in stopping you with this, it has you. Tell it to sit down and be quiet or go away till you're done. Remember, if logic were all there really was to the world, then surely all men would ride sidesaddle. I've seen women work long, long hours at jobs they despise in or- der to buy very expensive items for their houses, mates, or children. They put their considerable talents on the back burner. I've seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write ... and you know it's a funny thing about house cleaning . . . it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman. A woman must be careful to not allow over-responsibility (or over- respectability) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she be- lieves she "should" be doing. Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.”

“It may also be that a woman's creative process is misunderstood or disrespected by those around her. It is up to her to inform them that when she has "that look" in her eyes, it does not mean she is a vacant lot waiting to be filled. It means she is balancing a big cardhouse of ideas on a single fingertip, and she is carefully connecting all the cards using tiny crystalline bones and a little spit, and if she can just get it all to the table without it falling down or flying apart, she can bring an image from the unseen world into being. To speak to her in that moment is to create a Harpy wind that blows the entire structure to tatters. To speak to her in that moment is to break her heart. And yet, a woman may do this to herself by talking away her ideas until all the arousal is gone from them, or by not putting her foot down about people creeping off with her creative tools and materials, or by the simple oversight of not buying the right equipment to exe- cute the creative work properly, or by stopping and starting so many times, by allowing everyone and their cat to interrupt her at will, that the project falls into a shambles. If the culture in which a woman lives attacks the creative function of its members, if it splits or shatters any archetype or perverts its de- sign or meaning, these will be incorporated in their broken state into the psyches of its members in the same way; as a broken-winged force rather than a hale one filled with vitality and possibility.”

“Begin; this is how to clear the polluted river. If you're scared, seared to fail, I say begin already, fail if you must, pick yourself up, start again. If you fail again, you fail. So what? Begin again. It is not the failure that holds us back but the reluctance to begin over again that causes us to stagnate. If you're scared, so what? If you're afraid something's going to leap out and bite you, then for heaven's sake, get it over with already. Let your fear leap out and bite you so you can get it over with and go on. You will get over it. The fear will pass. In this case, it is better if you meet it head-on, feel it, and get it over with, than to keep using it to avoid cleaning up the river. Protect your time; this is how to banish pollutants. I know a fierce painter here in the Rockies who hangs this sign on the chain that closes off the road to her house when she is in a painting or thinking mode: "I am working today and am not receiving visitors. I know you think this doesn't mean you because you are my banker, agent, or best friend. But it does." Another sculptor I know hangs this sign on her gate: "Do not dis turb unless I've won the lottery or Jesus has been sighted on the Old Taos Highway." As you can see, the well-developed animus has excel- lent boundaries. Stay with it. How to further banish this pollution? By insisting nothing will stop us from exercising the well-integrated animus, by continuing our soul-spinning, wing-making ventures, our art, our Psychic mending and sewing, whether we feel strong or not, whether we feel ready or not. If necessary by tying ourselves to the mast, the chair, the desk, the tree, the cactus--wherever we create. It is essen- tial, even though often painful, to put in the necessary time, to not skirt the difficult tasks inherent in striving for mastery. A true creative life burns in more ways than one. Negative complexes that arise along the way are banished or transformed--your dreams will guide you the last part of the way-by putting your foot down, once and for all, and by saying, "I love my creative life more than I love cooperating with my own op pression." If we were to abuse our children, Social Services would show up at our doors. If we were to abuse our pets, the Humane So- city would come to take us away. But there is no Creativity Patrol”

“I saw how ladylikeness in the wrong situation actually throttled a woman rather than allowing her to breathe. To laugh you have to be able to exhale and take another breath in quick succession. We know from kinesiology and various other body therapies such as Hakomi, that to take a breath causes one to feel one’s emotions, that when we wish not to feel, we hold our breath instead. In laughter, a woman breathes fully, and when she does, she may begin to feel unsanctioned feelings. And what could these feelings be? Well, they turn out not to be feelings so much as relief and remedies for feelings, often causing the release of stopped-up tears or the rec­ lamation of forgotten memories, or the bursting of chains on the sen­ sual personality.”

“In Buddhism there is a questing action called nyübu, which means to go into the mountains in order to understand oneself and to re- make one's connections to the Great. It is a very old ritual related to the cycles of preparing the earth, sowing, and harvesting. While it might be good to go into the real mountains if possible, there are also mountains in the underworld, in one's own unconscious, and luckily, we all carry the entrance to the underworld right in our own psyches, so we can go into the mountains for renewal with dispatch. In mythos, a mountain is sometimes understood as a symbol de- scribing the levels of mastery one must attain before one can ascend to the next level. The lowest part of the mountain, the foothills, often represents the urge toward consciousness. All that occurs in the foot- hills is thought of in terms of maturing consciousness. The middle part of the mountain is often thought of as the steeping part of the process, the part that tests the knowledge learned at lower levels. The higher mountain represents intensified learning; the air is thin there, it takes endurance and determination to stay at the tasks. The peak of the mountain represents confrontation with the ultimate wisdom, such as that in mythos wherein the old woman lives atop the moun- tain, or as in this story, the wise old bruin. So, it is good to take to the mountain when we don't know what else to do. When we are drawn to quests we know little about, this makes life and develops soul. In climbing the unknown mountain we gain true knowledge of the instinctive psyche and the creative acts of which it is capable--that is our goal. Learning occurs differently for each person. But the instinctual viewpoint that emanates from the wild unconscious, and that is cyclical, begins to be the only one that makes sense of and gives meaning to life, our lives. It unerringly in- forms us about what to do next. Where can we find this process that will free us? On the mountain.”

“We can have all the knowledge in the universe, and it comes down to one thing: practice. It comes down to going home and step-by-step implementing what we know. As often as nec- essary, and for as long as possible, or forever, whichever comes first. It is very reassuring to know that when one is in a burgeoning rage one knows precisely and with the skill of a craftswoman what to do about it: wait it out, release illusions, take it for a climb on the moun- tain, speak with it, respect it as a teacher. We are given many markers in this story, many ideas about coming to balance: making patience, giving the enraged one kindness and time to get over his rage through introspection and questing. There is an old saying: Before Zen, mountains were mountains and trees were trees. During Zen, mountains were thrones of the spirits and trees were the voices of wisdom. After Zen. mountains were mountains and trees were trees. While the woman was on the mountain, learning, everything was magic. Now that she is off the mountain, the so-called magical hair has been burned in the fire that destroys illusion, and now it is time for "after Zen." Life is supposed to become mundane again. Yet she has the bounty of her experience on the mountain. She has knowing. The energy that was bound up in rage can be used for other things. Now a woman who has come to terms with rage returns to mun- dane life with new knowing, a new sense that she can more artfully live her life. Yet one day in the future, a something--a look, a word, a tone of voice, a feeling of being patronized, unappreciated, or ma- nipulated against one's will, one of these--will crop up again. Then her residue of pain will catch fire."

“Rage left over from old injuries can be compared to the trauma of a shrapnel wound. One can pick out almost all the pieces of shattered metal from the missile, but the tiniest shards remain. One would think that if most are out, that would be that. Not so. On some oc- casions, those tiniest shards twist and turn within and cause an ache that feels like the original wounding (rage rising up) all over again. But it is not the original and vast rage that causes this welling up, it is the very small particles of it, the irritants still left in the psyche that can never be fully excised. These cause a pain that is almost as intense as that of the original injury.”

“They are involved in drastic maneuvers on three fronts: one in trying to contain the outside event, one in attempting to contain the pain broadcasting from the old injury inside, and one trying to secure safety of position by running, head down in a psychological crouch. It is too much to ask a single individual to take on the equivalent of a gang of three and try to KO all of them at one time. That is why it is imperative to stop in the midst of it all, withdraw, and take sol- itude. It is too much to try to fight and handle feeling gut-shot at the same time. A woman who has climbed the mountain withdraws, deals with the older event first, then the more recent event, decides her position, shakes out her ruff, puts up her ears, and goes back out to act with dignity.”

“None of us can entirely escape our history. We can certainly put it in the background, but it is there nevertheless. However, if you will do these things for yourself, you will bridge the rage and eventually everything will calm down and be fine. Not perfect, but fine. You'll be able to move ahead. The time of the shrapnel rage will be over. You'll handle it better and better each time because you'll know when it is time to call in the healer again, to climb the mountain, release yourself from the illusions that the present is an exact and calculated replay of the past. A woman remembers that she can be both fierce and generous at the same time. Rage is not like a kidney stone-it you wait long enough, it will pass. No, no. You must take right ac- tion. Then it will pass, and more creation will come to your life.”

“But in the story, the mill is not milling. The psyche's miller is unemployed. This means nothing is being done with all the raw material that comes into our lives on a daily basis, and that no sense is being made of all the grains of knowing that blow into our faces from the world and from the underworld. If the miller has no work, the psy- che has stopped nourishing itself in critically important ways. The milling of grain has to do with the creative urge. For whatever reason, the creative life of a woman's psyche is at a standstill. A woman who feels thusly senses that she is no longer fragrant with ideas, that she is not fired with invention, that she is not grinding finely to find the pith of things. Her mill is silenced. There appears to be a natural slumber that comes upon humans at certain times in their lives. From raising my own, and from my work with the same group of gifted children over a period of years, I saw that this sleep seems to descend upon children at age eleven or there- abouts. That is when they begin to take acute measurements about how they compare with others. During this time their eyes go from clear to hooded, and though they are always in motion like Mexican jumping beans, they are often dying of terminal cool. Whether they are being too cool or too well-behaved, in neither state are they re- sponsive to what goes on deep inside, and a sleep gradually covers over their bright-eyed, responsive natures. Let us further imagine that during this time we are offered some- thing for nothing. That somehow we have twisted ourselves around to believe that if we will remain asleep something will accrue to us. Women know what this means. When a woman surrenders her instincts that tell her the right time to say yes and when to say no, when she gives up her insight, intui- ton, and other wildish traits, then she finds herself in situations that promised gold but ultimately give grief. Some women relinquish their art for a grotesque financial marriage, or give up their life's dream in order to be a "too-good" wife, daughter, or girl, or surrender their true calling in order to lead what they hope will be a more accept- able, fulfilling, and especially, more sanitary life. In these ways, and others, we lose our instincts.”

“However, back in misty time, it is a good bet that this sort of story originally presented the crone playing the part of the initiator/trouble causer, making things difficult for the sweet young heroine so embar. kation from the land of the living to the land of the dead could occur. Psychically, this is cohesive with concepts in Jungian psychology, the- ology, and the old night religions that the Self, or in our parlance, the Wild Woman, seeds the psyche with perils and challenges in order that the human in despair drives herself back down into her original nature looking for answers and strength, thereby reuniting with the great wild Self and, as much as possible thereafter, moving as one. In one way this distortion in the tale distorts our information about the ancient processes of a woman's return to the underworld. But ac- tally, this replacement of devil for crone is strikingly relevant to us today, for in order to discover the ancient ways of the unconscious, we often find ourselves fighting off the Devil in the form of cultural, familial, or intra-psychic injunctions that devalue the soul-life of the wild feminine. In this sense, the tale works either way, both by leav- ing enough bones of the old ritual so we can reconstruct it, and by showing us how the natural predator tries to cut us away from our rightful powers, how it tries to take our soulful work from us.”

“How does one live in the topside world and the underworld at the same time and on a day-to-day basis? What does one have to do to come down into the underworld on one's own? What circumstances in life help women with the descent? Do we have a choice about going or stay. ing? What spontaneous help have you received from the instinctive nature during such a time? When women (or men) are in this state of dual citizenship, they sometimes make the mistake of thinking that to go away from the world, to leave the mundane life, with its chores, its duties that not only beckon but irritate beyond reason, that this is a sterling idea. But this is not the best way, for the outer world at these times is the only rope left around the ankle of the woman who is wandering, working, hanging upside down in the underworld. It is an excruciatingly im- portant time, when the mundane must play its proper role in exert. ing an "otherworldly» tension and balance that helps lead to a good end.”

“let us consider that in Greek mythology, Persephone was not only a mother's daughter, but also the queen of the land of the dead. In lesser-known stories about her, she endures various torments such as hanging for three days upon the World Tree in order to re- deem the souls who have not enough suffering of their own to deepen their spirits.”

“To give birth is the psychic equivalent of becoming oneself, one self, meaning an undivided psyche. Before this birth of new life in the underworld, a woman is likely to think all parts and personalities within her are rather like a hodgepodge of vagrants who wander in and out of her life. In the underworld birth, a woman learns that any. thing that brushes by her is a part of her. Sometimes this differentia- tion of all the aspects of psyche is hard to do, especially with the tendencies and urges we find repulsive. The challenge of loving unap- pealing aspects of ourselves is as much of an endeavor as any heroine has ever undertaken. Sometimes we are afraid that to identify more than one self within the psyche might mean that we are psychotic. While it is true that people with a psychotic disorder also experience many selves, identi- fying with or against them quite vividly, a person with no psychotic disorder holds all the inner selves in an orderly and rational man- ner. They are put to good use; the person grows and thrives. For the majority of women, mothering and raising the internal selves 1s a creative work, a way of knowledge, not a reason for becoming unnerved. So, the handless maiden is waiting to have a child, a new little wild self. The body in pregnancy does what it wants and knows to do. The new life latches on, divides, swells. A woman at this stage of the psy chic process may enter another enantiodromia, the psychic state in which all that was once held valuable is now not so valuable any- more, and further, may be replaced by new and extreme cravings tor odd and unusual sights, experiences, endeavours.”

“Once we have been through the cycle, we can choose any or all tasks to renew our lives at any time and for any reason. Here are some: to leave the old parents of the psyche, descend to the psychic land unknown, while depending on the goodwill of whomever we meet along the way to bind the wounds inflicted by the poor bargain we made somewhere in our lives to wander psychically hungry and trust nature to feed us to find the Wild Mother and her succor to make contact with the sheltering animus of the underworld to converse with the psychopomp (the magician) to behold the ancient orchards (energic forms) of the feminine to incubate and give birth to the spiritual childSelf to bear being misunderstood, to be severed again and again from love to be made sooty, muddy, dirty to stay in the realm of the woodspeople for seven years till the child is the age of reason to wait to regenerate the inner sight, inner knowing, inner healing of the hands child in, to continue onward even though one has lost all, save the spirirual to retrace and grasp her childhood, girlhood, and womanhood fo re form her animus as a wild and native force; to love him; and Mother and the new childSelf her anasummate the wild marriage”

“To repair injured in- stinct, banish naïveté, and over time to learn the deepest aspects of psyche and soul, to hold on to what we have learned, to not turn away, to speak out for what we stand for ... all this takes a bound- less and mystical endurance. When we come up out of the under- world after one of our undertakings there, we may appear unchanged outwardly, but inwardly we have reclaimed a vast and womanly wild- ness. On the surface we are still friendly, but beneath the skin, we are most definitely no longer tame.”

“We began our search for the wild, whether as girlchildren or as adult women, because in the midst of some ardent endeavor we felt that a wild and supportive presence was near. Perhaps we found her tracks across fresh snow in a dream. Or psychically, we noticed a bent twig here and there, pebbles overturned so their wet sides faced upward ... and we knew that something blessed had passed our way. We sensed within our own psyches the sound of a familiar breath from afar, we felt tremors in the ground, and we innately knew that some thing powerful, someone important, some wild freedom within us was on the move. We could not turn from it, but rather followed, learning more and more how to leap, how to run, how to shadow all things that came across our psychic ground. We began to shadow the Wild Woman and she lovingly shadowed us in return. She howled and we tried to answer her, even before we remembered how to speak her language, and even before we exactly knew to whom we were speaking. And she waited for us, and encouraged us. This is the miracle of the wild and instinctual nature. Without full knowing, we knew.”

“GENERAL WOLF RULES FOR LIFE 1. Eat 2. Rest 3. Rove in between 4. Render loyalty 5. Love the children 6. Cavil in moonlight 7. Tune your ears 8. Attend to the bones 9. Make love 10. Howl often”

“In some ways, old emotion is like a mental set of piano strings in the psyche. A rumble from topside can cause a tremendous vibration of those strings in the mind. They can be made to sing out without ever being directly plucked. Events that carry similar overtones, words, visual features of the original events cause a person to "fight" to keep the old material from "singing out." In Jungian psychology, this eruption of great feeling tone is called constellation of a complex. Unlike Freud, who branded such behavior neurotic, Jung considered it ac- tually a cohesive response, similar to that made by animals who have been previously harassed, tortured, frightened, or injured. The animal tends to react to smells, mo- tons, instruments, sounds which are similar to the original injuring ones. Humans have the same recognition and response pattern. Many people control old complex material by staying away from persons or events that stir them. Sometimes this is rational and useful and sometimes not. So a man may avoid all women who have red hair similiar to that of his battering father. A woman may steer clear of all contentious argument for it brings up so much in her. However, we try to strengthen our ability to stay in all sorts of situations regardless of com- plexes because this staying power gives us a voice in the world. It is what gives us abil- ity to change things around us. If we are solely reactive to our complexes we will hide in a hole for the rest of our lives. If we can gain some tolerance of them, utilize them as our allies, for instance use old anger to put teeth into our proclamations, then, we can form and reform many things.”

#book

[hathorwritings]

Rise

It’s hard when you’re crying for the world,

But being told to hold back your tears.

Isn’t she dying?

Even sadder, didn’t she die?

Well why aren’t we all crying?

Not an innocent in its destruction.

That’s wise.

Intentions don’t excuse the bruises.

Let’s all have a sob,

For our greed is why she bleeds,

For our pride, for our righteous,

The sinner, the guilty

And innocent,

Animal and man.

Most for your insensitivity.

It’s her time to mourn,

Silence for Mother Earth.

Your abuse must end.

You’ve dug into her soil,

Make your clothes,

Drape yourself with jewels,

And laugh at the being who gave it to you.

Cry for Mother Earth.

Frivolously live off her resources,

While you fight wars on her back,

And stake claim on her beauty,

Pillage her cities and towns,

And murder her wildlife and children.

Kneel to Mother Earth.

Before she restores what you’ve broken.

Before she sees what you fought for.

Before she can hear the souls of

Blood soaked lands.

For your lusts, insatiable appetite

For chaos.

For taking others pains

To justify your opulence.

Will she wail with wind?

Blow with fire?

Lead with the undead?

Rise up nature.

Or rise up the lost

For their redemption.

Remember Mother Earth.

While you forgot her,

Her eyes were on you.

Soon you will know how

You will be defeated by Mother Earth….

#black girls rock #black poets matter #brown girls #self love #poetrycommunity #women writers #mother nature #black poems #love quotes #my poety #poetry