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#saturday thoughts
hamletthedane · 2 months
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I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.
What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.
What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.
What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.
The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.
And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.
But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.
I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.
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hestiashearthfire · 1 year
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Do We "Work With" the Gods?
Lately I've been seeing #witchblr posts in my feed more often. Honestly, it’s incredibly exhausting to see witchcraft treated as synonymous with pagan/polytheist/non-Christian practices when it isn’t. Worship is not witchcraft and witchcraft is not worship. Wicca is it’s own belief system, and it deserves to be respected as such.
Worship of the Theoi isn’t witchcraft—it’s prayer, devotion, faith. Sure, a spell can be an act of prayer and worship, but that doesn’t mean prayer and worship of the gods is witchcraft too.
It’s just frustrating to see how prevalent neopagan/Wiccan concepts and ideas are in the pagan/polytheist community. It breaks my heart to see young polytheists afraid to pray or give offerings because they’ve been convinced that “deity work” or “working with” a god is dangerous, difficult, or required to even approach the gods.
The Theoi are present and real. We can and should ask them for help, and build kharis with them. Building a devotional relationship with the gods does require work, but that doesn't mean we are "working with" the gods in the same manner as witchcraft practitioners, nor do we have to.
Religion is not a dirty word. Faith and prayer are not exclusive to Christianity or Abrahamic faiths. We do not have to practice witchcraft to be valid pagans or approach the gods. Worship of the gods is open to all. The Theoi are with us; pray, and have faith they will listen.
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the-badger-mole · 1 year
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Why are ghosts so old?
I mean, why are ghost always from a long time ago? It's always some Victorian era waif in a long white nightgown or a child who died in a coal mine. People have died since then. Where are the ghosts in FUBU gear? The valley girls who died in neon legwarmers with their hair teased and sprayed to the heavens? Where are disembodied voices humming an eerie rendition of Oops! I Did It Again in the basement rec room? Someone, somewhere died while they were passing out samples dressed as a hot dog. Does it take a while for a ghost to be seen? Were people in the industrial era seeing the first Revolutionary War ghosts?
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“Do you ever think about the amount of flavors Oreos have?”
“I wonder how big the number is. I can list 20!”
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The funny thing about Covid is when everyone was saying during lockdown, "We need to get back to normal."
But for some of us, loneliness was already normal. And knowing that other people were going through what I've always known actually made me feel a little less alone.
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autumnsup · 4 months
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Sometimes life just... surprises me. Like when I share something I've written and revised to the point of not wanting to read it ever again, and then readers tell me they couldn't put it down. This isn't meant to be a humble-brag or self-promotion (or maybe it is and I just haven't caught up to the truth yet) but genuine wonderment. I guess the saying is true: what is one person's trash can truly be another person's treasure, even if it's just for a little while.
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githik · 1 year
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nothing brings me more joy than deleting freshly received e-mails
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madmadammym · 6 months
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The beast was so much better looking than the eventual prince in the animated film
In my opinion
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ninichii-xcix · 2 years
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People keep urging me to let go, to move on from you and find someone new. It wasn’t as easy as they made it seem, despite knowing that all the feelings I have will forever be unrequited.
But that didn’t make the feat impossible.
I’ve moved on, I’ve let go of everything we could have been and everything we will never be. I’ve buried all the emotions under the deepest pits of my heart, making sure it will never break free regardless of whatever happens in the future.
Yet instead of being happier, I feel emptier, lonelier. The weight in my chest grows heavier instead of lighter and it feels as if something is sucking all the joy in my life, preventing me from enjoying this false freedom I tricked myself into.
I don’t know what’s worse; agonizing over an unrequited love or drowning in the loneliness of not feeling anything at all.
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desire-and-magic · 9 months
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Fantasizing about a Dom putting me in a leash and taking me to a club ☺️🫠
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niksixx · 1 year
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Does anyone else just get randomly insecure? Like I feel as if I’ve failed as a woman.
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shinigami-striker · 1 year
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What I want for Christmas | Saturday, 12.24.2022
What I want for Christmas are these down below:
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hestiashearthfire · 8 months
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Pagan Problems: The nice beeswax candles are expensive.
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autumnmylife · 1 year
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"It is important from time to time to slow down, to go away by yourself, and simply be."
Eileen Caddy
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babygrl0415 · 1 year
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Meow
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autumnsup · 11 months
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So I've never confessed this to anyone, but when I was a teenager on the cusp of my twenties, I went through a phase of musical discovery that entailed "fixing" soundtracks which didn't contain all of the tracks that were actually in the movie. I was finally able to watch mostly whatever I wanted after a restrictive childhood, and felt dissatisfied with the soundtrack albums available to me. I thus decided to embark upon a quest to put together the REAL soundtracks to my favorite movies and TV series, for my own personal enjoyment.
Case in point: Velvet Goldmine. The OST is fantastic, to be clear, but there was obviously more going on in the background of the movie than what was on offer (possibly for budget/legal reasons). I verily went out and began to acquire more tracks, sometimes with dubious methods, and compiled a new playlist for myself that I titled, oh so creatively, "The Complete Velvet Goldmine."
Trouble was, there were still a couple tracks that were mostly impossible for me to obtain. There was the one Gary Glitter track that I found problematic because of the heinous acts of the singer (who recently got recalled to prison, thank gods), not to mention that it overlaid a part of Brian Slade's journey that made me cringe the most because boy, did it not age well. So I resigned myself to leaving it off.
Fast forward several years, and I finally - FINALLY - remembered that there is a perfectly decent cover version played by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, so I acquired that track too. This is probably as complete of a soundtrack experience as I'm going to have, short of getting my hands on the recording of Ewan McGregor singing "Gimme Danger." Which is not available to the public, right? RIGHT??
I like the original Iggy Pop version well enough, but folks, my cup would truly run over if there were a bootleg copy of the cover track floating around somewhere that I could download. Or, even more improbably, if Todd Haynes would deign to provide us with a new and improved soundtrack release. On vinyl or otherwise.
Not expecting that this will ever happen, but a fan can dream, can't they?
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