"In lak'ech ala k'in" is a Mayan greeting which translates as "I am You and You are Me." It is the Mayan 'device' for remembering that we are all intimately related to everyone and ALL of nature on this planet, "...and may we never even pretend that we are not."
~Sinoun Che
Which is why we have poetry.
rainbow background text: Armageddon is terrible but our only other option was pronouns
If you paid taxes for 2025, you likely paid:
$124 — school lunch & nutrition programs
$49 — diplomacy to prevent wars
$19 — USPS
$19 — Federal Aviation Administration
$18 — national parks
and
$4,049 — weapons and war.
These priorities are hurting us all. We need change. #TaxDay
image of women dancing under moon text: pretty shitty how baseline human activities like singing, dancing, and making art got turned into skills instead of being seen as behaviors. so now it's like 'the point of doing them is to get good at them' and not 'this is a thing humans do the way birds sing and bees make hives.'
image of two children standing on stools to reach checkout desk at library text: I think the public library system is one of the most amazing American institutions. Free for everybody. If you ever get the blues about the status of American culture there are still more public libraries than there are McDonald's. During the worst of the Depression not one public library closed their doors. David McCullough
My household has easily had 80 or more library items out at a time, mostly books but also music and movies. Plus our library loans toys, tools, musical instruments, games, microscopes, sewing machines, and more. We are constant, exultant, ever-grateful library patrons.
Monk standing at crossroads, signs pointing opposite directions. One reads "find yourself." The other reads "lose yourself." Monk's thought bubble "fuck."
image from The Simpsons text: a researcher invented a fake eye condition called bionimania, uploaded two obviously fraudulent papers about it to an academic server, and watched major AI systems present it as real medicine within two weeks. the papers thanks starfleet academy, cited finding from professor sideshow bob foundation and fellowship of the ring university, and stated mid-paper that the entire thing was made up. Google's gemini told users it was caused by blue light. perplexity cited its prevalence at one in 90K people.
How are women supposed to walk through life knowing what we know? How are we supposed to get on a boat or climb a mountain, get a drink, sit on a plane, walk on a street, ride a train, knowing what we know?
image: cover of the book Dune, cover art is stylized mountains with a moon surrounded by moons text: “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” ~Frank Herbert
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
~Frank Herbert
image: confused looking child text: me trying to act normal around my friends but I start thinking about outer space and my own existence
bright spring scene with rainbow "I can't believe I exist on a planet with aurora borealis and coral reefs and snow capped Alps and mossy stones and sparkling waterfalls and I have to fight fascists."
photo of Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg at Trump inauguration text: “I don't think the robots are taking over. I think the men who play with toys have taken over. And if we don't take the toys out of their hands, we're fools." - Ray Bradbury
pic of Einstein wall mural text Albert Einstein failed his first college entrance exam in 1895
A raven sits high in the air perched on his home tree’s branch clad in a beautiful red scarf. He wears bifocals and looks pensive and scholarly. In his regal posture, we see to his right his collection of reading which includes a field guide to decent humans and other books in his family’s nest. It appears to be a cool but sunny & windy day as he takes in his lot in life with large and fluffy clouds, moving behind him in the sky.
I love what he’s reading
Young adult happiness is falling. Percent of young people who are pretty or very happy has dropped from 88% to 76% over the last 15 years after having held fairly steady between 1980 and 2010
My hottest “I have no data to back this up” take is that phones aren’t making young people less happy. What’s making them less happy is living in a world where everyone is having their reality defined by recommendation algorithms that can only care about whether something keeps you watching.
Makes you wonder who these know-it-all influencers expect will grow and transport food, stock shelves, prepare meals, wait on tables, clean homes and businesses, maintain landscaping, wash clothes, staff hotels, care for people in the earliest and latest years of life?
image: person in rabbit costume looking off into sky text: blessed are the weird people: the poets, misfits, writers, mystics, and painters for they teach us to see the world through different eyes. jacob nordby
same
I hope your spring rituals are at least this intriguing.
image of whales text: there are many great minds on earth and not all are human
image of astronaut Christina Koch looking out Artemis II window poem: THE VIEW FROM ARTEMIS II Astronaut Christina Koch gazes out the window into space. She is the first woman, ever, to see Earth from that distance. “To Asia, Africa, and Oceania,” she transmits from 252,756 miles away, “we are looking back at you.” Four and a half billion years ago a massive protoplanet named Theia smashed into Earth so forcefully it embedded deep in Earth’s mantle and tilted Earth’s axis. Its debris coalesced into Moon. In Greek myth, Theia was a daughter born to Earth and Sky, known as Euryphaessa or “far shining one” due to her divine radiance. Beams of light from her eyes offered insight to mortals. Theia the protoplanet was rich in ice and likely gifted water to dry rocky Earth, making life possible. Giving us the capacity to have oceans and flowers, elephants and owls, books and music. Countless craters on the surface show how Moon has used her body to protect Earth through all their billions of years together by pulling space rocks into her orbit, cratering herself over and over again. Moon uses her gravitational pull to generate ocean tides. She calms Earth’s wobble. She inspires dreamers. Astronaut Koch calls all life “fragile and interconnected.” Her voice from space affirms, “We will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.” Laura Grace Weldon
image of the US Constitution text: Article II Executive Branch Section 4 Impeachment The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
image: painting of woman in tub under moonlight text: i know it is a privilege to feel things deeply, but what the fuck
image: path in forest text: when a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order by Ilya Prigogene, nobel prize winning chemist
Exactly
Or tears floating off into the faces of others?