Dany Portrait :P

Reject reading social cues!! Embrace collecting personal intel via the mycorrhizal network that connect us all.

Can we also give little boys stuffed toys 🧸? They need things to hug and cuddle.

reblog if you need a hug

Blessed be 🌟

Reblog to bring fairy godpossum blessings upon your followers.

Use your libraries, folks. Show your librarians some love too 💕 ask them for book recommendations, and give thanks for the work they do. Libraries are some of the most efficient and least wasteful places. We get to borrow books we want to read and give them back then let other people borrow them. 📚♻️📚

🔥 The beacons are lit; the library calls for aid

The Trump administration has issued an executive order aimed at dismantling the Institute of Museum and Library Services - the ONLY federal agency for America's libraries.

Using just 0.003% of the federal budget, the IMLS funds services at libraries across the country; services like Braille and talking books for the visually impaired, high-speed internet access, and early literacy programs.

Libraries are known for doing more with less, but even we can't work with nothing.

How You Can Help:

🔥 Call your congressperson!

Use the app of your choice or look 'em up here: https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

Pro tip: If your phone anxiety is high, call at night and leave a voicemail. You can even write yourself a script in advance and read it off. Heck, read them this post if you want to.

Phones a total no-go? The American Library Association has a form for you: https://oneclickpolitics.global.ssl.fastly.net/messages/edit?promo_id=23577

🔥Tell your friends!

Tell strangers, for that matter. People in line at the check out, your elderly neighbor, the mail carrier - no one is safe from your library advocacy. Libraries are for everyone and we need all the help we can get.

...Wait, why do we need this IMLS thing again?

The ALA says it best in their official statement and lists some ways libraries across the country use IMLS funding:

But if you want a really specific answer, here at LCPL we use IMLS funding to provide our amazing interlibrary loan service. If we can't purchase an item you request (out of print books, for example) this service lets us borrow it from another library and check it out to you.

IMLS also funds the statewide Indiana Digital Library and Evergreen Indiana, which gives patrons of smaller Indiana libraries access to collections just as large and varied as the big libraries' collections.

As usual, cutting this funding will hurt rural communities the most - but every library user will feel it one way or another. Let's let Congress know that's unacceptable.

I see a human in the picture, but this post has such a delightful Hobbit energy. 💗💗💗

baps you on the head, lovingly. What are your top three favourite berries

(/bap'd)

I'm so glad you asked bc I do love a good berry. My favorite berry is any berry growing on a bush for me to eat! I go berry picking a lot, mostly to make jam, but I always keep some just to eat, and also I probably eat as many as I pick while I'm picking. Which slows down the process but I'm just a man.

No. 1 is salmonberries. I love the color & flavor variety! (the little blue berries are huckleberries). You can do so much with them, but they're delicious on their own, right off the bush.

For people with TikTok or Instagram, one of my dear mutuals, Madison Dawn (@ Alaskan8ive907 on both apps), is a Tlingit creator who makes a lot of very cool content about salmonberries and other foraging & fishing on Southeast Alaska's islands. Highly recommend!

One of my ALL TIME favorites is cloudberries (not pictured)! This can get confusing at times, because some people use "salmonberry" to refer to what I know as "cloudberries." It's a regional thing. I often follow the lead of my Indigenous friends and use the berry names in their languages to be more specific, but that doesn't always work either, depending on the language & place. There are so many names for beloved berries!!! I love them so much, I have 2 pairs of earrings by one of my fav artists, Siqiñiq Designs. This is my favorite pair! These are one of her many beautiful "aqpik" designs, the berry's name in more than one Inuit language:

I'm also a big fan of picking blueberries and blackberries!

Although admittedly I think blackberries are the most fun because you get so messy

I also love salal berries, mulberries, and black raspberries (not the same as blackberries)

Change.org

Sign the Petition

Free LaKeith Smith!

This is not justice. Please do not ruin this boys life.

Change.org

Sign the Petition

Justice for Lakeith Smith and A’Donte Washington!

Please sign the petition!!!

Your body is an ancestor. Your body is an altar to your ancestors. Every one of your cells holds an ancient and anarchic love story. Around 2.7 billion years ago free-living prokaryotes melted into one another to form the mitochondria and organelles of the cells that build our bodies today. All you need to do to honor your ancestors is to roll up like a pill bug, into the innate shape of safety: the fetal position. The curl of your body, then, is an altar not just to the womb that grew you, but to the retroviruses that, 200 million years ago taught mammals how to develop the protein syncytin that creates the synctrophoblast layer of the placenta. Breathe in, slowly, knowing that your breath loops you into the biome of your ecosystem. Every seven to ten years your cells will have turned over, rearticulated by your inhales and exhales, your appetites and proclivity for certain flavors. If you live in a valley, chances are the ancient glacial moraine, the fossils crushed underfoot, the spores from grandmotherly honey fungi, have all entered into and rebuilt the very molecular make up of your bones, your lungs, and even your eyes. Even your lungfuls of exhaust churn you into an ancestor altar for Mesozoic ferns pressurized into the fossil fuels. You are threaded through with fossils. Your microbiome is an ode to bacterial legacies you would not be able to trace with birth certificates and blood lineages. You are the ongoing-ness of the dead. The alembic where they are given breath again. Every decision, every idea, every poem you breathe and live is a resurrection of elements that date back to the birth of this universe itself. Today I realize that due to the miracle of metabolic recycling, it is even possible that my body, somehow, holds the cells of my great-great grandmother. Or your great-great grandmother. Or that I am built from carbon that once intimately orchestrated the flight of a hummingbird or a pterodactyl. Your body is an ecosystem of ancestors. An outcome born not of a single human thread, but a web of relations that ripples outwards into the intimate ocean of deep time.

Your Body is an Ancestor, Sophie Strand

I got to hold a 500,000 year old hand axe at the museum today.

It's right-handed

I am right-handed

There are grooves for the thumb and knuckle to grip that fit my hand perfectly

I have calluses there from holding my stylus and pencils and the gardening tools.

There are sharper and blunter parts of the edge, for different types of cutting, as well as a point for piercing.

I know exactly how to use this to butcher a carcass.

A homo erectus made it

Some ancestor of mine, three species ago, made a tool that fits my hand perfectly, and that I still know how to use.

Who were you

A man? A woman? Did you even use those words?

Did you craft alone or were you with friends? Did you sing while you worked?

Did you find this stone yourself, or did you trade for it? Was it a gift?

Did you make it for yourself, or someone else, or does the distinction of personal property not really apply here?

Who were you?

What would you think today, seeing your descendant hold your tool and sob because it fits her hands as well?

What about your other descendant, the docent and caretaker of your tool, holding her hands under it the way you hold your hands under your baby's head when a stranger holds them.

Is it bizarre to you, that your most utilitarian object is now revered as holy?

Or has it always been divine?

Or is the divine in how I am watching videos on how to knap stone made by your other descendants, learning by example the way you did?

Tomorrow morning I am going to the local riverbed in search of the appropriate stones, and I will follow your example.

The first blood spilled on it will almost certainly be my own, as I learn the textures and rhythm of how it's done.

Did you have cuss words back then? Gods to blaspheme when the rock slips and you almost take your thumbnail off instead? Or did you just scream?

I'm not religious.

But if spilling my own blood to connect with a stranger who shared it isn't partaking in the divine

I don't know what is.

I want to see free or affordable insulin for all. In 2024 no one should be dying because they can’t afford insulin.

Healthcare is a human right!