Persephone 🦋

Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them. 

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job. 

Kind of blue, Musubu Hagi

cosmic art x | x

& if I were to forgive you (& I know I could) who would be left who would be left                          to forgive me?

— Hieu Minh Nguyen, from “Afterwards,” published in Hobart

Polish editions of Moomin books from 1970 & 1980

The best kind of photo is when a cheeky cat has stolen a fish

“The combination of that brilliant brain and fragile body is very loveable. She has a sweet and childlike nature, from which her intellect is completely separate. I have never known anyone who was so profoundly sensitive, and who makes less of a business of that sensitiveness.”

Vita Sackville-West, describing Virginia Woolf, from a letter c. August 1928

the last couple of days I've been noticing way more buds than usual on the branches of trees and bushes. I think something big is about to happen

Vincent Van Gogh’s letters with sketches and studies

La Jeune Martyre (The Young Martyr) by Paul Delaroche, 1855. Featured in Rino Stefano Tagliafierro’s Beauty. |x|