No subscription or hidden extras
Read through the most famous quotes by topic #natural
Behjet eased the horse forward again. "The harvest is failing. There will be no crop at all if this rain doesn't stop - not even hay." The rain. The rain she'd been so grateful for, the rain that concealed the warping of her shadow. It was going to kill people. ↗
#guilt #natural-disaster #rain #realization #unnatural-disaster
The fantastic postulates that there are forces in the outside world, and in our own natures, which we can neither know nor control, and these forces may even constitute the essence of our existence, beneath the comforting rational surface. The fantastic is, moreover, a product of human imagination, perhaps even an excess of imagination. It arises when laws thought to be absolute are transcended, in the borderland between life and death, the animate and the inanimate, the self and the world; it arises when the real turns into the unreal, and the solid presence into vision, dream or hallucination. The fantastic is the unexpected occurrence, the startling novelty which goes contrary to all our expectations of what is possible. The ego multiplies and splits, time and space are distorted. ↗
Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence. ↗
#biology #chemical-evolution #darwinism #evolution #naturalism
NAD MALOMĚSTSKOU KAŠNOU Vodo, vodo, vodičko, Ty nejsi ty, ty nejsi ty, Nepostojíš maličko – Tyrlityty – tyrlityty – Nemáš stání mi naslouchat, Tečeš, tečeš neustále, Dál a dále, co nejdále, Kovové tě roury ženou, Studna jen tě vyšplouchat Na vyhřátý starý rynk Hlinozvonnou, vychlazenou – Oblou, starý, nový čas Oblékáš obraz přes obraz, Prahnoucí mé žízně čumus, hladinou svou barvoměnnou (hladinou svou tvaroměnnou) měniíš každou vteřinou, přes okraj se kapky přeřinou – konkylandr – konkylandr – hlasu plna’s, plan šumu’s: „Jdi na vandr! Jdi na vandr!“ Z tebe bych pil tak rád! Kdybys přestala protékat, Ztepláš a skalíš se nastokrát, Samá lenost budeš, smrad, Co ti po tom, že mám tě rád – Cákycák – cákycát – Trvale chceš se rozlévat, Sebechvat jsi, sebechvat, Jsi poháněna i to, co pohání, A celek – toť čisté trvání. ↗
The blue sky, the brown soil beneath, the grass, the trees, the animals, the wind, and rain, and stars are never strange to me; for I am in and of and am one with them; and my flesh and the soil are one, and the heat in my blood and in the sunshine are one, and the winds and the tempests and my passions are one. I feel the 'strangeness' only with regard to my fellow men, especially in towns, where they exist in conditions unnatural to me, but congenial to them.... In such moments we sometimes feel a kinship with, and are strangely drawn to, the dead, who were not as these; the long, long dead, the men who knew not life in towns, and felt no strangeness in sun and wind and rain. ↗
In Tulsa, a girl would no sooner have run around with unstraightened hair than she would have run around naked. It would have been worse than running around naked, letting everyone see your naps (40). ↗
#midwest #natural-hair #self-esteem #white-supremacy #nature
Drugs and medical technology can be enormously beneficial when used to take care of real complications, but too often they are abused when applied to women birthing normally. These women are thus subjected to unnecessary risks. The key to this problem is informed consent, an ideal too seldom realized. Informed consent means that no woman during pregnancy or labor should ever be deceived into thinking that any drug or procedure (Demerol, Seconal, spinals, caudals, epidurals, paracervical block, etc.) is guaranteed safe. Not only are there no guaranteed safe drugs, but many of them have well-known, recognized side effects and potential side effects. Informed consent should mean that no woman would ever hear such falsehoods as, “This is harmless,” or, “I only give it in such a small dose that it can’t affect the baby,” or, “This is just a local and won’t reach the baby. ↗
But in the early 1970s, we were not birdwatching. We were birding, and that made all the difference. We were out to seek, to discover, to chase, to learn, to find as many different kinds of birds as possible — and, in friendly competition, to try to find more of them than the next birder. We became a community of birders, with the complications that human societies always have; and although it was the birds that had brought us together, our story became a human story after all. ↗
...I believe there is a legitimate aim of transcendence that is more modest and perhaps more realistic. We may not be able to rule out the skeptical possibility, and we may not be able to ground our normal capacity for understanding on something in which we can have even greater confidence; but it may still be possible to show how we can reasonably retain our natural confidence in the exercise of understanding, in spite of the apparent contingencies of our nature and formation. The hope is not to discover a foundation that makes our knowledge unassailably secure but to find a way of understanding ourselves that is not radically self-undermining, and that does not require us to deny the obvious. The aim would be to offer a plausible picture of how we fit into the world. Even in this more modest enterprise both theism and naturalistic reductionism fall short. Theism does not offer a sufficiently substantial explanation of our capacities, and naturalism does not offer a sufficiently reassuring one. ↗
