Credit: Poetic Outlaws (Facebook) “The aim of life is to live it intensely, to be fully born, to be fully awake. To emerge from the ideas of infantile grandiosity into the conviction of one’s real though limited strength; to be able to accept the paradox that every one of us is the most important thing there is in the universe – and at the same time not more important than a fly or a blade of grass." ~ Erich Fromm

On days when my neighbors do laundry, the air is so full of that horrible synthetic detergent smell, I have to go inside. It didn't used to be this way.

Credit: Seer and Sage (Facebook) “Beauty grows in you to the extent that love grows, because charity itself is the soul’s beauty.” ~ Augustine of Hippo Do you seek beauty in the fleeting reflections of the mirror, or in the boundless capacity of your heart to encompass others? True beauty is not a superficial trait found in physical perfection or temporary aesthetics. It is an expansive, vital force that flourishes only when we open ourselves to the profound needs of another. When we cultivate charity, we are not merely performing good deeds: we are expanding our very essence. As love takes root within us, it illuminates the hidden corners of our being, transforming our internal landscape into something radiant. The soul becomes a garden that blossoms through the constant nourishment of selfless compassion. Every act of true charity strengthens this inner bloom, making the spirit more resilient and luminous to all who encounter it. To love is to invite beauty to reside permanently within your core. Therefore, the ultimate measure of your personal splendor is found not in what you possess, but in how much room you have made for the well-being and joy of all living things." #Beauty #Charity Art by Alphonse Mucha

Credit: I Heart Intelligence (Facebook) "Jo Nagai was raising swallowtail butterflies at his home in Kobe, Japan, when he noticed something odd. The ones he had looked after as caterpillars seemed to recognise him. Wild butterflies fled. His didn't. He was in second grade. He wrote a four-page letter to Dr. Martha Weiss, an entomologist at Georgetown University who had studied whether moths could retain memories through metamorphosis. He asked if she could help him design a version of her experiment for butterflies. She said yes. Using a muscle therapy device, Jo trained caterpillars to associate the scent of lavender with a mild vibration. When the caterpillars became butterflies, 70 per cent of them still avoided the lavender. Their brains had been completely rebuilt during metamorphosis. The memory survived anyway. Then he bred them. The offspring, which had never been trained, also avoided lavender. So did their grandchildren. Without ever experiencing the vibration, two generations of butterflies inherited an aversion to a scent their grandmother had been taught to fear. Jo documented it all in a 33-page research paper and presented his findings at the International Congress of Entomology in Kobe in 2024. He was 10. A second-grader wrote a letter to a Georgetown professor, and together they found evidence that butterflies can pass memories down through generations." #nature #Entomology

Credit: The Cosmic Dancer (Facebook) “To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvellous victory.” #AccenuateThePositive ~ Howard Zinn [Art: Era Leisner]

Credit: Sharnael Wolverton Sehon (Facebook) "When you lose someone you love, your brain does not accept it. It starts searching for them. Scientists scanned the grieving brain and found something nobody expected. Grief does not feel like sadness to your brain. It feels like hunger. Ancient traditions understood this completely. The research came from Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor at University of Arizona. Published in Neurolmage. She spent over two decades studying what happens inside the brain during grief. What the brain scans revealed changed how scientists understand loss - and why it hurts the way it does. Think about the last time you lost someone. The waves that kept coming. A song. A smell. A moment that reminded you. You were not choosing to remember. Something was pulling you back. That pull had a biological source. Dr. O'Connor found exactly where it was coming from. What the research documented. When grieving people saw photographs of the person they lost, the nucleus accumbens activated. The brain's reward and craving center. The same region that activates during hunger. During longing. During searching for something, the brain expects to find. Your brain was not grieving. It was looking. Then she found something that explained everything. Your brain builds a map of the people you love. Where they are. When will they return? What their presence feels like. When someone dies, the map does not update immediately. Your brain keeps sending the search signal. Looking for someone the world says is gone. Think of grief like a GPS that lost its signal. It knows where you were going. It keeps recalculating. Searching for the route. Trying to find what it was navigating toward. Grief comes in waves because that is when the GPS recalculates. Not because you are broken. Because your brain loved someone deeply enough to keep looking. What ancient traditions understood. Every major ancient tradition built specific mourning rituals around grief — not to rush it but to honor the search. Jewish Shiva - seven days of communal mourning prescribed to give the brain time to witness. Islamic mourning practices - prescribed periods of grief with the community present. Sufi tradition - lamentation poetry prescribed as the language of the searching heart. Indigenous mourning ceremonies - prescribed to help the soul complete what the mind could not accept alone. All working with what Dr. O'Connor measured. Then she found something that reframed everything. The intensity of grief directly correlated with the depth of the bond. The stronger the love, the stronger the search signal. The more the brain was activated during grief, the more it had loved. Grief is not a malfunction. It is love with nowhere to go. And a brain still trying to deliver it. Your practical guide. Do not rush the search - your brain needs time to update its map. Grief has a biological timeline. Forcing it to end early leaves the search signal running without resolution. Let the waves come - each wave is the brain recalculating. Fighting the waves prolongs them. Moving through them completes the search cycle. Seek witness - research shows grief processed in the presence of others resolves more completely than grief carried alone. Ancient traditions never grieved alone. There was always a community. Dr. O'Connor's research on the reward system and grief focused primarily on complicated grief and prolonged unresolved bereavement. Normal grief activates different patterns. What is consistent across all grief research - grief is a genuine neurobiological process. Not weakness. Not something to overcome quickly. A process that the brain must be allowed to complete. So ask yourself honestly. Is there a grief you were told to get over — a loss you buried instead of mourned - a search signal still running quietly underneath everything? Because your brain does not forget what it loves. It keeps the map. And somewhere beneath the surface - it may still be looking. Dr. O'Connor concluded. Grief is the price we pay for love. But it is also a neurological process - the brain learning to update its model of the world after someone central to it is gone. That learning takes time. And it cannot be rushed without cost. Your brain did not break when you lost them. It started searching. Because that is what love trained it to do. Science confirmed it was never a weakness. It was your brain refusing to stop loving. Give it the time it needs.🙏🏻❤️‍🩹 Watch my video on this 🙏🏻❤️‍🩹 Grief and Neuroscience...How does Grief or Loss affect Your Brain? Dr. Sharnael" #Grief

Credit: We Arethe Medicine Circle (Facebook)

#detox

#parenting

Credit: Pyramid Consciosness "Dante did not write the Inferno as a horror story. He wrote it as a map. The Divine Comedy begins in darkness, in a forest, at midpoint of life, completely lost. Before Dante can ascend through Paradise, he must first descend through every circle of hell. This was not an accident of narrative structure. It was the teaching. The journey upward is only available to the one who has first gone all the way down. There is no shortcut that bypasses the descent and arrives at the light. Virgil does not lead Dante around the underworld. He leads him through it. Every tradition that has mapped the inner journey has placed this same requirement at its center. The alchemical process begins with the nigredo, the blackening, the stage of putrefaction in which everything the ego has constructed is dissolved. The Sufi path requires the annihilation of the self before union with the divine becomes possible. The shamanic initiation across cultures involves a symbolic death, the dismemberment of the old self, before the healer can return with the capacity to heal others. Jung called this the night sea journey, the descent into the unconscious that precedes genuine transformation. The reason most people do not reach paradise is not that they are incapable of it. It is that they are unwilling to begin in hell. They want the ascent without the descent, the light without the darkness, the resolution without the suffering that makes resolution possible. Hell, in Dante’s framework, is not punishment. It is the honest confrontation with what is. The souls in the Inferno are not there arbitrarily, they are experiencing the full reality of the choices they made in life. To walk through hell is to see clearly. And clarity, however painful, is the beginning of every genuine ascent. The path does not avoid the darkness. The path goes through it. What descent have you been refusing to make, and what might be waiting for you on the other side of it?" #PyramidConsciousness #Dante

#health

Credit: Homeschooling for Beginners (Facebook) #parenting

#parenting

Credit: Guardians of Nature (Facebook) "The little pink-and-yellow moth stuck to your porch screen has never taken a single bite of food. It never will. It can't. It's a rosy maple moth — the smallest of North America's great silk moths, colored like cotton candy for a reason worth knowing. As an adult, it has no working mouth. No tongue to uncoil, nothing to drink with. The equipment simply isn't there. Everything it will ever do — fly, find a mate, lay the next generation — runs entirely on fuel it banked months ago, as a fat green caterpillar chewing the leaves of your maple. It can't hear you, either. No ears at all. It reads the whole world through feathered antennae and its feet, chasing one signal on the night air: a mate's scent. And the pink and yellow aren't decoration. Against spring's flowering branches, that pastel is camouflage. So it has a few short days — no hunger, no sound — just the single errand it spent an entire caterpillarhood saving up for. It isn't starving. It was never built to eat. The meal was the childhood, taken on your maple tree." #RosyMapleMoth #SilkMoths #BackyardWildlife #NativeInsects #Nature

I am declaring bragging rights for taking action on a complaint and getting a result. I hope it inspires others to do the same. So.. I still live near my old highschool. I walk around the property for exercise. Our neighborhood has drastically changed since I graduated in 1981. The American flag on the pole is faded and severly tattered. It upsets me. The high school is also where lots of events are held including Sunday worship and elections. I went on the Nextdoor app and made a post about the neglected state of the flag with photos. The post generated over three thousand clicks and a long thread of comments. After three days of attention to the post, I got a private message from someone within the school system who has not only ordered a new flag but is arranging to have it hoisted up. Victory!!

#CrazyHorse #Black Elk

593K views · 9.3K reactions | This man is 100% correct | Mike Bayles

This man is 100% correct

#homeschool #parenting