#sameasiteverwas

Credit: Classic Literature (Facebook) "In 1849, Dostoevsky stood blindfolded before a firing squad, having already made peace with dying, when a rider arrived with news that the execution was called off. It had all been staged, a piece of psychological cruelty ordered by the Tsar himself. Hours later, still shaking from it, he sat down and wrote to his brother Mikhail. The letter survives, and it's strange to read now, because you can feel a man trying to process something no framework he had was built to hold. He tells Mikhail not to grieve for him, that he isn't dejected, that he hasn't lost heart. Life, he writes, is a gift, life is happiness, every minute could have been an age of happiness. He says he understood this only now, at the edge of losing it entirely. What gets me about the letter isn't the relief in it, though there's plenty of that. It's the specific thing he fixates on afterward: not vengeance against the state that staged his death, not despair at the four years of Siberian labor waiting for him instead, but a kind of frantic gratitude that reads almost like a man trying to convince himself as much as his brother. He asks Mikhail to send him books. He worries about missing his family. He talks about the future like a person suddenly aware that he'd been sleepwalking through the concept of having one. He carried this moment for the rest of his life, wrote condemned men into his fiction again and again, characters facing the exact wall he'd faced, because you don't really get to set an experience like that down once you've had it. The letter is the first draft of everything he'd spend the next three decades writing about: guilt, mercy, the specific vertigo of a mind confronting its own ending and then, without warning, being handed its life back." #Dostoevsky

Credit: Facts They Don't Teach You (Facebook) "Farmers in Japan are using specially colored insect nets as another way to control agricultural pests without relying entirely on insecticides. The technology is based on how insects see and respond to color. Researchers have developed red-colored nets that can interfere with the visual cues used by certain small pests, including onion thrips, making it more difficult for them to enter crops. Unlike conventional insect nets, the effect is not based only on the size of the mesh. It also relies on the insects’ visual responses to the colored material. Researchers at the University of Tokyo tested red nets on Welsh onions and found that they reduced the invasion and damage caused by onion thrips. Field experiments showed that the use of red nets could reduce the number of insecticide applications by approximately 25 to 50 percent while maintaining commercially acceptable crops. The approach does not work equally well against every pest. Earlier Japanese field research, for example, found that red nets were effective against some thrips but provided little additional benefit against certain whiteflies beyond the physical protection provided by the mesh itself. Other Japanese agricultural researchers have also experimented with using color and visual patterns to influence pest behavior. Yellow trapping sheets with specific edge patterns have been developed to attract and capture whiteflies and other small agricultural pests. These methods are part of a broader approach to integrated pest management, where physical barriers, biological controls and targeted pesticide use can be combined rather than relying exclusively on chemical sprays." #GardeningHacks

#sameasiteverwas

Credit: The Cosmic Dancer (Facebook) “Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?” ~ Tao Te Ching [Art: Tracy Porter]

Credit: The Garden Almanac "Everyone calls it dew. The lawn has been running its own plumbing all night. Dew is sky water. It condenses out of humid air onto anything cool, blades and webs and the wheelbarrow you meant to put away. But on calm nights, roots keep pushing water up while the leaves have stopped using it, and the pressure needs somewhere to go. So the plant opens tiny relief valves at its leaf tips and edges and lets the extra out, one bead at a time. Botanists call it guttation. Tomorrow at sunrise, get low and check. A film all over the blade is dew. One round drop balanced exactly on the tip is the plant's own well water. Strawberry leaves hang theirs along the edge like a hem of glass beads. 🌿" #nature #guttation #dew

Credit: Ravenous Butterflies (Facebook) “The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing, and becomes nothing. He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn, feel, change, grow or love. Chained by his certitude, he is a slave; he has forfeited his freedom. Only the person who risks is truly free.” Leo Buscaglia Stanislaus Soutten Longley - Autumn.

#selfmastery

#parenting

#LOL

credit: Whispers From The Heart (Facebook) "In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write a famous author and ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond -- his response is magnificent: “Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta: I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana. What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow. Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula. Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK? Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash receptacals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow. God bless you all!" Kurt Vonnegut Photo credit: Transgressive fiction.

Credit: Pyramid Consciousness "What blocks you isn’t separate from the path. It’s the raw material the path is currently made of. Most people treat obstacles as interruptions to the real work, delays standing between them and whatever they’re actually trying to do. That framing keeps the obstacle and the goal in permanent opposition, one thing fighting the other for the same space. Marcus Aurelius is proposing something stranger and more useful. The obstacle isn’t blocking the action. It’s supplying the action’s next form. What stands in the way doesn’t get removed so the way can continue. It becomes the way. This only makes sense once you notice how much progress actually happens through friction rather than despite it. A muscle doesn’t grow around resistance. It grows because of it, using the exact force trying to stop it as the mechanism of its own development. A river doesn’t detour around every boulder out of defeat. Contact with the boulder is what carves the particular path the water eventually takes. The obstruction and the eventual shape aren’t opponents. One produces the other. This reframes frustration itself. The instinct when blocked is to see the block as proof that things have gone wrong, that the plan has failed. Stoic practice asks for a harder, more useful read: the obstacle is data about what actually needs to happen next, often more accurate data than the original plan provided. What stood in the way becomes, quite literally, the next correct move. Nothing is actually blocking you. Everything blocking you is only material you haven’t used yet." #PyramidConsciousness #MarcusAurelius #Stoicism