🍀grubloved new version🍀

“In the 1970s, scientists realized that humpback whales sing structured songs. Strangely, even if they’re coming from thousands of miles apart, males converging on mating grounds all sing the same song. Humpback song is composed of about ten different consecutive themes, each made of repeated phrases of about ten different notes requiring about fifteen seconds to sing. The song lasts about ten minutes. Then the whale repeats it. For hours in the ocean, in their season of courtship, the whales sing. Each ocean’s song is different, and over months and years it changes in the same way for the thousands of whales in each ocean, the song somehow a continual work in progress, fully shared. Sometimes the change is sudden and radical. In the year 2000, researchers announced that humpbacks’ song off Australia’s east coast was “replaced rapidly and completely” by the song Indian Ocean humpbacks off Australia’s west coast had been singing. It seems that a few “foreigners” made the trek west to east, and their song became such an instant hit with the easterners that everybody had to sing it. The researchers wrote, “Such a revolutionary change is unprecedented in animal cultural vocal traditions.” And once a phrase in the song disappears, it has never again been heard, despite over twenty years of eavesdropping. What do the songs mean? Researcher Peter Tyack says, “We may have to thank the evolving aesthetic sensibilities of generations of female humpbacks for the musical features of the males’ songs.” Songs of humpback whales, by the way, have sold millions of recordings. We share that aesthetic. That might be both the biggest mystery and the best evidence of like-mindedness.”

SZA receiving an autism diagnosis is going to be healing to so many undiagnosed girls, but especially for a group of girls who are even MORE unlikely to be diagnosed—black girls! I am so beyond proud of SZA for getting evaluated and sharing this update with us because its going to change so many lives. I barely know any celebrities who have been open about having an autism diagnosis. I havent seen anyone on tumblr post about SZA’s post which could be a problem with my curation of who i follow but i wanted to share this awesome news with my followers!

i am still rotating this but i think some of the point of a god in the purest sense is the act of carving oneself to accommodate something that does not carve for you. a god cannot carve itself for you in the material way that your cat or your partner will because gods move in the layer of magical meaning and not in the physical world. this blurs a little depending on the god obviously but even a very present god like a tree changes in response to you in not the same way as the really material carving of behavior in order to support yours in the way of someone who loves you

in some way always the gifts you receive from a god are never from the god itself but instead gifts you give yourself in the name of the god. in order to forge a relationship with a god that truly enriches your life in ways other than simple structure, in order to receive gifts from your god, you need to allow yourself to consider things in the world as gifts. you have to work intentionally to create value and wonder and awe in things that could otherwise pass you as mere scenery. the giftedness or blessingness of something is, like most magic, created not in the material moment of the thing's conception -- is not an inherent material quality of something in the world -- but instead occurs at the point of contact between something in the world and someone who is performing the action of receiving blessings and gifts. in this way the act of blessing is honestly less important to magical practice than the act of being in the mode of blessedness

God is relation, full stop. He is like reality in this regard. Consider an electron, the fundamental unit of all matter. No one has ever seen one. They really don't "exist" until we turn our attention to them. The physicist Marcelo Gleiser says that "exist" may be too strong a word to use for an electron. I take God's existence to be much the same, though for God "exist" is too weak a word. We don't know what the existence of God is. We have no idea what the word "exist" even means in the context of God. What we do know—or what I know, I should say—is that God doesn't exist until I turn my attention to him. Relation brings him into being, or, more accurately, enables his being to be perceived, experienced, shared. My attention—and the precise quality of that attention—is absolutely involved. I realize this is unorthodox at best, heretical at worst. But it is my experience of being in the world and of being with God. "The feeling remains," as Teresa of Avila says, "that God is on the journey, too."