Gone.

in me hole beep beep

Low Energy Devotional Activities and Ways to Connect with the Gods

Let's be honest, religion and consistent practice can be HARD, especially when you're chronically ill, disabled, mentally ill or neurodivergent. This is a list of lower energy practices you can do to connect with your Gods when you're having a rough day.

I hope this is helpful to anyone who needs it! Take care of yourself first and foremost. If you don't think you can manage something on this list then thats perfectly fine too! you're not a bad person for not being able to do something spiritual or religious. Ultimately, these things are not a necessity. Don't stress :)

I’m taking pottery lessons right now… and my teacher said “the kiln gods are being kind to me right now.” And that made me stop and think. Is there a god of pottery? I tried to look it up but it’s hazy.

In Ancient Greece, Athena was apparently the goddess of crafts, which is a bit vague. Hephaestus was the god of sculpting, but that’s not right either.

In Ancient Egypt, I found Khnum who made the other gods and humankind on his potter’s wheel.

I found two gods of pottery in Southeast Asian cultures, Lianaotabi and Panthoibi.

But I wasn’t able to find anyone else. Pottery being such an important part of daily life all around the world, it seems like there would be more. Does anyone know of any other gods of pottery?

kiln gods are also A Thing!

they're little sculptural critters that potters make and leave on or around their kiln for good luck. a lot of them have to do with fire or are holding pottery (Calcifer from Howl's Moving Castle is one I've seen multiple times) but a kiln god can be anything

I share a kiln so I don't want to take up space on or near the kiln, so I just put a kiln god through with every batch of pottery

here's a selection of mine (all holding pottery)

the head of the ceramics dept learned his wood fire techniques in Japan, including a Shinto take on the kiln gods.

wadding is a material glaze doesn't stick too, and it's used to prop up pieces in a wood fire kiln because otherwise the wood ash would weld them to the shelves.

everyone has to make a little wood fire idol out of wadding and place them on top of the kiln

and unlike a gas or electric kiln that can be programmed and then left alone aside from a few checks, a wood fire kiln needs to be babysat for the full 2-3 day fire (for our size kiln anyway).

cool thing is there's an external pit where we burn thin pieces of wood to get a good ash layer on the pieces, and you can cook in said pit while you're watching. but our prof required us to throw a little bit of whatever we cooked into the main fire as ordering

he also opened the firing by sharing some sake with the kiln before lighting it

we have so little control

the kiln can finish our work

and make them functional

or it can destroy it all

so we make offerings

and protectors

and pray

- Clay Pigeon

on this day one year ago someone sewed a fried egg to a tshirt

this is your only day to reblog this for a year

i missed my chance last year so this has been in my queue for 364 days

on this day one decade ago someone sewed a fried egg to a tshirt

Rest is not earned by being productive and overworking. It is a human right. It is a human need. You deserve to rest.

smh not real gamers!!!😠😠

they want an easy mode with only straight pieces😠😡

NOT ON MY WATCH!! IN MY COMMUNIST FUTURE EVERYONE WILL PLAY GAY TETRIS AND IN FACT THEY WILL ALSO BE GAY!!!!

Yet more opossum memes

ethically sourced from tumblr post under the cut

Work best for:

What to do:

Storage:

Drying:

I have a hot take about "guerrilla gardening"

So i've been pulling/digging up and growing random seedlings I find along roadsides for a month or two now. Many of them are dug out of gravel or pulled out of literal pavement.

This started out as an experiment and has now grown into a pretty large project, as I've found out that most of these plants actually survive and thrive. I have at least 120 plants in pots that are thriving now (after culling the non-natives) and I've planted still more in the back yard.

Anyway, throwing native wildflower seeds onto a golf course does literally jack shit. It's already covered in native wildflower seeds.

To restore biodiversity and habitats, we have to change the way land is managed. Mowing and spraying are an endless war on nature's efforts to re-wild our entire world, and our upper hand against her is incredibly fragile. Nature is tough as nails and she doesn't stop.

Now I can identify so many native plants, especially trees, as seedlings, and...they're everywhere. There are dozens and dozens of plant species in a lawn that isn't constantly laced with herbicide, and many of them are beautiful flowering plants that just never get a chance to bloom because people keep mowing them down.

Furthermore, common "weedy" species proliferate largely because of constant, destructive human management. Most "weeds" are just plants that take over destroyed areas and get them habitable for other species. "Weed" isn't a real category of Evil Plant, but it isn't an arbitrary descriptor either—"weed" is a job.

When a swath of forest burns or is felled by a tornado or something, somebody has to stop erosion from stealing all the topsoil, give the creatures a place to hide, attract birds and mammals that will spread new seeds, and keep the ground shady and moist. And that somebody has to be a quick, aggressive grower. That's where "weeds" come in.

So by intensively and indiscriminately weeding and mowing, humans keep their yards and gardens in a constant state of "oh shit, emergency," and the weeds try to take over because....that's what they're supposed to do.

So people see a "weedy" lawn with two months' overgrowth and think, "this is terrible, we can't have this, look at all this thick grass and weeds, it is full of ticks" and decide that the Only way is to keep mowing the whole stretch of land constantly, forever, instead of recognizing that the weedy overgrown lawn is 1) an early developmental stage of something else and 2) 40% invasive species that you put there

I don't know where I'm going with this. I'm just generally frustrated that it's not common knowledge how nature reclaims land.

Most online quips about "guerrilla gardening" show a fundamental lack of understanding about this natural process. If you try to plant something else on a golf course, it will get killed with herbicides and/or mowed down. Those are the ONLY things stopping the golf course from becoming a prairie or forest or whatever it was before.

I think people really want edgy illegal action to be the answer but the answer is actually "talk to people, educate them, and give them the resources to do better." I'm realizing also that the average person knows nothing, nothing, about plants or native species or ecosystems, and people appear to not care because they don't know.

"Water usage! Conservation! Biodiversity!" all that stuff is meaningless squawks to people that can't put it in context. People will generally pretend to know the importance of words like this even if they don't. It's a social thing.

But when you explain to them what bees do for plants, or how many kinds of grass there are, or what plants provide food for birds, it immediately becomes apparent that they actually don't know anything about the natural processes around them, and most people at this point are trying to keep up a dim facade of being sort-of-conscious of environmental concerns, but don't actually have an accessible point of entry to Actually learn about their world

I mean. INDIVIDUAL illegal action won't do anything, but neither will telling a golf course owner how much damage their golf course does. The reason they don't care isn't because they don't know, it's because exploiting the natural resources they claim to own and the labor of their employees is how they make money. Likewise, the idea that "I have to keep my house's 'property value' going up, because this is an investment before it's a home," is the most significant reason people keep individual lawns; an educational campaign can't outweigh the economic, material system of real estate.

COLLECTIVE 'illegal' action — revolution, seizing private property, and violently preventing real estate developers et al. from regaining control of this land; and, in the case of colonized land, seizing this private property into the control of native people — WILL do something about the environmental damage of, e.g., a golf course, the real estate market.

I would say the most significant reason people keep lawns is because they think the alternatives are all too time consuming or expensive to consider, or are being essentially forced to by an HOA. Trees and plants, if anything, raise property values.

But most people aren't even motivated by property values per se; they're motivated by their own ability to enjoy their property.

The state of general knowledge about gardening is in Hell right now. The easiest to find information on gardening online comes from landscaping websites which often spread straight up misinformation. People don't know that you can plant trees close together or in shade. They don't know that a stand of trees will essentially manage itself. They don't know that a garden with native plants, when it's properly populated, will require very little maintenance.

It's fixed in people's minds that mowing a lawn is the easiest way to manage the land, when if anything it's one of the MOST high maintenance uses for land.

Growing flowers and trees is popularly viewed as difficult and only for a select few that have a "green thumb." This is because so much info comes from websites that are trying to sell you shit.

Violence is not The Only Answer To Anything. Literally just google any conservation, waterway restoration, re-wilding organization in your area. The problems are systemic but guess what? That means most individuals aren't your enemy.

we can't violence our way into being able to identify native species either

what good does it do to be able to identify native species if so much land is used for golf courses or parking lots? in order to plant native species and restore the land, we have to be able to get rid of what's currently there

So much. So much good.

This is exactly the vital point I want other people to be able to learn about—nature is incredibly resilient and adaptable, and restoring the land starts here and now, not with a hypothetical blank slate

Like right now I'm involved with a local nature center where I'm going to be doing an educational panel on identifying tree seedlings (among other things) and giving away free trees. I have, last I counted, around 115 plants thriving in makeshift pots out on my back porch right now. They are native species that I literally pulled from cracks in pavement, roadsides, and gravel. I've planted about a dozen in my back yard already. I'm going to give some to my neighbors.

The first important point is that trees take time to grow. And we're talking organisms that can live hundreds of years. I'm not going to wait until every golf course is shut down, I'm planting the trees now.

The second important point is that for a lot of homeowners, the main barrier is lack of knowledge—if they could recognize tree saplings and flowers growing in their lawn, they'd keep 'em. If they knew that native flower gardens could be lower maintenance than lawns and how exactly to manage such a garden, they'd do it in a heartbeat.

One thing I hope to do is get rid of the financial barrier. Trees can be like, $150 apiece at a nursery. Here, have a free tree. There you go.

Third important point is that every restored bit of habitat helps. Patch of dirt next to a parking lot? Turn it into native flowers, the world is better for it. One-acre lot? Plant a few dozen trees in clusters and fill the rest with shrubs and flowers, there will be thousands more creatures of a hundred species in the world because of it.

I encourage you to look up pasture succession, because there's a domino effect to plants growing in a disused field. When a tree grows, it attracts squirrels. Squirrels plant more trees. Birds like to sit in trees, and when they poop it plants more trees. But everything in nature is connected this way. If you plant a crap ton of native wildflowers, your neighbors' lawns are going to have them popping up all over the place.

Perhaps most significantly, if people know the name of a plant, they can learn how and why it's important. They can care about it as their neighbor. And that is the beginning of ecological awareness. With that comes the desire to protect.

The sheer amount of DETAIL in nature, like the number of species that are in even a square foot of lawn, is mind boggling. And being able to see that beauty and diversity transforms you.

as promised, the transplanting tutorial

most sources make transplanting sound incredibly difficult, but transplanting young seedlings from areas with sparse dirt, like a driveway or roadside, is actually incredibly easy and can get you some great stuff. Once I worked out the method, i've had a very high survival rate

it took me like a month of trial and error to figure this out so you don't have to.

Feel free to repost, no need for credit

I...tried to make a meme and got carried away and made A Thing that is like partially unfinished because i spent like 3 hours on it and then got tired.

I think this is mostly scientifically accurate but truth be told, there seems to be relatively little research on succession in regards to lawns specifically (as opposed to like, pastures). I am not exaggerating how bad they are for biodiversity though—recent research has referred to them as "ecological deserts."

Feel free to repost, no need for credit