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theartistknownaslymond · 2 years

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Francis pining for Philippa (could go all the way through from the anvil moment to Flaw Valleys or could be any section of that) please.

'Such Hapless Hap' - a band AU playlist for Francis pining for Philippa, so miserable that Spotify keeps advertising me divorce counselling now

The Beatles - You've Got to Hide Your Love Away Jeanne Mas - Toute Première Fois Leonard Cohen - Ain't No Cure for Love Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - The Carnival is Over The Communards - If I Could Tell You ABBA - My Love, My Life Davy Graham - Anji Joan Armatrading - Did I Make You Up? Renaud - Mistral Gagnant Peter et Sloane - Besoin de Rien Envie de Toi Elton John - Sacrifice Kino - Ljubov' eto ne shutka R.E.M. - You Are The Everything Elvis Costello - Any King's Shilling Prince - Purple Rain Capercaillie - Coisich, a Rùin

More info/lyrics snippets below the cut

What I learned making this is that Francis is a nightmare to make playlists for, because he will listen to ANYTHING. He's not snobbish about genre at all, he has no guilty pleasures (not really. Not unless you count Philippa herself). And he's a slippery bugger who doesn't like to be direct.

So the principles of the playlist are that Francis realises he doesn't need to be at all subtle when he's getting emotional to big lush pop ballads, because nobody believes the emotions in radio friendly pop could be applicable to a Tortured GeniusTM like him. Hence: The Beatles, ABBA, Jeanne Mas, Peter et Sloane.

For the most part I tried to keep these to 1988/'89 (Checkmate-era in the AU), but obviously some tracks are earlier - again, particularly the on-the-nose big ballads that people would just hear as a showy-off/ironic cover if he played it in the late '80s. And while it's not a ballad of the pop variety, I put Davy Graham's famous guitar piece Anji in because in the '60s everyone and his dad was attempting to cover it for their girlfriends, with more elaborate flourishes etc etc to prove their skill. Francis goes back to the original and the best, naturally.

Images in the album cover are of Lucy Farrell (violinist) and Johnny Flynn.

Anyway, here are some lyrics to demonstrate:

Here I stand head in hand / Turn my face to the wall / If she's gone I can't go on / Feeling two-foot small (You've Got to Hide Your Love Away) Francis is a bit non-plussed by The Beatles, but he recognises what made them popular. His preference is for the early sub-three-minute pop songs like this that are deceptively simple but pack emotional heft. He is not immune to this song about heartbreak being seen in public.

[such insolence / in the silence / which troubles your innocence, / a game mixed with suffering] (Toute Première Fois) Oh this song sounds all sweetness and light on the surface but the lyrics aren't so sweet. Put it in the context of Rue de la Cerisaye and that particular 'first time' and it's downright dark.

I know this love is real / It don't matter how it all went wrong / That don't change the way I feel (Ain't No Cure for Love) Of course Francis loves Leonard Cohen. Of course Danny loves to play the sax part.

Like a drum my heart was beating / And your kiss was sweet as wine / But the joys of love are fleeting / For Pierrot and Columbine (The Carnival is Over) Francis? Referencing commedia del'arte and the clown who is tragically in love with his wife while she leaves him for another? It's more likely than you think.

If we should stumble when musicians play, / Time will say nothing but I told you so / There are no fortunes to be told, although, / Because I love you more than I can say (If I Could Tell You) Iconique hard-partying lefty gays had to go on the playlist.

But I know I don't possess you / So go away, God bless you / You are still my love and my life / Still my one and only (My Love, My Life) ABBA doesn't need to be subtle.

[instrumental] (Anji) See above.

Did I live before / You came upon the scene / Did I make you up / Or are you just a dream (Did I Make You Up?) This one's mainly here because I wanted it to be 'canon' that Francis is a fan of Joan Armatrading.

[And hear your laughter fly as high / As birds calls fly / To tell you finally that you have to love life] (Mistral Gagnant) Renaud sang lots of angry political songs and played behind the Iron Curtain but this album has softer shades as he was falling in love. Definitely CM-era French and feral Francis.

[I need nothing, I want you / As I never wanted anyone / You see, the day, seems just like love / I need nothing, I want you] (Besoin de Rien, Envie de Toi) Lyrically this is just as sweet as it sounds. If Francis and Philippa sing it together some time though (the afterparty where Marthe screws everything up?) then it will torment them every time it's on the radio. And it's on the radio a lot.

Sensitivity builds a prison / In the final act / We lose direction / No stone unturned / No tears to damn you / When jealousy burns (Sacrifice) BIG Elton hit here that's technically about cheating in a marriage, but also Francis and Philippa both trying to out-sacrifice themselves for each other while claiming they're doing nothing of the sort...yeah big mood

[When the night's getting still / I can hear you playing guitar / But the tune it seems so far…] (Ljubov' eto ne shutka) Francis learned about them in TRC in Russia, obviously, and this one even has a line about being alone in Russia instead of with his love so *shrug emoji*

(Say, say, the light) And she is so beautiful, she is so young and old / (Say, say, the light) I look at her and I see the beauty of the light of music (You Are the Everything) Gotta keep up the quota of queer '80s acts on here.

Please don't put your silly head in that pretty soldier's hat / You've done your duty, that's enough of that / I don't know if what I'm doing is right / I don't know if you should be forgiving / But for me it seems it means my life / While for you it could just be a living (Any King's Shilling) Again, Rue de la Cerisaye vibes, but also fits for fears of selling out and what on gives up for fame (or for Austin).

I never wanted to be your weekend lover / I only wanted to be some kind of friend, hey / Baby, I could never steal you from another (Purple Rain) Because Philippa loves Prince, and this is Prince's 'great muckel ballad' (a description of a folk song I once heard Sam Lee use).

[Come on, my love, hù il oro / Keep your promise to me, o hi ibh o / Take greetings from me, hù il oro / Over to Harris, boch orainn o / To John Campbell, hù il oro / My brown-haired sweetheart, boch orainn o] (Coisich, a Rùin) Because it's referenced in the fic I wrote that was meant to be the equivalent of the rooftop chase, and because the playlist needed some Scots Gaelic.

#band au: ringed castle #band au: checkmate #ship: the open sea #character: francis crawford #character: philippa somerville #playlists: period appropriate

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junypr-camus · 2 years

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Nonfiction Book Recommendations

Admittedly, I read just as much if not more nonfiction than I do fiction. Here are some of my favorites, in no particular order. As you can tell, I have a weird mix of serious and silly.

What If?, Randall Munroe The famed author of xkcd (and former NASA roboticist!) brings you answers to the craziest questions. Complete with his classic stick figure illustrations.

Math with Bad Drawings, Ben Orlin If Randall Munroe taught high school math and drew in color, you'd have Ben Orlin. This book shows how geometry, statistics, probability, and much more have to do with elections, the Great Recession, and... the Death Star.

Caste, Isabel Wilkerson A riveting and utterly eye-opening perspective on American society. Isabel Wilkerson explores the similarities between our country and famous caste systems such as Nazi Germany, and how caste has shaped our lives.

A User's Guide to the Universe, Dave Goldberg & Jeff Blomquist One of the first and best books I've read on modern physics. Though the subject can be hard to wrap your head around, this book makes it mind-blowing and funny (with plenty of comics thrown in).

Strange Glow, Timothy J. Jorgensen An accessible book that seeks to show the story behind radiation, from Nagasaki and Hiroshima to mammograms. It'll make you rethink your next dentist's x-ray or airport screening.

Caesar's Last Breath, Sam Kean Lighthearted and filled with stories, this book discusses everything about the air that we breathe.

Black Gold, Albert Marrin Though ten years later this book's warning of the dangers of oil may feel redundant, it still provides insight into how deeply engrained the substance is in our society.

Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari Think you know everything about humanity? Think again. Harari seeks to the answer the question of what sets us Homo Sapiens apart, starting with our life as hunter-gatherers in the savanna.

How Things Work, Theodore Gray Though he's more famous for Elements, this is my favorite of his books. With beautiful photographs, he deconstructs everything from clocks to scales to clothes, and makes his own potholder (from cotton seeds!) along the way.

The Upside of Irrationality, Dan Ariely Psychologist Dan Ariely shows us what it means to be human through thought-provoking experiments. Hopefully it'll give you some insight into yourself, too.

Parkland, Dave Cullen Dave Cullen made his name writing Columbine, the story of the first major school shooting. More than a decade later, this story follows not the perpetrator, but the students who rose up afterwards, and formed a national movement. Absolutely uplifting and inspiring.

#book reccs #book recommendations #book rec list #book tumblr #book list #bookblr #books and literature #reading #books and reading

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inthecityofgoodabode · 3 years

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2021: May The Fourth

Columbine seed head looking like the Grinch’s fingers:

A little grainier than I’d like but I dig this little guy trucking along the edge of a chocolate mint leaf with a raindrop on its back:

And they whispered secrets to one another:

We went out to Plot 420 to harvest Romaine lettuce. The dirt road was a sloppy mess so we parked on the blacktop & I walked down to the plot:

Plot 420:

I was on the gray side when I took this shot so it was raining on me already:

Cool sky & a sweet orange port-a-potty:

Today’s Plot 420 harvest - Romaine lettuce:

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lycomorpha · 3 years

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The Flora of Horizon Zero Dawn - Medicinal valley's blush part 1: initial drawings

Image: Aloy with medicinal valley’s blush in the field

So the past few weeks, me and my beloved botanical friend Dr Maria Christodoulou got collaborating on a project; draw and describe all the fictional plants and fungi that can be harvested in the game Horizon Zero Dawn (HZD) by Guerrilla Games. See also this introductory post from me, and this post on the why of video game botany from Maria.

(All the images in this post are either screencaps or my sketches/artwork unless otherwise captioned)

Let me start with some background for anyone who hasn’t played it

HZD is set in Colorado USA, in a post-apocalyptic future landscape populated by several tribes of humans, regular squishy-animals, metal machine-animals, and some beautiful flora

Several plants and fungi can be interacted with, being either used as medicine or to make potions

The plants are all fictional but seemingly based on real ones, so Maria and I have a starting point when considering the botanical features of HZD species

The archetypal cultural traits each human tribe is assigned are given fairly up-front, and there are also some examples of their writing found in world of HZD – this gives us help with trying to write as an imagined person from a particular group.

It’s worth mentioning up front that not all tribes are shown in-game as having written traditions. But this would be a kinda short collaboration without Maria’s writing... So for the purposes of fan-art-making, we’re assuming that each has some form of documentary record-keeping when it comes to keeping track of their region’s natural resources.

We’ve started our first experiments with the plant above, medicinal valley’s blush. Along with Maria’s expertise as a botanist we found the HZD Wiki helpful – it lists all the resources including plants, and for some of them (e.g. freeze rime root) it suggests a possible real-world relative (e.g. Colorado blue columbine.) This excellent post & its comments are also full of useful info/work other players have already done in trying to track down the possible predecessors of HZD plants. Maria’s going to talk about her specific botanical reasons for starting where we did with our studies, and you should definitely keep up with her posts when they pop up here.

Medicinal valley’s blush

This plant may be based on rosebay willowherb (UK)/fireweed (US). That’s particularly good for us because we’re in the UK right now and (unlike the aforementioned Colorado blue columbine) it’s a species found all over the place here – including my back garden where I encourage it because it’s a larval food plant for moths like elephant hawkmoths. It springs up quickly on disturbed ground and is called fireweed in the US because it's often the first thing to set seed in recently burned ground. Similarly it's also been called 'bombweed' in the UK, where it was the first thing to pop up on bomb-damaged land during World War II. Around here, you can often see its wind-borne seeds floating around on a summer breeze.

So it’s an ideal place to start! Plus I can maybe justify inventing a fictional moth species to go with… Even though we don’t really see much insect life in HZD, you know bugs must be there! (And you know I’m always here to bring the invertebrates like come ON did you seriously expect me not to fucken try it?!!? Lol)

Rosebay willowherb, aka fireweed [photos by Kallerna (L) & Dcrjsr (R) via Wikimedia Commons]

Luckily for me I’ve spent lots of time devising and describing fictional insect species evolved from living ones for my Cryptic Cards and Insecta poker decks. So I’m comfortable taking existing wildlife as a scaffold and then making shit up from there. This is my first completely fictional plant though, and I am not a botanist. Thankfully Maria is a botanist - I’m a visual artist and pharmacologist so I can draw plants and wrap my head round the medicinal chemistry of them, but what TF they’re doing in the ground and how they got there? Not my department.

Maria also has more relevant taxonomy experience here. Which is good because plant taxonomy hates me. Insect taxonomy too, mind. In fact let’s just say I hate taxonomy and taxonomy hates us all, shall we? Good. Not unrelatedly… Rosebay willowherb has at least 3 taxonomical synonyms. It’s often cited as Epilobium angustifolium, but Chamaenerion angustifolium is considered the correct form now apparently - although it’s also called Chamerion angustifolium in places, including in my 2nd hand edition of Stace’s Flora of the British Isles. You know what I said about taxonomy earlier? THAT.

In fact, we have come to call this plant something else on this journey:

So anyway… My drawing began with HZD photomode, and Maria’s scientific diagnostics/description for medicinal valley’s blush. We went through an iterative process of discussing the those two things while sketching/swearing/thinking about what valley’s blush may have in common with or how it differs from our willowherb. The visual differences that first struck me were;

Larger flowers that are one shade of red on the valleys blush (vs. willowherb’s multiple shades of pink) with shorter stalks connecting to stem

Slightly broader, striated leaves that are more widely spaced apart on the stem of valley’s blush

Valley’s blush located where we might get TRAMPLED BY MACHINES while trying to look at it for an art project… I mean… so I’m told

We also kicked around additional features that might not be visible on screen. Some of Maria’s diagnostic features relate to imagined adaptions to the HZD environment, and I leave that for her to describe in her posts.

Initial drawings

I started out with a series of sketches in pencil, ink, and paint of both plants. Then I gradually refined them to get a shape and form consistent with descriptions of rosebay willowherb, and the on-screen appearance of valley’s blush plus Maria’s work on it.

The first few page of my HZD sketchbook are dotted around this post. They’re part of how we are refining our ideas for medicinal valley’s blush. (The blue tape is to protect the glass of my scanner from the metal binding of the book btw)

I also made the ink drawings below of both the real and fictional plant side by side. I find these outline studies of form really useful to fix the plant structures in my head. They also highlight the difference between the plant in the game and the one it’s based on. Maria & I’ve made a couple of audio posts on plants in fiction and in this one, about imaginary botany we love, we appreciate media that shows thought going into its novel plants - not just saying something like ‘this is a beech tree but it’s different cos we made it blue lol.’ So it was good to look at the willowherb and valley’s blush side by side and see the differences as well as the similarities. Honestly, I’m loving the ways in which the art of HZD builds an environment that is both familiar and believably different.

Ink outlines of rosebay willowherb/fireweed and medicinal valley's blush side by side

So that’s us off the starting line - next up will be a post from Maria on her side of this same process. You can follow her on Twitter @melasnous as well as finding posts on this project here.

#sciart #plants #botanical art #horizon zero dawn #horizonzerodawn #HZD #hzd fanart #botany #plant #ink drawing #sketching #video game botany #VideoGameBotany #Aloy #Flora of HZD #Flora of Horizon Zero Dawn

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thepoetryof-birds · 3 years

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Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis)

Northern Cardinal is a bird in the genus Cardinalis; it is also known colloquially as the redbird, common cardinal, red cardinal, or just cardinal. It can be found in southeastern Canada, through the eastern United States from Maine to Minnesota to Texas, and south through Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala. Its habitat includes woodlands, gardens, shrublands, and wetlands. The northern cardinal is a mid-sized songbird with a body length of 21–23 cm (8.3–9.1 in). It has a distinctive crest on the head and a mask on the face which is black in the male and gray in the female. The male is a vibrant red, while the female is a reddish olive color. The male behaves territorially, marking out his territory with song. During courtship, the male feeds seed to the female beak-to-beak. A clutch of three to four eggs is laid, and two to four clutches are produced each year. (Source)

Symbolism

Cardinal symbolism is mainly due to its bright red color, sharp yet resonant song, and unique characteristics. Cardinal bird meaning pivot or hinge in its Latin translations, indeed, represents a pivotal point in a person’s life.

Cardinals themselves are romantic and devoted lovers to each other. When a cardinal mates, they mate for life. They have a harmonious, musical, and healthy relationship with their spouse. Both the female and male cardinal romantically sing duets to each other in troubling times; they do so by calling similar melodies to each other. This is why the native folklore believed that if a single person spotted a cardinal crossing their path, they could expect a romantic relationship soon. If a person in a committed relationship encounters the red bird of wonders, they can expect a renewed spark of romance in their relationship.

Seeing a cardinal is a mysterious yet important event. You need to pay attention to where the Cardinal is sitting or landing. For example, if you see them near a utility box, power line, or even near firewood, it means it is time for you to start making changes aggressively and take more initiatives than you usually do. However, if you see a cardinal land near any body of water like a puddle, for instance, then the spirits might be nudging you to pursue your dreams. Maybe it is time for you to spend more time in your creativity. (Source)

Poetry

The Cardinal-Bird

The Cardinal has come again; He all the brake salutes; His music floods the silent glen, Oh, hear him, how he flutes!

From tree to tree his scarlet glows; Such beauty rare he brings, That all the richness of the rose Seems lavished on his wings!

-Lloyd Mifflin

When autumn woods are bare and dead, A crested bird, of cardinal red, Sways like an oak-leaf overhead; And sighs, "Drear! drear! drear!"

When winter woods are white with snow, And drifts pile high as wild winds blow, Like flame this torchlike bird doth glow; And cries, "Whew! whew! whew!"

When springtime's crimson buds appear, And red-gold columbines are here, This songster welcomes the new year; And sings, "Cheer! cheer! cheer!"

When summer's sun sheds scorching beams, And cardinal flowers beside the streams Grow wild, this brilliant bird still gleams; And whistles, "Hue! hue! hue!"

- Alice E. Ball

So forth went the cardinal, who from her tree perch had wondered why her colors were of the earth and not the magnificent sunset. Others around her had bore the brilliant crimson, yet she’d remained as she had always been: dull as the branches of home. Thus went the cardinal, who in the limitless sky soon discovered: the music that beckoned her forward was eternally blind.

- A.K. Neu

#poetry of birds #birds #nature #natures beauty #cardinals #poetry #symbolism

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moodboardinthecloud · 3 years

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Gathering Council: World of Witnesses

by Sophie Strand

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10226588198557848&set=a.1499832382446

Scarlet Tanager. Woodcock. Yellow-throated Vireo. Thimbleweed. St. John’s Wort.Black locust. Honey locust. King Bolete. Cayuga Soil. Schist. Bluestone. Turkeytail. Mountain lion. Coy Wolf. Trillium. Columbine. Mountain Laurel. The Shawangunk Mountain Range. The Esopus Creek. The Millstream. Sturgeon. Purple Loosestrife. Wolf spider. Chanterelle. Osha. Phlox….The litany lasts about an hour, or as long as it takes for me to boil the water for my pour over of coffee and watch streamers of clementine dawn stripe across my living room. Lately, it’s spilled into my early morning run. But by the time I’m done summoning and sending thanks to every being I know in a twenty-mile radius of my home, I’m surrounded by a world of witnesses. The day begins within a more-than-human community. And my decisions henceforth– practical, creative, and spiritual – will be made with the knowledge that I exist in relationship. Everything I do is ecological. When I used the word ecological, I root back to the original etymology: Greek oikos for household. I am not a noun on an empty page. I do nothing alone. I am a syntactical being, strung together by my metabolism and needs and desires, to thousands of other beings. Together we are all a household, and every choice we make, mundane or explosive, takes place within the networked household of relationships. I did not arrive at this practice intellectually. It was not an exercise or a molded habit. It was a lifeline. Anyone who has been seriously ill, or has had a near death experience, will know that it cuts the metaphysical chaff. Illness and injury act like a bottleneck. You are squeezed through, pressurized and simplified. Only the most intrinsic beliefs, prayers, and ideas travel with you through to the other side. I was raised by spiritual parents who wrote about and researched religion and mantric prayer. I was given beads and taught Tibetan Buddhist, Zen, and Catholic prayers from a very young age. I found these repetitive vocalizations to be steadying. But I often struggled with the abstraction of the Christian prayers and the language barrier between me and the Buddhist mantras. Drawn to study, understand, and reinterpret the words, I was increasingly cognitive about prayer, rather than embodied. But after my first-time experiencing anaphylaxis, one of the charming bouquet of symptoms that arrived with the onset of my genetic condition at sixteen, I realized the prayers evaporated with oxygen. As my throat narrowed and my blood pressure dropped, as I watched the people around me reflect my own panic, I realized the only thing that stayed were the animals, and the fungi, and the trees, and the mountains. In those moments I found myself growing as small as a sunflower seed, planting myself on the sandy banks of a river island, halfway down the Battenkill River. I could see a sapphire splash of a kingfisher in the water. Smell sunlight baking the ryegrass into sweetness. Feel the drifting lick of a dragonfly darting across my shoulder blades. I was suspended between life and death. But I was held, not by a prayer or a god or an idea, but by a landscape. By the aliveness that was me, and was also much deeper than me. I didn’t learn this lesson immediately. Not the second, not the seventh, not even the fifteenth time I came through the bottleneck. But each narrow passage winnowed me down to essentials. And what I kept coming back to, in hospital beds, on the bathroom floor, in the ambulance, in my own arms, late at night, trying to assess whether or not to drive myself to the hospital, was that while very little of human civilization stayed with me or offered comfort, an entire universe of life exploded on the other side of these experiences, welcoming me into a greater sense of community. I found myself remembering the mountain lion eyes I once stared into, the marble head of the bald eagle somehow distinct against the similarly white haze of a blizzard. The glittering scent of the lilac grove overtaking the old bluestone quarries on Lewis Hollow. Soon, when I went to pray, I found myself summoning my counsel, in gratitude and also in a petition for their help and their instructive audience. How best may I act? How may I act knowing you are watching tenderly and attentively? What stories do I need to notice? What stories want to be told? Who needs my help today? And whose help can I receive? The potent thing about creating a counsel of beings you live alongside, is that, unlike an abstracted god, they actually show up. The heron does, in fact, dissect the sky, providing a symbol of incisiveness just at the moment when you need to make a decision. The ground really does provide a soil womb for the food that you will eat and metabolize into music, laughter, dance, heated breath on a windowpane, lovemaking. The fungi really do hold the forest together and provide a medicine that heals your brain and rewires your immune system. These are the guardian angels that have roots instead of wings. They are attached to place, and the more you summon them, the more they will show you that there is a miracle in every footstep, a deep abiding embrace in every biome-laced breath of fresh air. This is not a taxonomical exercise. Any name will do. Any way of tracking that invisible and intimate line of connection between you and another being. You exist, not as one end of that thread, but vibrating along its connection. Anything you do to harm yourself, harms other animals and trees and insects. Anything that nourishes other beings, may ultimately nourish you. And when you are suffering, when you are very scared, you do not need to remember a single prayer, or say a holy word. Your body, a doorway poured through with matter, a spider-webbing of relatedness, is prayer enough. Every second you stay present with your connectivity to your ecosystem is sacred, somatic, lived epiphany. If you pray, ask yourself, does your prayer have roots? Does your god sometimes grow fur? Do your holy words grow leaves? Does your spirituality connect you into your situated ecosystem? If you want, it is a lovely thing to slowly name all those beings that make up your environment. And to seek out new relationships to further flesh out this relational prayer. Gather counsel as you would wildflowers. Pick the ones that show up brightly, insistently, and show you they notice you, just as much as you notice them. Gather counsel as you would pick up a few flat stones to skip across the river. Gather counsel as you would stars, without your hands, held only as a flash of light, in the prismatic blink of an open eye.

Image by @tinorodrigriguezartist and @virgoparaiso

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scrivenerofmossflower · 3 years

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I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghost

Word Count: ~2.8k Summary: Four new friends decide to celebrate their recent meeting by doing some light breaking-and-entering at the local cemetery. They're looking for a ghost. They accidentally come out with the seeds for a YouTube channel. In which Gonff has done research, Rose brought the video camera, Martin's a little too comfortable with this, and Columbine wonders how a pre-med like her wound up stuck with two theater geeks and an enigma. read on ao3 Notes: Human AU, College AU. Un-beta’ed, all mistakes are my own. I’ve been sitting on this for like, over two years and the fact that the ‘verse is still bothering me and I still remember all the details to the set up means that I’m just going to have to exorcise it. Have a Halloween fic the day after Halloween.

The cemetery was on the western edge of town and looked not as a cemetery usually does, with neatly kept graves and graveled paths and mown lawns, but as a cemetery should. With the sun just below the horizon and night falling quickly, the overgrown graveyard with it’s off-kilter, lichen covered headstones and crumbling mausoleums looked like something right out of a horror movie.

“Hollywood called, they want their set back,” Rose said. All four friends were leaning against the iron gates at the entrance, nerving themselves up to go in.

“Oh, come on, this is B-list horror fodder at best,” Gonff countered. “More like Haunted Mansion or Hocus Pocus than—are you recording this?”

“Yep,” Rose said. She turned her phone towards him, zoomed in and out on his face, and stuck out her tongue. “You know how big a wimp my brother is about the spooky stuff, so I was going to send it to him. Congratulations, he just found out you’re a massive Disney geek.”

“Everyone likes Hocus Pocus—”

“Are you seriously going to do this?” Columbine interrupted, and rolled her eyes when Rose turned the camera on her.

“Scared?”

She sighed. “Of getting arrested for trespassing? Yes.” She reached out and made a swipe for the camera, but Rose avoided the grab. “Especially if you’re going to be recording us breaking the law—Martin!”

While they’d been talking, Martin had swung himself onto the top of the chest-high wall and sat straddling it with one leg to either side. “What?” he asked. “It’s not that high.”

“That’s not really her point, mate,” Gonff said. What was chest high on Martin was shoulder high on Gonff, and between that and a bit of extra pudge, it was a bit more of an undignified scramble up. Martin snagged the back of his shirt and heaved when it looked like he wouldn’t quite make it. “Thanks. C’mon, Columbine, you’re up next.”

She sighed again, but took both their hands and let them haul her up between them, with a neat little twist that left her sitting on the wall, feet on the outside.

“Here, catch,” Rose said. She tossed her phone up to Martin and waved off their assistance, bracing her hands on the top of the wall and hopping up, accepting her phone back with a grin. The group paused again on the top of the wall. “So,” Rose said, dragging out the vowel and turning the camera on each of them. “What do you think we’re going to find?”

“I was poking around in the library this afternoon,” Gonff volunteered, drumming his heels against the wall, “and turned up a couple of specifics. Apparently there was this chemist—and I use the term loosely, he wasn’t trained and it was the 1700s, I think—but when he died he said he’d be back.”

“And was he?”

“Well, he was exhumed at some point, and the body was unsettlingly preserved. Though I suppose saying the tomb was broken into would be more accurate; a curious medical student tried to cut off his head.”

“And you say it’s the theater geeks who’re weird,” Rose said. “When has a theater geek ever tried to cut off someone’s head in the name of science?”

Columbine just raised both eyebrows in Rose’s direction. “Really? We’re really going there?”

“Okay, but when has a medical student willed their skull to a theater so it can be used in a production of Hamlet?” Martin asked, and ignored how all three just looked at him in bewilderment. “Go on, Gonff. The body was unusually preserved, the student tried to take its head.”

“Which I contest, honestly,” Columbine interrupted. “You could get as good a sample without desecrating the corpse like that.”

“Anyway,” Gonff said. “As he was putting the head in the sack he’d brought with him, he heard whispers coming from the corners of the tomb.” He gestured, describing the scene with relish. “Whispers at the edges of reality, seeping through the cracks. When he turned around, there were shadows writhing and twining in the corners, reaching out as if they would pull him into the void itself.”

There was a beat of silence.

“And this tomb is in this graveyard?” Rose said, scanning the layout of the ground below them.

“Yep. The student ran, of course, and left the head behind. It’s probably still there, kicked into a corner by a panicked foot.”

Martin and Columbine exchanged skeptical looks. “Guilty conscience, obviously, and probably wind through the leaves,” Columbine said. “Look, there’s trees all along the wall, and there’s grass and stuff, too. When was this?”

Gonff blew out an exasperated breath. “I don’t really remember, a few years after the guy died?”

“So call it the 1810s at the latest,” Columbine said, crossing her arms. “Way before electricity was harnessed for things like flashlights. If he had a lantern or an oil lamp, those shadows were probably caused by the unsteady light source, and obviously an overactive imagination.”

“Speaking of which, anyone else have a flashlight?” Martin asked. “First quarter moon won’t be up for another few hours.”

There was another, longer silence.

“We are really bad at this,” Gonff said finally. “Martin’s the only person who brought a flashlight? Seriously?”

“I was just going to use my phone,” Rose said. “But that’s going to eat my battery, especially if I’m recording at the same time.”

“Lesson learned. When poking around old graveyards after dark, everyone in the crew brings a flashlight,” Columbine said, shaking her head.

“We’ll keep it mind for next time,” Rose decided, and hopped down into the graveyard without further commentary. “Come on, let’s go find this tomb. You remember which one it was, right, Gonff?”

“Yeah, it’s in the north corner. I’ll lead the way.”

“If it makes you feel any better,” Martin said as he helped Columbine down off the wall, “I swung by earlier today to talk to the groundskeeper. Ghost hunters aren’t new to him, and we’ve got permission. As long as we don’t break anything, leave trash around, make too much noise, etcetera, he’s fine with it, if a little resigned.”

“I’m beginning to think you’ve done this before,” Columbine said, half joking, half accusing.

Martin shook his head. “No, I just don’t see any reason to take unnecessary risks.”

Gonff laughed from in front of them, and turned around to walk backwards and still face them. “Matey, I’ve known you for a week and I can already say with full confidence that that’s the biggest lie you’ve ever told.”

“I did say unnecessary risks,” Martin said with complete calm. “Besides, I haven’t been that reckless around any of you.”

“Yes, because jumping two flights of concrete steps is perfectly reasonable,” Rose said, giving him a very disappointed look.

“I was running late and took the landing on my shoulder like you’re supposed to.”

The deeper the four friends passed into the graveyard, the older the headstones became. What names and dates had survived the years were obscured by green-gray or orange lichen. At the very back were a row of small marble buildings, some with long fractures in their walls, some with craggy domes, some in eerily perfect repair but with the iron grate hanging askew. The casual back and forth banter grew quieter as they approached, until at last the muffled sound of shoes upon gravel swallowed it up entirely.

“That’s it,” Gonff whispered, nodding towards a mausoleum built into a low hill, the dark space where its door should have been framed by ivy and brambles.

Rose took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Break my phone and I’ll curse you,” she said, and thrust it into Gonff’s hands.

“Wait, what are you doing?”He fumbled it, checking the camera and keeping it trained on Rose. The image was becoming grainier as the light faded, but it was still enough to film, for now.

“I’m going inside,” Rose said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

“Oh, no, not without me you’re not,” Gonff said, shoving the phone at Martin. “Here, you hold this.”

“I’m pretty sure this violates the 'don’t break anything' request we got from the groundskeeper,” Columbine said, rubbing at her forehead.

“Do you want to go in to explain every ‘experience’ they have, or shall I?” Martin asked. The video wouldn’t show the fond grin he wore, but it was clear enough in his voice as he trained the camera on Columbine, equally fond for all her exasperation.

“You’ve got the flashlight,” Columbine pointed out, waving him on. “I’ll stand guard on the off chance someone comes to run us out.”

“We can jump the wall and make for downtown if that happens,” Martin said. “Always have an exit strategy.”

“You’ve definitely done this before.”

“No, that’s just general life advice.”

They were interrupted by a low call from Gonff from inside the mausoleum. “Martin! Flashlight?!”

Martin fished the penlight out of one pocket with one hand, keeping the camera steady on the door as he approached. He knocked on the jamb with it. “Hello? Sorry for the disturbance, but we were just hoping to look around for a little bit, if you don’t mind the company. We’ll leave you in peace again soon.”

He flicked the light on, and startled back when it illuminated Rose, who was far closer than he’d expected. She also backed off with a pained protest. “Warn a girl before you do that, will you?”

“Sorry, sorry,” Martin said, angling the light a bit lower.

She rubbed at her eyes. “Were you talking to the ghost just now?”

“Look, if there is someone in here, just because he’s dead doesn’t mean we have to be rude,” Martin pointed out, following Rose into the crypt. “How’d you feel if someone came poking around your room without even apologizing for it?”

“You don’t even believe in ghosts,” Gonff pointed out, squinting around. The three of them drew closer together—ghost or no, they were in a small space with a dead body after dark, circumstances creepy enough to raise the hair on the back of anyone’s neck.

“I prefer to hedge my bets,” Martin said, sweeping the penlight slowly around. It was mostly empty, but for a few dead leaves in the corner and a low, rectangular construction in the middle of the room—the tomb itself. “I don’t see anything in here. Should we go a bit deeper?” They were huddled near the door, the blue-bright LED penlight aided by the distant starlight and the sickly yellow glow of a nearby streetlight.

“Yeah, why not,” Gonff said. His voice was a bit higher than normal, but he slid one foot forward, then another. Rose trailed behind him, looking closely around the room.

“Are you sure I shouldn’t go in front?” Martin asked.

“You’ve got the camera,” Rose said.

“Right,” Martin muttered, not sounding too pleased with that. “Of course.”

“I’ll curse you, too, if you break my phone—” Rose started, only to cut herself off with a gasp. “Did you hear that?”

“No?”

Another long moment of tense silence, before all three heard a rustling sound from beyond the tomb.

“I heard that,” Gonff said, this time with an almost manic sounding giggle. “It sounds like he doesn’t like curses. Maybe don’t talk about that right now?”

“Right,” Rose said. She swallowed. “Sorry.”

“There’re a lot of dead leaves in here,” Martin said, directing the penlight towards the corners. “It was probably the wind, or an animal. Something like—huh.”

The light illuminated a misshapen lump closer to the entrance, a bundle of something that looked like it might be cloth. The trio stared at it for a moment.

“Do you think that’s the head?” Rose whispered.

“It’s definitely something,” Gonff said. All three drew closer together until their shoulders were touching.

“You know, I sort of thought the head would’ve been moved, or missing, or eaten by now,” Martin said.

Gonff blanched. “Eaten?”

“Well, yeah. Animals, scavengers, that sort of thing. What, did you think I meant cannibalism?”

“No…”

“Well, only one way to find out,” Rose said. She squared her shoulders. Each step forward echoed hollowly in the empty mausoleum, and when she spoke, both Gonff and Martin couldn’t quite suppress a jump. “Martin, will you stop moving the light around? I’m nervous enough as it is.”

“I’m not moving the light, Rose. And my hands are steady, before you ask,” Martin protested, eyes on the video to make sure this was the case.

Rose halted without turning around. When she spoke, her voice was forcibly calm. “If it’s not the light, what’s making the shadows move?”

“Martin, are you getting that?”

“I’m recording the shadows acting like shadows, yes,” Martin said patiently. “They’re moving because you’re moving, Rose, and you’re between the light and the—oh,” he said, as the shadows trembled again and moved up the wall.

There was a crash of stone on stone from behind them, loud in the sudden stillness. All three screamed, Gonff and Rose both latching onto Martin’s arms. Martin had dropped the penlight to free one hand, and the light swung wildly about the mausoleum, chasing spiky shadows and weird shapes up the walls.

“I think we should get out of here,” Gonff said, already backing out and dragging Martin along with him.

“Good idea,” Rose agreed, matching Gonff pace for pace. “Great time and all, really interesting, but we ought to, you know, go analyze the footage, see if we got an EVP—”

“Not find out what that was?”

“A ghost angry about a joke about curses.”

“Don’t joke about curses, I was cursed once and it offends me,” Gonff agreed with another high pitched giggle.

“This is just for practice anyway, next time we’ll go investigate,” Rose said.

There was another rustling, and the penlight caught the reflective gleam of eyes at the other end of the room.

They broke and ran, bursting out of the mausoleum and almost bowling over Columbine.

“What, what did you—”

“Eyes, dark, something—”

“Just run!” Rose said, pushing the both of them ahead of her.

“Over the wall?” Martin asked the group.

“Yes, fine, just away!”

This wall was conquered far more easily than the first, the fear adding extra speed to all four friends’s flight.

“You really saw a ghost?” Columbine panted.

“No,” Martin said, at the same time Gonff said “Yes!”

“There were eyes, mate, actual, glowing eyes!” Gonff continued. “And the shadows, you saw the shadows!”

“I saw shadows move that weren’t caused by Rose,” Martin said.

“And the crash? And the rustling?”

“Coincidence. Dead leaves. There wasn’t a ghost in there.”

They stopped a dozen blocks away, Rose clutching a stitch in her side, Gonff with his hands braced on his knees, gasping for breath.

“Then what was it?” Rose asked, leaning her head against the wall of the closed coffee shop.

“I don’t know,” Martin said. He was breathing deeply, deliberately slowing his breathing back to normal. “But it wasn’t a ghost.”

“That’s… because… it was a fox,” Columbine said, also bent double and panting for breath. She waved her phone, which the other three only just noticed in her hand. “I saw it come out about two seconds before you did,” she said, straightening as her breath came back. “Snapped a few pictures. He’s a cutie, you probably scared him.”

“We scared him?” Rose repeated, scandalized.

“Oh, let me see,” Gonff said, leaning over her shoulder as she swiped through the handful of pictures.

“Wait, let me get a shot of this,” Martin said, a grin beginning to steal over his face. He raised Rose’s phone again, getting a good angle on Columbine’s. “Aw, he is cute.”

“What about the eyes—?”

“Probably a family,” Columbine said. “I mean, that’d be a great place for a den, wouldn’t it? Sensible people don’t go in.”

“Did I ever claim I was sensible?” Gonff asked her, turning to look at her indignantly with his chin still propped on her shoulder. “Did Rose? Did Martin?”

Rose shook her head, beginning to laugh. “So our first ghost… was actually a family of foxes,” she said.

“Apparently,” Gonff said.

“Stepping through leaves, knocking something over, moving around so that there were shadows,” Martin listed. “And our imaginations did the rest.”

Columbine shot them all a grin. “Good thing I didn’t come in with you guys, then, or I wouldn’t have evidence,” she said, waving her phone in Gonff’s face.

“Well, you’ll have to figure out a way to get evidence from the inside next time,” Rose decided. She put out a hand and wiggled her fingers. Martin passed her the phone.

“Next time?” Columbine repeated.

“Absolutely,” Rose said, and panned the camera around the group. “After tonight, we’ve got to find a real ghost. This is too embarrassing a note to leave on, don’t you think?”

#my fic #redwall #Late LateRose Channel AU #one-shot #Martin the Warrior #Gonff #Columbine #Rose #look I don't remember where this came from #but I love it #please love it too

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valiant-portabella-pirkko · 3 years

Text

A Garden of Memories; A Guild Wars 2 Story

After finally defeating another Elder Dragon, Commander Pirkko takes some time to mourn those who gave everything so she could be here now. And yet, even in death she is determined that something new and beautiful will regrow from the ashes. They will not be forgotten.

In a garden that holds the memories of lost friends, comrades, and perhaps even foes, she and Caithe share a moment of grief for yet another who left this world far too soon.

————————————————————————————

“... Commander, do you have a moment?” Pirkko hardly looked up, even as she heard familiar footsteps approaching softly across the grass. She didn’t feel like talking to Caithe. She wasn’t sure she wanted to talk to anyone.

She finished her work nonetheless, gently tapping down a small mound of loose soil with the flat of her gardening shovel. Her head raised, eyes watching the Firstborn’s approach. Caithe paused. Their tiredness made them seem like mirror reflections, two sylvari warriors worn down by loss and regret. In spite of herself, Pirkko’s expression softened, a long, heavy sigh escaping her lips as she straightened and brushed the dirt off her knees.

“I can talk. What is it, Caithe?” Her voice was quiet, betraying the wound carried deep in her soul. The Firstborn stood before her, looking to the Commander’s half-finished project contemplatively. There was no doubt in Pirkko’s mind that she knew exactly what it was meant to be, even as rough as it was.

“A statue is being constructed in Trahearne’s memory,” she answered softly. “It will stand near the Grove’s entrance once it’s been completed. The others planned to send you a letter when it was done, but.. I felt it would be best for you to hear this news in person.”

The Commander was silent for a long moment…

She could still feel the blade in her hands, the tears on her cheeks.

“... I’m sorry,” Caithe amended quickly, frowning, “I suppose I wasn’t the best choice of messenger. I’ll leav—”

“Don’t go.” Pirkko cut her off, rubbing her eyes with one fist. “I… Thank you, for telling me. You didn’t have to do that.” She looked back to the unfinished latest addition to her garden, chest tight. “It’s just… A lot. That’s not your fault.”

Caithe nodded. “You were very close, I know.”

“He was a good man.” Pirkko could feel that agony in her chest twisting, keen as a knife. “He didn’t deserve to die like that. It’s a fate I wouldn’t have wished on my worst enemy, let alone…” She took a long, rattling breath, looking away. “... Caithe. Does it ever get any easier?”

Caithe crouched at the small planting site, pulling a seed from her coat. She pressed it into the soil, then rested her hand lightly on top… A few small sprouts poked up, fresh green leaves unfolding in the Grove’s warm light.

“Losing someone?” She let the saplings twine around her fingers briefly before drawing them back, watching them slowly reach upwards. “Over time, you become used to the pain of it. It no longer strikes so sharply or so deep, but it never quite goes away. Each fresh wound leaves a new scar in its wake.”

Pirkko picked up a broken sword from its place against the wall of her home, striding forward and placing it into a humble pedestal at the new tree’s roots. Caithe’s vine wound around it, framing the blade perfectly. She stepped back, admiring their handiwork.

“So, no,” Caithe decided finally, “I suppose it doesn’t.”

“... I’m sorry about Faolain.” Pirkko gave her a sympathetic look. “I know that had to be hard for you.”

“She was lost to me long before that,” she answered. “Whatever was between us withered and died many years ago.”

“I know.”

Everything was quiet for a long, solemn moment. Mordremoth was dead, but Caithe was right, she knew. The damage it left behind was never going to completely heal, not really. Faded marks would always remain. On the land, across their skin, and deep in the hearts of all those who had witnessed its rampage and lived.

“... Commander.” Caithe looked out at the garden before them, her gaze even harder to read than usual. “If I may ask, are all of these..?”

“... Yes.” She stuffed her hands into her pockets, looking out over the display.

There were so many flowers here. The entire patch of earth was covered in them.

“It’s beautiful. I’m sure they would have appreciated the gesture, too.”

“Thank you. I think so, too.”

Another moment of silence came, but it was different from the solemn, sad quiet that hung over the pair before. Even from death, something new could one day regrow. Their memory was preserved not in cold, hard stone, but in the continuation of life itself. There was something poetic about that.

It was only then that Caithe noticed a single plant that was different from the others. A tangled rose bush stood alone at an edge of the garden, adorned with vibrant red-orange blooms. Pretty as it was, its thorns were sharp, glittering dangerously in the noon sun.

“... Even one for her, Commander?” Caithe raised an eyebrow slightly.

“As I said… That was a fate I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”

The Firstborn shook her head in disbelief. “Sometimes I fear you may be too soft for your own good.” She gave the bush a bitter glare. “After everything she put all of us through, I hardly think she deserves a memorial.”

“It’s not about what she deserves.” Pirkko’s tone held a careful, restrained frustration. “And I haven’t forgiven her for what she did. But… As Ventari said, everything has a right to grow. No one else will mourn her, so I will instead.”

“Scarlet didn’t want anyone to mourn her,” Caithe pointed out. “Her solitude was a choice. She didn’t care about anyone but herself, even to the end.”

“Then I’ll be kinder than she was.”

A sigh of exasperation drifted across the clearing. “You really are too soft.” She looked to the rose bush once more. “You may recall the rest of that tenet; the blossom is brother to the weed. A thistle would have better suited her.”

Pirkko snorted. “And risk stepping on it? No thanks. Roses may have thorns, but at least they’re easy to see.” Caithe couldn’t help a wry smile.

“Fair enough. She would have enjoyed that a bit too much.”

“Exactly.”

Pirkko stretched briefly, then started gathering up her tools and putting them away. “Ah, I should probably finish up here and get a look at that statue. I’m curious how it’s turning out, hopefully they don’t make it too pretentious.”

“Don’t worry, it’s in good hands,” Caithe promised with a reassuring smile. “I’m sure it will come out nicely. Want me to lead the way?”

“Go on ahead,” replied Pirkko, “I’ll catch up, I’m sure it can’t be that hard to find.” The Firstborn nodded, heading off to their destination. Only once she was out of sight did the Commander look to another of the garden’s dearest inhabitants. A few blooms of columbine were in view, a lovely mix of deep red-brown, pristine white, and vibrant yellow. Reaching up from soft green leaves, they even looked a bit like the magister they memorialized.

She smiled faintly. It was good fighting by your side again, sister. I just wish it had been under better circumstances. The young sylvari lowered her head a moment. Thank you, Sieran. I’ll never forget you.

The Commander finished stowing her tools and finally left the garden behind.

But she could never leave behind the memories, even if she had wanted to.

#Guild Wars 2 #GW2 #sylvari #fanfiction #cw; character death mention #post-Heart of Thorns #Regrowth AU #yes this is canon to the Regrowth AU!#hi yes hello guess who finished Heart of Thorns and is emotionally compromised

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wisdomrays · 3 years

Text

TAFAKKUR: Part 311

PERFECT MATH IN NATURE: Part 1

Although many Qur'anic verses encourage us to search for God's art in nature, probably few of us have ever taken the time to do so. For example, how many of us have ever analyzed the number or arrangement of a flower's petals? If we were to do so, we would discover that the number of petals is usually one of the Fibonacci numbers.

In this article, we will delve a little deeper into this magnificent miracle of God: the mathematics of nature.

FLOWERS:

For example, look at the pictures given below. For 1-petalled flowers, we offer white calla lilies; for 2-petalled flowers, we offer the very rare euphorbia; and for 3-petalled flowers trilliums, lilies, and irises.

Did you ever wonder why 4-petalled flowers are so rare, and why everyone gets excited when they find a 4-leaf clover? The reason for this is because such flowers are very rare, for 4 is not a Fibonacci number. Some violets and bluets also have 4 petals.

Flowers with 5 petals are rather common. Among them are buttercups, wild roses, larkspurs, and columbines.

Examples of 8-petalled flowers are bloodroots and delphiniums. Examples of 13-petalled flowers are ragworts, corn marigolds, and cinerarias; those with 21 petals are daisies, asters, and chicories; and those with 34 petals are oxeye daisies, sunflowers, plantains, and pyrethrums.

Some families of daisies, such as the michaelmas daisies from the asteraceae family, have 55 and 89 petals.

SEED AND FLOWER HEADS

The echinacea purpura is a member of the daisy family native to the Illinois prairie. You can see in Figure 1 that the orange œpetals seem to form spirals curving both to the left and to the right. At the edge of the picture, if you count those spiraling to the right as you go outwards, you will notice that there are 55 spirals (a Fibonacci number). A little further toward the center, you can count 34 spirals (another Fibonacci number). If you count the spirals going the other way, you will see that the pair of numbers (counting the spirals curving toward the left and toward the right) are neighbors in the Fibonacci number series.

The same happens in many seeds and flower heads, among them sunflower seeds, daisies, pineapples, and pine cones. The reason for this is that such an arrangement packs the optimal number of seeds so that no matter how large the seed head is, the seeds are always packed uniformly at any stage. As they are the same size in any given area, there is no crowding in the center and no scarcity at the edges.

The spirals form a pattern: The œcurvier ones

appear near the center, while the flatter ones, which are more numerous, appear the further out you go. Thus the number of spirals we see in either direction differs according to the size of the flower's head. On a large flower head, we see more spirals further out than we do near the center. The numbers of spirals in each direction are (almost always) neighboring Fibonacci numbers.

Let's observe the spirals in these beautiful arts of the Infinite Artist. Consider the daisy. In the close-packed arrangement of tiny florets in the daisy blossom's core, you can see the phenomenon in an almost two-dimensional form. As shown in Figure 2 there are 21 (a Fibonacci number) counterclockwise spirals and 34 (another Fibonacci number) logarithmic or equiangular spirals. In any daisy, the combination of counterclockwise and clockwise spirals generally consists of successive terms in the Fibonacci sequence.

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qqueenofhades · 4 years

Note

How did 9/11 affect the American psyche? I’ve heard people say that 9/11 is when America went insane, but I was born into the post-9/11 America, so it’s a bit hard for me to wrap my head around.

Oh man. You kids are asking the easy questions tonight, I see.

I’m not even sure I can adequately describe the effect that 9/11 had on the American psyche and the ways in which the entire world would be massively, almost unimaginably different if it had never happened, but here goes.

Basically, in the almost exactly ten-year period between the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the terror attacks in 2001, life for Americans was pretty damn good. They had won the Cold War, the economy was doing great, everybody was feeling rich and optimistic and like there was nothing but blue skies ahead. (Side note, I wonder if this resurgence of ‘90s nostalgia has to do with the fact that that’s the last time that we collectively felt safe.) The Columbine school shootings happened in 1999, back when that was completely still a shocking thing that nobody would expect, and not a semi-regular feature of the news every few months. I was 11 years old. Littleton was about an hour from where we lived at the time. I spent the whole morning crying about it and insisted on organizing a memorial service for the victims. The 2000 presidential election was bitterly contested between Bush and Gore, coming down to a handful of votes in Florida and the Supreme Court decision. Man, you also have to wonder how all of recent American history would have gone differently if Bush had lost.

Then…. 9/11. I was 13. It was an ordinary, sunny Tuesday, my dad came upstairs with a funny look on his face, and said that apparently the World Trade Center had been attacked. We didn’t have cable TV, so we didn’t watch any of it live, but I don’t remember that we discussed anything else for the whole day. We were at home, which was far away from the East Coast or where any of it was happening, so I don’t have any dramatic memories of seeing people freaking out or anything like that. At dinner that night, THAT NIGHT, my mom said that Osama bin Laden had probably done it. I repeat: everyone knew on the same night that it had happened that Osama was almost definitely responsible. You may note that Osama bin Laden was a Saudi national, all the hijackers were Saudi, and al-Qaeda was an organization with deep Saudi roots. (Remember the part where America attacked… Afghanistan? Yep. Seems legit. Then again, they weren’t the biggest oil producers in the region and a major US ally.)

It is impossible to overstate the shock that this caused. This had never happened. Even through both world wars and the long, dangerous 20th century and the turbulence and tension of the Cold War, there had never been an attack like this on mainland American soil. (And on that note, America got into World War II, despite all the heroic mythology about freeing the world from tyranny, because of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which in 1941 was an American territory. There were plenty of Nazi sympathizers among the establishment and government, and as soon as the war was over, America brought plenty of Nazis, including Wernher von Braun, to work in the space program. To say nothing of our problems with Nazis NOW. So yes.) The psychological effects were literally devastating for both Americans and many other people. Not to downplay the obvious horror of what happened on 9/11 and the people who were killed, but it turned America into a siege state. Everyone was terrified, and yet now we had a War on Terror, helpfully called a “crusade” by President Bush before European allies forced him to walk it back. His approval ratings hit 90%+ in the days after 9/11, and support to bomb Afghanistan – again, not in any way directly connected to this, aside from the fact that it was where Osama bin Laden had been active, and when the US government had armed him and fellow mujahadeen in the 1980s to fight against the Soviets, who had invaded in 1979, making it a Cold War proxy battlefield, and anyway – was MONUMENTAL. The whole public was behind this. International sympathy for America was incredible. Everyone was on our side and willing to say that we had been wronged. It didn’t really matter that Afghanistan was not really connected to this. Someone needed to suffer for this outrage. And boy, did they suffer.

Then came March 2003, and the infamous declaration that we were now going to invade Iraq, because Saddam Hussein (supported by the US in the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, in retaliation for Iran overthrowing their puppet shah in 1979, after CIA and MI6 staged a coup to remove Iran’s democratically elected prime minister in 1953 to protect their access to oil) apparently had weapons of mass destruction and was about to use them to kill more Americans. Everyone knew at the time that this was pretty much bullshit. But boy, did the Bush administration go hard to work selling it to us. The Department of Homeland Security was founded in 2002, after the attacks. The Patriot Act and other intrusive new surveillance methods and measures were quickly authorized. Americans became watched, spied on, mistrusted, and suspected of wrongdoing in ways never really tried on a large scale before. Any dissent was framed as taking the side of the terrorists; couldn’t you see that we needed all this to be safe? The state of national emergency that was declared after 9/11 was never actually revoked; we are all still living in it 19 years later. The culture of hyper-militarism, all these huge flags at sporting events and the visibility of these “Salute to Service” months and this aggressive fasciso-patriotism all grew up directly from the seeds of 9/11 and the sense of unforgivable affront to America, which could do what it wanted anywhere else in the world but could never forgive anyone for inflicting it in return.

It’s a mark of how badly all that public sympathy was mismanaged that by the time 2003 rolled around, the international community (except for Great Britain and Bush’s loyal compadre, Tony Blair) was… to say the least, skeptical of this Iraq adventure. It was pretty clearly a pretext to resume the Gulf War from Bush Senior’s tenure, unrelated to any actual justification or revenge for 9/11, and demonstrated the fact that far from resting on our laurels and feeling safe after winning the Cold War, America was now locked in mortal combat with an enemy that could be everywhere at any time. Nobody should feel safe, because the terrorists were out there. Despite the condemnation, Bush got re-elected in 2004, in part by painting his opponent, John Kerry, as someone who just couldn’t be trusted on national security. In short, Kerry, a Vietnam veteran, was “Swift Boated,” though he also did run a pretty wooden and uninspiring campaign. I just missed being old enough to vote in this election, though my parents and older sister all voted for Kerry, and Bush’s failings were a frequent subject of discussion in our house. He was getting more and more unpopular, was a figure of national ridicule, and yet this never actually discredited the whole War on Terror and the apparatus that sustained it. There were reports of war crimes, including Abu Ghraib, committed by the American forces. The indiscriminate torture and murder of detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba was also an object of national concern, but allowed to keep happening. Less than 5 years after 9/11, and all this sympathy for America, America had… well, lost its mind.

So… yes. There’s an entire generation now that is too young to remember 9/11 and thinks that America has always been this way, but it is, again, completely impossible to overstate how 9/11 turned this sense of comfortable complacency and national prosperity upside down. Everything was now justified in the name of freedom, and any disloyalty was suspect. Our “The Greatest!!” state had to be repeated and reissued and emphasized at every point. Many innocent Americans died on 9/11, sure. But the way that it was turned into the worst violation that any country had suffered anywhere, led to the death of thousands of Afghans, Iraqis, American servicepeople, Muslims, and everyone else involved in the wars and the system that was built to sustain them, and turned America into this paranoid, brutal, out-of-control war-machine juggernaut is, it can be well argued, its worst and most lasting tragedy.

#politics for ts #anonymous #ask

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salbidum · 3 years

Text

Garden log for today 4-14-21, and exhaustive list of what plants are at what stages.

Decided I couldn’t survive one more hour of my life without foundation plantings; haphazardly threw astilbe tubers into containers of potting soil, planted the aquilegia plants the native plants lady from Buy Nothing gave me (four of them in cement block holes - we’ll see how that goes), and then decided that since the dutchbulbs.com customer service is absolutely garbage and I can’t figure out how to send back the pink phlox they sent me by mistake instead of my fern mix, I may as well plant it too. I did try hacking a hole in the top of some of my hay bales and putting potting soil in them. I’m curious how that goes.

I also reviewed my garden log back to 2018, and wow, I guess in 2018 I also worked from home and basically only got out to the garden store. I put a lot of plants in the ground in 2018.

The back swamp has had the most successful remediation I’ve ever attempted: namely, I called our water utility and asked if there was a reason why that area was full of standing water a full week after any rain, when all the other vernal creeks were dry. There was. It was a leaky meter head. They fixed it. So there we go. (This did exile the single small frog living in a sinkhole full of poison ivy in that area, but the creek is 4 or 5 good-sized hops away, and living in chlorinated city water was probably bad for it anyway. It was absolutely still hopping and yelling in protest every time I walked by yesterday.)

As far as what is up in the back swamp area: the sweet vernal grass has seeded though the seed heads probably aren’t mature. The self-heal was the first thing to appear in the back area and has formed some impressive mounds. The sweetflag has flowered. The false hawksbeard is starting to flower, and the first dandelions (european not kriga) are in puff ball. There seems to be a single plant of blue-eyed grass up at the corner near the playground, and I’m keeping an eye on that in case it sets seed. Also blooming: tree verbena, black cherry, southern dewberry, and every damn pine in the damn state all at once.

The stilt grass, poison ivy, and virginia creeper are just beginning to emerge now. Wisteria on the ground is just now sprouting, but it’s in full bloom in the treetops.

The autumn olive/oleander is blooming some more (we have several types, all vaguely invasive, all absolutely loved by birds, so different sorts have been blooming for a month - the thorny olive first, I think). The yew honeysuckle is fruiting.

In my own garden, I’ve got the lilies, my one dwarf columbine, the star of bethlehem, and the blueberry bushes, ranunculus, and jacob’s ladder blooming right now, though the last three were bought this year as plants and so who knows if this is their normal blooming schedule. The painted fern has also emerged and leafed out over the last week. The dianthus are back for their fourth year. You will never believe this, but when you fertilize dianthus with fish emulsion and compost it does better than when you just leave it in hard clay ground for three years and wish it luck.

The first four sprouts of malabar spinach are up. Yes, I did not succeed in getting rid of it this year. It just grows so well with so little effort and then you can eat it. We also bought two cucumber plants and put them in the trough this week even though that’s just committing to a long ugly battle with powdery mildew.

Whatever I’m allergic to blooms about 4 p.m. every evening and stays in the air until the middle of the night. At least I know now that it sometimes goes away?

In the front, the chives and big dianthus are about to bloom. The cardinal flower is back up, the yarrow is taking over, the lantana is just barely struggling to start leafing out from the base, and there’s a fire ant hill in my thyme plant so that’s a thing I’m dealing with. My wife spent several weeks worrying that the oregano was dead and now it’s taken over a good part of the bed. The mint has been more subdued but it’s early yet.

I put a plant marker on my clover to try to see if I can keep it from getting mowed this year.

On the last invasive-plant note, besides that spring is depressing because you realize how much of the landscape is english ivy, invasive honeysuckle, oregon grape, and oleander over and over, I think the newly-appeared thing in our creek is vietnamese water parsley. I’m going to spend more time trying to identify it, and if it’s that then I’m psyched. It’s terribly invasive in our climate, but I also pulled some up and smelled it and it smells delicious. I feel like of all the ways to wipe out a plant, cooking and eating it usually works the fastest.

#season tracking #garden log

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vvitchy-things · 5 years

Text

Herb List - WIP

I’m updating this with the names of the plants and adding the meanings as I have time, don’t worry.

Acacia - meditation

Acacia (Gum Arabic) - friendship, love, protection, psychic abilities, wisdom

Aconite (Wolfsbane/Monkshood) - invisibility, protection, spirit work

Acorn - courage, fertility, luck, manifestation/power

Adam & Eve Root -

Adder’s Tongue -

African Violet

Agar-Agar - attraction

Agrimony -

Ague -

Alder -

Alfalfa

Alkanet -

Allspice - money drawing, business success

Allspice (Pimento)

Almond -

Aloe - cleansing

Althea Root -

Amaranth -

Amber -

Ambergris -

Anise -

Anise Seeds -

Angelica - attraction, cleansing/purification, cursing, divination, energy, healing, meditation, protection, spell-breaking, success, wisdom

Apple -

Apricot -

Arnica Flowers -

Arrow Root -

Ash -

Asafoetida -

Aspen -

Avocado -

Azalea -

Bachelor’s Buttons -

Balm of Gilead -

Balm of Gilead Tears -

Balsam -

Bamboo -

Banana -

Banyan -

Barley -

Basil - peace & happiness

Bat’s Head Root

Bay Laurel

Bay Leaves - protection

Bayberry -

Beans -

Bee Pollen

Beech -

Beef -

Beet -

Beetroot -

Belladonna -

Belladonna (Nightshade) -

Benzoin -

Bergamot -

Betel Nut -

Bilberry Bark (Huckleberry) -

Bindweed -

Birch -

Bistort -

Black Cohosh -

Black Haw -

Black Haw (Devil’s Shoestring)

Black Pepper -

Black Salt -

Black Walnut -

Blackberry -

Blackberry Root -

Bladderwrack -

Bladderwrack (Kelp) -

Blessed Thistle -

Blessed Thistle (Holy Thistle) -

Bloodroot -

Blowball -

Blue Cohosh -

Blue Violet -

Bluebell -

Bluebery -

Boneset -

Borage (Starflower) -

Brimstone (Sulfur Powder) -

Broccoli -

Broom -

Brussel Sprouts -

Buchu

Buckeye (Horse Chestnut) -

Buckthorn -

Buckwheat -

Burdock -

Butcher’s Broom -

Cabbage -

Cactus -

Calamus -

Calendula -

Calendula Flower -

Camphor -

Caraway -

Cardamom -

Carnation -

Carob -

Carrot -

Cascara -

Cascara Sagrada -

Cashew -

Cassia -

Catnip -

Cauliflower -

Cayenne Pepper -

Cedar -

Celandine -

Celery -

Celery/Celery Seed -

Centaury -

Chamomile - luck, cleansing

Cherry -

Cherry Bark -

Chervil -

Chestnut -

Chia -

Chickweed -

Chicory -

Chili Pepper -

Chili Powder -

Chives -

Chrysanthemum -

Cilantro -

Cinnamon -

Cinquefoil -

Citronella -

Clary Sage -

Clove -

Clover - friendship & health

Cloves -

Club Moss -

Coconut -

Coffee -

Coltsfoot -

Columbine -

Comfrey -

Copal -

Coriander -

Corn -

Cotton -

Cowslip -

Cramp Bark -

Cranberry -

Crowfoot -

Cucumber -

Culver’s Root -

Cumin -

Curry -

Cyclamen -

Cypress -

Daffodil -

Daisy -

Damiana - passion

Dandelion - psychic, second sight

Dandelion Leaf -

Dandelion Leaf/Root -

Dandelion Root -

Dates -

Datura -

Deer’s Tongue -

Devil’s Bit -

Devil’s Bone Root -

Devil’s Claw -

Dill -

Dittany -

Dittany of Crete -

Dogbane -

Dogwood -

Dragon’s Blood -

Ebony -

Echinacea -

Egg -

Eggplant -

Elder -

Elecampane -

Elm -

Endives -

Eucalyptus -

Evening Primrose -

Eyebright -

False Unicorn Root -

Fennel -

Fenugreek -

Fern -

Feverfew -

Fig -

Figwort -

Fish -

Flax -

Flax Seed -

Fleabane -

Foxglove -

Frangipani -

Frankincense -

Fumitory -

Fumitory (Earth Smoke) -

Galangal -

Galangal Root -

Gardenia -

Garlic -

Gentian -

Geranium -

Ginger -

Ginkgo Biloba -

Ginseng -

Goldenrod -

Goldenseal -

Goosegrass -

Gorse -

Grains -

Grapefruit -

Grapes -

Green Pepper -

Guava -

Ham -

Hawthorn -

Hay -

Hazel -

Hazelnut -

Heather -

Heliotrope -

Hemlock -

Henbane -

Henna -

Hibiscus -

Hickory -

High John the Conqueror -

Holly -

Holy Thistle -

Honey -

Honeydew -

Honeysuckle -

Hops -

Horehound -

Horseradish -

Huckleberry -

Hyacinth -

Hydrangea -

Hyssop -

Indian Paintbrush -

Iris -

Iris Root -

Iris Root (Orris Root) -

Irish Moss -

Ivy -

Jasmine -

Jezebel Root -

Job’s Tears -

Juniper -

Kava Kava -

Kelp -

Kiwi -

Knotweed -

Kola Nut -

Kumquat -

Lady Slipper -

Lady’s Matle -

Larch -

Larkspur -

Laurel -

Lavender - passion, sleep

Leek -

Lemon -

Lemon Balm -

Lemon Verbena -

Lemon Verbena (Vervain) -

Lemongrass -

Lettuce -

Licorice -

Lily -

Lily of the Valley -

Lime -

Linden -

Liverwort -

Lobelia -

Lotus -

Lotus Root -

Lovage -

Lucky Hand -

Lucky Hand (Orchid Root) -

Lucky Hand Root (Orchid Root) -

Mace -

Magnolia -

Magnolia Flowers -

Maidenhair -

Maidenhair Flowers -

Mandarin -

Mandrake -

Mango -

Maple -

Marigold -

Marjoram -

Marshmallow -

Marshmallow Root -

Mastic -

Meadowsweet -

Melon -

Mesquite -

Milk Thistle -

Mimosa -

Mint -

Mistletoe -

Moonwort -

Morning Glory -

Moss -

Motherwort -

Mugwort - psychics

Mulberry -

Mullein -

Mushrooms -

Musk -

Mustard -

Mustard Seed -

Myrrh -

Myrtle -

Narcissus -

Nectarine -

Nutmeg - good luck

Nuts -

Oak -

Oak Moss -

Oats -

Oatstraw -

Oleander -

Olive -

Olive Leaf -

Onion -

Orange -

Orange Blossom (Neroli) -

Orchid -

Oregano -

Orris Root -

Orris Root Powder -

Palm -

Pansy -

Papaya -

Paprika -

Papyrus -

Parsley -

Passion Flower -

Passion Fruit -

Patchouli -

Pea -

Peach -

Peanut -

Pear -

Peat Moss -

Pecan -

Pennyroyal -

Peony -

Peppermint -

Periwinkle -

Persimmon -

Pikaki -

Pimpernel -

Pine -

Pine Nut -

Pineapple -

Plantain -

Plum -

Plumeria -

Pokeroot -

Pokeweed -

Pomegranate -

Poppy -

Poppy Seed -

Pork -

Potato -

Prickly Ash Bark -

Prune -

Pumpkin Seed -

Quassia -

Quince -

Radish -

Ragweed -

Raisins -

Raspberry -

Raspberry Leaf -

Red Clover -

Red Pepper -

Red Willow Bark -

Rhubarb -

Rice -

Rose -

Rose Hips -

Rosemary - powerful guardian

Rose Petals - love, romance, good luck for endeavors of the heart

Rowan -

Rue -

Rye -

Safflower -

Saffron -

Sage -

Sagebrush -

Sandalwood -

Sasparilla -

Sassafras -

Saw Palmetto -

Sea Salt -

Sesame -

Sesame Seed -

Shave Grass -

Sheep Sorrel -

Skullcap -

Skunk Cabbage -

Slippery Elm -

Snakeroot -

Snapdragon -

Solomon’s Seal -

Solomon’s Seal Root -

Southern Wood -

Sow Thistle -

Spanish Moss -

Spearmint -

Spiderwort -

Spinach -

Squaw Vine -

Squill -

Squill Root -

St. John’s Wort -

Star Anise -

Stinging Nettle -

Strawflower -

Strawberry -

Sugarcane -

Sumac -

Summer Savory -

Sunflower -

Sweet Bugle -

Sweet Pea -

Sweetgrass -

Sycamore -

Tangerine -

Tansy -

Taragon -

Tea Leaves -

Thistle -

Thyme - luck, peace & prosperity

Toadflax -

Tobacco -

Tomato -

Tonka Bean -

Tormentil -

True Unicorn Root -

Tuberose -

Turmeric -

Turnip -

Uva Ursi -

Valerian -

Vanilla -

Venus Fly Trap -

Vetiver -

Vinegar -

Violet -

Walnut -

Watercress -

Wheat -

White Willow Bark -

Wild Cherry Bark -

Willow -

Wintergreen -

Wisteria -

Witch Hazel -

Witches Burr -

Witches Grass (Dog Grass) -

Wood Aloe -

Wood Betony -

Woodruff -

Wormwood (Absinthe) -

Yams -

Yarrow -

Yarrow Flower -

Yellow Dock -

Yellow Pepper -

Yerba Mate -

Yerba Santa -

Yew -

Ylang Ylang -

Yohimbe Bark -

Yucca -

« »•« »•« »

Created: 10/01/2019

Last Updated: 10/03/2019

#witch #beginner witch #witchblr #magical herbs #masterpost #kitchen witch #green witch #grimoire #book of shadows

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historytaker · 3 years

Text

King Versus King

Within the first quarter of the 14th century, it would be forgivable to let the king of England seem profoundly on top of the world. The setbacks of his father, Edward II, were crudely mended by his mother, Isabella. England was swelling with military, political, and thereby economic success; So much so that the population had inflated to 4 million. Equally important to the crown, Edward II had a legitimate claim to the French crown. The Capetian dynasty was a long standing rival in European politics with the Plantagenets. The Plantagenets out-bred and out-wed the Capetians, ultimately. What’s more, the long time enemy of the English, the Scottish, had little affinity for their king, David II. To add to the seemingly charmed hand of state, when David II was struck in the head with an arrow and duly kidnapped by the English, the Scottish refused to pay a king’s ransom and had all but formally announced fealty to Edward II. This Plantagenet wore the crown of three kingdoms and ushered in an era of chivalry, fantasy, success, opulence and unrequited love for the dynasty overseeing an economic power that had heretofore been unprecedented in Christendom, save only for the early successes of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II. The king was experiencing the apogee of an age in which the old order was in solid control of the comings and goings of the world. Bishops preached in Latin. Indulgences could be paid. Wealth buffered concerns on Earth and evidently in Heaven. For, one could compel a monastery to pray for your soul with such fervency and continuity that one’s stay in purgatory would be short, and Heaven’s bliss obtained in short order. Wealth could be and was hoarded. The lord of the manor had no reason to ever assume a change in the order.

So sustained was the monarchy in England, Edward II felt it not at all unreasonable to fashion himself a modern Arthur at Camelot. His was a kingdom of gentlemen, of knights, of righteous conviction and marshal prowess. He started the Order of the Garter and created a round table to emulate the notion that the king was first among equals. Indeed, the top of the mountain granted a glorious view. Surprisingly, the view did not grant observation of a great encroacher, indeed a devastator of many kingdoms. In fact, this was a king in a hurry; one that intended on conquering more than England, but the world. His march may have started in the steppes of central Asia, but by 1348, some 20 years after taking the throne, Edward II England was besieged by a rival king, King Death.

The army deployed by King Death was, of course, the plague. It is generally believed that it was transmitted by rodents carrying bubonic infested fleas. The Mongols took their dead infested and lunged them into the city walls of the Black Sea city Caffa. From Caffa and the Genoese merchants who ported there, the disease spread. The contagion was swift. At first, and with devastating swiftness, the cities were eviscerated. The fecal matter of the fleas could be inhaled or the bites from the bugs were death sentences. If the diseases spread to the lungs, the death would take 4 agonizing days of fitful coughs. The blood-laced sputum surely spread to those near, and in its turn spread to whomever inhaled it.

What could Edward III do in the face of such rumors of malady in his realm? At first, not much. There were murmurs of a pestilence in the world by sea-fairing traders. Their contacts in Italy described the condition, its velocity of transmission, and naturally assumptions on what devil-worshiping cult had summoned it. There were even numbers suggesting the dead of Venice reached 100,000. Even so, it would not be until the king’s daughter succumbed to the illness in her turn. The Infante Pedro of Castile was to marry Edward’s daughter, Joan. But by September 2, news had reached him that she was dead from the plague. And in keeping with the stoic nature of the king, he is reported to take the news by first saying, “It is as it is.” Naturally, in a rare moment of looking behind the curtain, we can prize from his correspondence with Alfonso XI a father in morning. He laments with a piety mixed with a familiar grief that Joan had “been sent ahead to heaven to reign among the choirs of virgins where she can intercede for our own offences before God himself.” He is quick to remark that Joan had been his dearest daughter and whom “we loved best of all for all her virtues demanded.” To underscore the pang sorrow the king was enduring and to put a point to how bereft he was of a solution he states “No fellow human being could be surprised if we were inwardly desolated by the sting of this bitter grief for are human too.” Among kings, it is incredibly rare to hear such claims to human emotions.

So what does a king do when wrecked from the inside over a new foe as this? He reaches out to the only people who can have answers for pestilence. Naturally this meant the Archbishop of Canterbury. He needed prayers especially in the southern regions of the kingdom where this seem to be emanating from. Alas, the plague caught him too. There was no Archbishop of Canterbury to pray for the people of Kent. And what a perturbation it must have been when men on horseback would come into the city or village speaking of apocalyptic devastations only to then find themselves one of the dozens, or hundreds, or thousands destined for the mass graves.

Perhaps most jarring to the people, rich and poor, man and woman, young and old, was the remarkable speed at which it worked. People pieced together the transmission method soon enough that heart wrenching moments of furtive relationships occurred. Parents abandoning children, husbands abandoning wives, all watching from a distance the quick death but slow agony of those they loved. A welsh poet Jeuan Gerthin explained what we would have noticed among those struck down with the disease, “ Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit; seething terrible wherever it may come, a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry, a burden carried beneath the arms, a painful angry knob, a white lump. It is of the form of an apple, like the head of an onion; a small boil which spares no one. Great is its seething like a burning cinder, a grievous thing of ashy colour…an ugly eruption. They are similar to the seeds of the black peas, broken fragments of brittle sea coal…a grievous ornament…the peelings of the cockle-weed, a black plague like halfpence, like berries.”

All told, by the end of the plague, nearly half of England would be dead and buried hastily in graves. Recent excavations from the 1990’s shown just how fast and chaotic the scene must have been. Traditionally the buried were oriented toward Jerusalem to rise from their graves upon the return of Christ triumphant. The graves revealed a final statement among the buried, jaws slacked open, limbs pointed jaggedly, a frozen protestation of the inhumanity. As the plague meandered through the realm, it upended more than health of very much alive people from just 4 days prior, it upended the conventions and structures of society. A Franciscan monk in Ireland, John Clynn noted with a sobering view to his own reality: “ Seeing these many ills and that the whole world is encompassed by evil, waiting among the dead for death to come, I have committed to writing what I have truly heard …and so that the writing does not perish with the writer or the work fail with the workman I leave parchment for continuing it in case anyone should be alive in the future.” With the all too familiar tone of understatement in British writing, it followed with a new hand, “Here, it seems, the author died.”

Who do the people go to if the king cannot save them? Who do they direct their frustration and hate to if the benevolent God in heaven is not manifesting through the sermons of the priest? How do people receive Christ for that matter now that there are no more priest to speak on their behalf to God? There were no bakers to bake bread, no physics to make med, no priest to receive the dead. Out of the uncertainty of the moment, truly inspired homespun remedies made the rounds. Whether by trial and error or willing a remedy, one potion is passed down to us by a herbalist; giving us a glimpse at the heavy ask but thoughtful response to what was by then considered a disease due to miasma or noxious air. It logically implies then that good smelling things were a kind of remedy. “If it be a man take five cups of rue, and if it be a woman leave out the rue, five little blades of columbine, a great quantity of marigold flowers, an egg, fresh laid, and make a hole in one end and blow out all that is within, and lay it to the fire and roast it till ground to powder but do not burn it, and take a good quantity of treacle and brew all these herbs with good ale but do not strain them – and make the sick drink it for three evenings and mornings. If they hold it in their stomach, they shall have life.”

The booming 4 million population at the outset of the plague were still 90% agrarian. Among those who worked the land, few actually owned their parcel. And increasingly the population was fighting for a smaller and smaller share of land to fashion subsistence for themselves and their families. The plague, in some respects served as a pressure valve. But the correction was too sudden to accommodate the economic structure of England.

The homes of the people, largely field laborers, lived in modest lime-washed structures made of wood felled from the local forest, with dirt floors. To add to the ambiance of the abode, the owners would have strewn loose straw on the ground mostly to collect the refuse of the fields and manure on their feet. The toiling masses did not have much to begin with. The world around them was hard enough before the plague, but with the plague came a psychological and physical damage that could scarcely be comprehended. Whole villages died. Naturally, the economy collapsed. Out of this collapse came the evolution of manorial economics to cash economics. It would no longer due for the workers to simply work for a subsistence and get whatever graces the lord granted. Work needed to be done, the obligations of the lord still needed to be met, but he now had a shortage in labor. His laborers were demanding, with a level of self awareness scarcely granted to them, that the new economic reality was on the worker’s side now.

Out of the plague did spur an opportunity for toiling folk to rise out of poverties oblivion. It was not fast, nor necessarily in one life-time. Sometimes it took generations, but generations as opposed to never at all, the working poor did have a chance. And it was this seeming conspiracy of the cosmos to upend all the structures that held the people together, their faith in the government, their financial inability to resist the rules or rulers, the unquestioning certainty on matters of God, death, hell and heaven by the priesthood, all went out the window. From the necessity of laypeople having to fill roles that were utterly foreign to their station came a new sense of capability to people who never otherwise would have ventured to change. Unwritten rules governing the village went to the wayside as power was exercised often by those who were in a position to exploit it. Meanwhile, Edward III was aging and his son and heir apparent, Edward the Black Prince, died leaving the succession in untenable uncertainty.

Inevitably the old king died and that left government in the hands of a 10 year old, Richard II. Grant it, everyone that was anyone knew that power ultimately laid in the hands of John of Gaunt, Richard’s uncle and protector. In fact, you might compare John of Gaunt to any of our modern day monopolist or business giants like Jeff Bezos. His wealth and holdings and influence could rival a king’s and in many cases did. Even so, the Lancaster stayed behind the scenes and guided the young Plantagenet through his early years. Richard took to the role of king rather quickly, it seemed. His vows and all the mystique surrounding the trappings of monarchy went to his head. In the early years of his boyhood, perhaps with the structure of fixers behind the scenes, it proved useful and life saving. In time it would be his undoing. Nonetheless, the boy regent was pitted against one of the biggest moments in his career when, at last, a popular uprising threatened to upend government.

If, as John Wycliffe supposed, people could find Christ in their own way free from the needs of the priesthood, this supposition unfettered the people from strict forms of social control or engineering. For as it was, finding Christ and following him meant a steady hand towards an egalitarian model. What concessions were made in the in-between years of the start of the plague and Richard’s reign were in-part at risk by the policies enacted by John of Gaunt. The toiling folk had definitively climbed the social ladder into the ranks of yeomen. They were solidly middle class, to borrow a later colloquialism. By their estimation the government was keeping them suppressed and squeezing them for revenues they earned no thanks to the laxed reactions of government. So it was no surprise that what began first as tax dodging by the villagers by shrinking into the forest soon bloomed into open hostility at the tax collectors or strongmen the king or lord would send. The usual deferential English country yokels were becoming intransigent. Dodging taxes soon became the least of it. The village leaders started violent reactions in the form of collecting the heads of those attempting to collect dues. The so-called Peasants revolt began this way. Not with a written manifesto, but with the gumption of survivors, social climbers, and increasingly self-indoctrinated Christians who took for themselves what bits they could of the point of Christ.

The leaders, in part self ascribed and in others acclaimed to, were primarily Watt Tyler and John Ball. Who was Watt Tyler? Tyler was a charismatic man who was imprisoned for not having the money to buy his manumission. In the New Jerusalem being created in real-time, who could be a better general for this lot of revolters in the service of God and King Richard? The imprisoned Watt Tyler. John Ball for his part understood the egalitarian nature of Christ message. Our riches were not for this world but for our home in heaven. It followed then that the ostentatious life of the bishops was something to disdain and use as proof that these were not shepherds of men for Christ, but shepherds of evil and wickedness for earthly possessions. John Ball was the only bishop the people would need. He was one of them and would remain so. The movement was not to overthrow the king. Instead, with a fatal sense of deference for power and monarchy, the movement sought to save the king from his uncle and all bad advisors surrounding him. They, naturally, would save the king and advise him.

The conflagration congregation indeed set fire to Gaunt’s holdings. Richard beheld a terrible site. The skyline of London was ember red in the evening the group made it to the city gates. The leverage was on the side of the “peasants,” but they fully went the whole way. To his credit, Richard agrees at the age of 14 to ride out to meet them. Tyler asks and evidently receives in word the concessions of ostensibly a new kingdom with a Magna Carta written and affirmed for the common people. The overreaching by such low born and the ability to get a king to capitulate was evidently enough to drive one of the king’s retainers mad. Watt Tyler was sliced down and murdered on the spot.

In a glorious sense of theatrics and prudent wherewithal, to allay the fears and ire of the crowd Richard rides out to them in a life-saving vague claim, “You shall have no captain but me.” It did the trick and bought the king and the other frightened aristocrats time to cut down the people one by one. The devastation was total. Upon retrieving the upperhand, when asked again by impertinent lowborn to be received as a king for them, Richard remarks with Plantagenet fury “You wretches, detestable on land and sea; you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues. Rustics you were and rustics you are still: you will remain in bondage not as before but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity. However we will spare your lives in you remain faithful. Choose now which course you want to follow.”

Evidently it worked. Richard was able to stymie the ferocity of a new social order ready to explode. Regardless if the upstarts were successful or unsuccessful, things had changed. While the plague took a century to run its course, and the slow death rattles of a dying dynasty took 100 years to finalize, and while it took 100 years for a modern sense of Englishness to take hold geographically as well as politically, the plague did bookend an epoch in the organization of labor, ideas, currency, and governance. And as with all moments of crisis and collapse, a germ of creativity can sprout into the first tree within a mighty forest of new possibilities. King Death then was the equalizer. Ultimately, it was that equality and need for it that had been festering for years before Edward’s reign even. It just took a different king to make the way and speed up the process, in this case, by necessity.

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