Pun Of The Day

Though, of course, it is the humans who need
to have a sense of living better within tighter limits
and reducing their numbers in favour
of increasing the populations of other species 
-it was humans who invented the theory
of evolution in which, with their practically infinite
expansion, they made themselves the exception to it.

Please left click here to read the full article.   

 

Men Hold Up Half The Sky

and they play their part with much better grip,
when they predict more thoughtfully
how much better women have always been
at holding the other half than men of old accepted. 

Out Of Scale Living

Used to be called 'evolution'
by the humans who thought themselves
the peak of sentience in the history of the universe,
'I am the best. I am the measurer of everything,
the grader of all that is lesser than me around me'
thought Francis Galton, the author of the phrase
'survival of the fittest', that reduced evolution
to a competition where surviving by being second,
or lower in the scale of co-creative living,
was made to seem to be an unattractive option.

Fast forward to 2025 and the race for finite resources
is now reset around the search for rare earth minerals
with which to build new technologies, minerals-
scandium, cerium, promethium, yttrium, dysprosium,
thulium, lutetuim, holmuim, europium, praseodium,
terbium, gadolinium, neodynium, lanthanum -
are materials that occur in many places, but remain hidden
in the beauty of nature, where now, to preserve the planet
we must destroy the beauty that gives it a value well beyond
the reckoning of the species with the least sense of proportion
relative to its intelligence that the planet has ever had to endure.     

Faded Blooms

remain blooms until they lose their colour,
but whilst they fade they are still alive;
they live and blend into the background
of what goes on around them.

But with Valentine's day due soon
let old loves bloom afresh
and show their colours as signs of spring
whilst everything else is dithering.
 

Degrees of Unintended Narssicism

It is in the nature of every country
in the world to think it is the best,
better than any other nation state,
and better than every other empire.

Better to the point where the word
'empire' has become declasse,
devalued for how close to 'empire'
is to the old self justifying hierarchies
when slavery and trading in slaves,
were the foundation of the wealth of the few,
for whom everything was property, for sale, 
or for pompous displays to other nations. 

'Empire' has been replaced
by the phrase 'trading block',
where each signee portrays itself
as the leader in the agreement
and other countries come second,
third, fourth, or last, in value
of importance, due to their inferiority. 

The narcissism of the nation state
is something world leaders get elected for, 
to update their leadership status,
the more to prop up how each nation
sees itself  as the centre of the universe

The best ex-leaders learn humility
most by what they do when office deserts them.

The Overwhelm (noun)

 A. L. Kennedy has it right;

'The Overwhelm is the friend of every dodgy sales pitch
for bad leaders, bad ideas, bad products,
because it extinguishes thought.
Headlines and influencers, online radicalisation
they all get more unquestioning traction
if whatever they say overwhelms.
Authoritarians conjure horrors of the imagination
whilst planning real ones
and trashing the governments
we pay to guard and serve us.
Predators thrive in storms and profitable instability
whilst we waste valuable mental bandwidth
we don't have trying to understand chaos....

The storms in our lives, minds, bodies, hearts,
they can all be just as damaging as Storm Eowyn
but when we are overwhelmed The Overwhelm
we can make us lose heart in anything ever being put right.

Listen to the full ten minute talk by her here.  

Picture Set Of The Month - February 2025 - The Paintings Of Hélène De Beauvoir

'Serie Venise' a cubist/abstract painting
by Hélène De Beauvoir (1910-2001).
She was exhibiting here work across
Europe, Japan and the USA.

'Untitled', undated by Hélène De Beauvoir,
one of here greater accomplishments, away
from a painting career, was to be the president
of a centre for the care of battered women. 

'Self Portrait' as painted in 1955
by Hélène de Beauvoir. Her younger sister
Simone De Beauvoir (1908-86) was more
famous than Hélène for writing the feminist
philosophical work 'The Second Sex' in 1949. 

'Harvester in Morocco' as painted in 1949
by Hélène De Beauvoir. Morocco was, of course,
a colony of France, though further back it was
encroached on by the Ottoman Empire.
Presently it has the part of the fifth largest
economy in all of Africa.

'The Flower Market' (undated) by Hélène De Beauvoir
(1910-2001) who painted until she eighty five years old, 
and only stopped painting, whether from failing hands

or failing eyesight, in the last six years of her life.