One of the most challenging instruments I’ve ever attempted to learn. Hammered Dulcimer… one of the oldest instruments in the world.
it is a calm
I hate that the sound and image isn’t synced on my phone but it’s so beautiful….
@lycan-art check this out, you will love it!!!
(via clockwork-mockingbird)
Fun fact: There was a female Native American chief known as Pine Leaf who promised not to marry a man until she personally killed 100 men with her bare hands. When a man convinced her to give up on this pledge and settle down before taking her virginity and running away, Pine Leaf responded by gathering a harem of women, swearing off men forever and becoming an even more badass warrior.
(via im-lost-but-not-gone)
"When we took Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” into a maximum security woman’s prison on the West Side…there’s a scene there where a young woman is told by a very powerful official that “If you sleep with me, I will pardon your brother. And if you don’t sleep with me, I’ll execute him.” And he leaves the stage. And this character, Isabel, turned out to the audience and said: “To whom should I complain?” And a woman in the audience shouted: “The Police!” And then she looked right at that woman and said: “If I did relate this, who would believe me?” And the woman answered back, “No one, girl.” And it was astonishing because not only was it an amazing sense of connection between the audience and the actress, but you also realized that this was a kind of an historical lesson in theater reception. That’s what must have happened at The Globe. These soliloquies were not simply monologues that people spoke, they were call and response to the audience. And you realized that vibrancy, that that sense of connectedness is not only what makes theater great in prisons, it’s what makes theater great, period."
—
-Oskar Eustis on
(via mindlessmunkey)
(Source: azpbs.org, via littlestartopaz)
Remember old Fleur Delacour? She’s got a job at Gringotts to eemprove ‘er Eeenglish. And Bill’s been giving her a lot of private lessons.
But my Bill and Fleur feels, my Bill and Fleur feels. The eldest boy, the best boy, with his accolades and his earring and his dashing escapades, breaking curses in pyramids, the boy who comes home when he’s called. The girl so beautiful she is inhuman with it, vain and selfish until you see quite how selfless she is.
They are both of them monsters: the werewolf, scarred fighting his parents’ war returned, and the veela, struck beautiful by her grandmother’s life, something ghastly hidden in her bones. They both carry an otherness they did not ask for. They are both judged for their perfection (head boy and champion of Beauxbatons, brave and beautiful, honorable and fair), judged for the way they seek after it (his long hair and his earring, her prettiness, her vanity), and judged for its lack. He is scarred and she loves too hard, she is not a gentle soul.
During the second task, they took each of the competitors’ most precious people: Harry’s best friend, Cedric and Krum’s sweethearts, and Fleur’s little sister. I like to think she worries about it, how much her own life orbits around this little life almost a decade smaller than her. I like to think she worries about it, worries about Gabrielle but also worries about how much she worries, worries about what people will think. I like to think that at fifteen, when a tiny Gabrielle climbed into Fleur’s lap, Fleur decided she didn’t care. She gathered her sister close and worried all she wanted about everything except what other people thought.
I like to think she worries about Bill, when she first starts feeling her orbit shift in his favor. Gabrielle will always be tucked under her wing, but Bill’s hand is in hers, and for the first time in a life of flights and flitting and others’ eyes on the hem of her robe, that hand feels like it should be there. And Fleur worries, because she can feel her orbit shifting, toward this handsome ex-Head Boy with Egyptian sand still between his toes.
I like to think she worries about it, about him, up until the first time she sees Bill with his brothers, amid a gaggle of Weasleys, until she sees him with his one and only baby sister.
Ginny is small and wiry, sharp as a sharpened rosebush branch. Fleur knows something about beautiful, dangerous things. Ginny hates her at first, and Fleur smiles, flits by, moves on. She decided a long time ago not to care about what other people thought. The important thing here isn’t the way Ginny rolls her eyes at Fleur, or the way Ginny will one day learn that they both have hard darknesses under their pretty skins; Fleur likes the way that Bill teases his little sister, falls into the rhythm of his family, wrapped up in a warm possession of these people he loves. She remembers that they are both here because they have wrapped themselves up in a war, to save lives, to save others, to save their own. She stops worrying about Bill. He will understand about Gabrielle.
The beauty and the beast; the boy and the land-bound siren; the least interesting quality in either of them is the shape of their skin. She is vain, selfish, petty, pretty, and she falls whole-heartedly into a war that isn’t hers.
Fleur is horrified when Molly thinks she will leave Bill for his scars, she is horrified that anyone would think her love skin deep, because Fleur Delacour, above all, knows what it is to be skin deep. They have been casting her as that all her life, this perfect beautiful child, the talented student, the lovely young lady. People swoon around her in the hallways when they aren’t rolling their eyes at her vanity.
This was her skin, not her vanity. This was her birthright, as much as Harry’s green eyes or Bill’s red hair and the war on his heels, This was so far from her self.
These were her selves: Fleur weeping furiously on the shores of the lake, and kissing Harry and Ron when they bring Gabrielle back to the air; Fleur at Shell Cottage, gracious, exhausted, in love in a war zone; Fleur shouting a grieving Molly Weasley down in a Hogwarts tower, declaring how foolish it would be to stop loving a man based on his scars. She is beautiful enough for both of them, after all. They are brave enough for each other. They have both always had the monster in their bones, perfection hounding their heels, little siblings who are all the reason they need to fight to make the world a brighter place.
Few look past Bill’s scars, past Fleur’s luminous beauty, but they look at each other, hold hands, cling tight. He sees her sharp, sharp smile while he grins with his wolf’s teeth, bleeds from his big heart. Between them, they make the world a brighter place, a better one, and don’t care who notices, who sees, who understands. They do, and that’s enough.
WELL OKAY THEN
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
Having grown up in DC, statues of various dead guys on horses are basically background radiation, or they were before I became Hamilton trash and started noticing them again. Now it’s like every time I turn around there’s a Founding Father looking at me like I personally disappointed him, and it’s getting a little unnerving.
Although: as a result, I sort of want to write a magical realism thing where that can really happen. Where if you do something they would have disagreed with strongly enough, the statues climb down off their columns and lumber down Mass Ave to the Russell Building or the Capitol, where they stand on the sidewalk, arms crossed, glaring into the window of whoever’s just introduced legislation that offended them. They don’t speak, or attack anyone, or damage anything– well, they do tend to bump their heads on low-handing streetlights, sometimes, but that doesn’t count. Mostly they just stand there, mournful, accusing, for everyone to see.
Sometimes lawmakers can talk them around, convince them they’re not actually betraying the political ideals of their predecessors. Politicians who are good at this tend to have much, much longer careers than the ones who aren’t. Politicians who piss off the wrong statues seldom get reelected.
George Washington rarely budges, and when he does it’s front-page news, nationwide. Madison’s always been easier to talk around than most. Hamilton spend more time off his plinth than on it, but he cools off fast. Jefferson holds grudges, to the point that hardly anyone worries too much about making him mad.
It’s not just politicians, either, and they don’t always come to life in anger. Joan of Arc’s bronze horse will shiver to life in Malcolm X Park, sometimes, and carry her off to join protest marches, when she thinks their cause is just. Gandhi walked with Iraq War protestors. The Spirit of American Womanhood, outside Constitution Hall, danced on the day that Roe v. Wade was decided, and when Obergefell vs. Hodge went through, Eleanor Roosevelt taught a clumsy Lindy to Baron von Steuben.
Lincoln has only risen from his seat once since he was put there in 1922, and that was to nod in solemn approval at LBJ from the White House lawn.
Some cities rarely put up statues, and many have taken theirs down. Paris has a great many artists and writers memorialized, and curiously few politicians. In London, during the Blitz, Nelson shinned down his column to help dig people out of collapsed buildings, until he was broken to pieces himself; he stands atop the column again today, reassembled, but has never moved since. In the last moths of the Soviet Union, a desperate Communist Party had the statues of Moscow chained in place. These days, Monument Avenue in Richmond is punctuated with a long series of empty plinths and bare columns.
But DC keeps theirs, and keeps building more.
(via academicfeminist)
A little girl hears for the first time the Muslim call to prayer.
Subhanallah
If you don’t think the call to prayer is one of the dopest sounds out there, you have no ears.
Will you please just look at how mesmerized this child is
this is beautiful.
“That’s a good one.” She’s so mesmerized! And her mom just doesn’t even notice.
I love this because a lot of the time in western culture Muslim traditions and practices don’t get highlighted for the beautiful things they are and here’s a little girl exposed to just a small aspect of that and she’s in awe. That’s wonderful.
This is beautiful
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
I work at a small pet store, and we sell two things in abundance: dog food and crickets. As for crickets, we sell them at twenty for $1. Now, the store is almost always busy, so we don’t have time to actually count out twenty crickets. We usually eyeball it, keeping our guesstimations on the generous side. Customers dig it because they usually get a few more crickets than they asked for, and we get to save time and generate a little good will.
One day a customer comes in and asks for one hundred large crickets. Let’s call him Clyde. No problem, I tell him. As I’m gathering the crickets into the bag, I ask him about what he’s feeding them to, and we get to talking about lizards, tarantulas, and other cricket-eaters. Clyde seems alright at this point - I genuinely enjoy talking about animals with the customers.
I hand Clyde the bag of about one hundred crickets, and he takes a long look at it, turning it this way and that. He looks at me and skeptically asks if there’s really a hundred crickets there. “Looks like 70 or 80,” he says. Mind you, everyone at the store is very good at guesstimating how many crickets are in a bag; we all know what 20, 50, and 100 crickets look like, and in all the time I’ve worked there, I’ve never been questioned by a customer.
My immediate emotional response was somewhere between annoyance and wounded pride. So, I did the reasonable, logical thing: I took the bag back, and I told him I’d count every single cricket, ‘cause I’ll be damned if he doesn’t getexactly one hundred crickets.
So, I painstakingly count each cricket by dropping them one by one from the first bag into a new bag. He watches me the whole time, making comments here and there like “unnecessary” and “I’m sure it was a hundred.” But nay, I tell him. “I want to make absolutely sure that you get the crickets you paid for.”
As I count my hundredth cricket, I look at the remainder in the bag. Lo and behold, there are ten crickets leftover. A whole fifty cents! As I hand Clyde the new bag of exactly one hundred crickets and toss the rest back into the bin, I thank him for keeping me and the store honest, and assure him that I’ll count his crickets every time he comes in from now on.
Haven’t seen him since.
(Source: redd.it, via littlestartopaz)
Monsters in the Classroom
The marker squeaks as I drag it across the board. My students are poised behind me, pencils and papers ready. They have a simple assignment: write down as many words as they can think of that describes who they are. While they write, I write. Tit for tat. Lead by example. I begin my list:
Teacher
Woman
White
Appalachian
Poor
Educated
I pause and look around the room. My students now get the idea and have started to write their own lists. I take a deep breath and keep going.
Feminist
Liberal
Fat
Depressed
Atheist
A few students go ‘huh’ at the last one, but then go back to writing. I see a few of them jot down Christian on their list. One student writes down Muslim. Another student writes down something, then erases it and replaces it with a question mark.
One more beat and I raise the marker again. In a steady hand, I finish my list.
Queer
I look at the word on the board, black standing out against white, and carefully erase the smudge I made of the ‘Q’ and rewrite it. I’m wasting time, but I am about to discover something heavy, weighty about my students. When I turn around, I will see who trusts me and who now doesn’t. I place the cap back on the marker, count a beat of five in my head, and turn around. The students now have a clear view of the board.
I see one student in the back smile, grin wide and teeth showing, before ducking their head back down to their list. We’ve shared a secret, something between the two of us, a mental handshake. I see you there, we both say without words. I focus on their grin instead of the student now looking at me in disgust.
