“Forever living, forever changing, forever growing, the mind's eye can awaken the universe.”
“It was funny, she thought, that people treated her flesh like a public resource, a reservoir for all their insecurities and emotional dysfunction, when it was she who had their insides at her fingertips.”
Source: Manhunt
“Capitalism is not and will not be a source of justice for any of us.”
Source: “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People
“How much are we allowed to change our bodies while still being body positive? Does that amount of change decrease if we call ourselves part of the fat acceptance movement? Does the community get to vote you out if you go over a line? Where is the line? Does a group of people on a social media platform count as a community?”
Source: Landwhale: On Turning Insults Into Nicknames, Why Body Image Is Hard, and How Diets Can Kiss My Ass
“How long had his widow lived on here, beside the silent forge, with the grass growing up against the closed double doors, and six-feet-tall mallows drowning the hen-run, the potato-plot, the drying-ground? Piles of washing there must have been in the old days - husbands toiling with horses in smoke, children in and out of dikes and marshes. I imagined her coming through the tall grass of the orchard, with an apronful of windfalls, petals and pollen, and a wispy moth stuck to her skirt.”
Source: A Countryman’s Summer Notebook
“Just as not requiring a child to reason critically will stunt her intellect, not stressing a child's bones, muscles and immune systems will fail to match these organ's capacities to their demands.”
Source: The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease
“All biological and artificial mechanisms -no matter how well designed- are vulnerable to malfunctions, failures, and breakdowns. Even if developmental processes are canalized against perturbations, they can deviate from their target phenotype as random events and disturbances accumulate over time.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“Mutation load has been proposed as a likely explanation for the persistence of common, heritable, and harmfulmental disorders like autism and schizophrenia.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“Same Old, Game Old by Stewart Stafford
On the first day of the new year,
Chronos's roulette wheel rolls,
Seeing the thermometer do 60,
Scraping shadows off the fridge.
Teddy bear plays hide-and-seek,
With a giant, grey beast that barks,
And an elephant with a rainbow gut,
But some things should go AWOL
Dinner plate talismans bring cheer,
Windfall greens and Jupiter peas,
Coins tossed in an oracle's grotto,
Marching into the fog of life ahead.
© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
“An Aussie January by Stewart Stafford
Dead air in the fallen forest,
The black goat circled silently,
Three hillside crosses sombre,
January, warm as an Aussie winter.
Boy brandishing a thin, red worm,
Cheerful march on raspberry feet,
Turning left at the silver potatoes,
Leftovers from the gnome’s feast.
4 a.m. wind a rolling bandmaster,
Whipping a flagpole cord to a beat,
Tingling every wind chime around,
The hibernating squirrel missed it.
© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”