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My happy place.

Half-Life 2

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When all that really mattered.

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Anna Kendrick

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I got to hold a 500,000 year old hand axe at the museum today.

It's right-handed

I am right-handed

There are grooves for the thumb and knuckle to grip that fit my hand perfectly

I have calluses there from holding my stylus and pencils and the gardening tools.

There are sharper and blunter parts of the edge, for different types of cutting, as well as a point for piercing.

I know exactly how to use this to butcher a carcass.

A homo erectus made it

Some ancestor of mine, three species ago, made a tool that fits my hand perfectly, and that I still know how to use.

Who were you

A man? A woman? Did you even use those words?

Did you craft alone or were you with friends? Did you sing while you worked?

Did you find this stone yourself, or did you trade for it? Was it a gift?

Did you make it for yourself, or someone else, or does the distinction of personal property not really apply here?

Who were you?

What would you think today, seeing your descendant hold your tool and sob because it fits her hands as well?

What about your other descendant, the docent and caretaker of your tool, holding her hands under it the way you hold your hands under your baby's head when a stranger holds them.

Is it bizarre to you, that your most utilitarian object is now revered as holy?

Or has it always been divine?

Or is the divine in how I am watching videos on how to knap stone made by your other descendants, learning by example the way you did?

Tomorrow morning I am going to the local riverbed in search of the appropriate stones, and I will follow your example.

The first blood spilled on it will almost certainly be my own, as I learn the textures and rhythm of how it's done.

Did you have cuss words back then? Gods to blaspheme when the rock slips and you almost take your thumbnail off instead? Or did you just scream?

I'm not religious.

But if spilling my own blood to connect with a stranger who shared it isn't partaking in the divine

I don't know what is.

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Anna Kendrick

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Unveil the fascinating story of the world's oldest sword! Recently uncovered in a Venetian monastery, this remarkable weapon dates back an astonishing 5,000 years and is made from arsenical copper, which came before the advent of true bronze. Initially misidentified, it took the sharp eye of a passionate graduate student to uncover its true age. Hailing from Kavak, near the historic site of Trebizond (modern-day Trabzon, Turkey), this sword shares striking similarities with others found at Arslantepe, dating back to around 3,000 BC. This incredible discovery not only highlights the ingenuity of early metallurgy but also offers a thrilling glimpse into the world of ancient weaponry.

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Lord Shiva ॐ Talon Abraxas

"Om Tryambakam Yajamahe Sugandhim Pushti Vardhanam

Urvarukamiva Bandhanan Mrityor Mukshiya Maamritat"

Meaning - Om, We Worship the Three-Eyed One, Who is Fragrant, Increasing the Nourishment. From these many Bondages similar to Cucumbers (tied to their Creepers), May I be Liberated from Death (Attachment to Perishable Things) So that I am not separated from the perception of Immortality (Immortal Essence pervading everywhere).

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"Pay attention to the signs, for God speaks within you through your intuition, but God also speaks outside of you through synchronicities.” - Rumi

Spirited Away Talon Abraxas

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suggested donation by Heather Christle

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Diving into the Wreck

by Adrienne Rich

First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone.

There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it’s a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment.

I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin.

First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed

the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters.

This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body We circle silently about the wreck We dive into the hold. I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.

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“In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.” ― John Fowles

The Forest Path Talon Abraxas

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Sometimes

by Mary Oliver

I.

Something came up out of the dark. It wasn’t anything I had ever seen before. It wasn’t an animal or a flower, unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water, a head the size of a cat but muddy and without ears. I don’t know what God is. I don’t know what death is.

But I believe they have between them some fervent and necessary arrangement.

II.

Sometimes melancholy leaves me breathless…

III.

Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source! Both of them mad to create something!

The lighting brighter than any flower. The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.

IV.

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

V. Two or three times in my life I discovered love. Each time it seemed to solve everything. Each time it solved a great many things but not everything. Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and thoroughly, solved everything.

VI.

God, rest in my heart and fortify me, take away my hunger for answers, let the hours play upon my body

like the hands of my beloved. Let the cathead appear again — the smallest of your mysteries, some wild cousin of my own blood probably — some cousin of my own wild blood probably, in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

VII.

Death waits for me, I know it, around one corner or another. This doesn’t amuse me. Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers. It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy. I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

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Sophia Loren

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- Dog star, burning through a vast black sky -

In memory of Laika: a greater friend to mankind than mankind was to her.