#being a rural queer has its perks

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[freeminimaps]

6 Things to Know Before Visiting Slovakia

There are many countries that are considered to be in the heart of the continent of Europe and Slovakia is most certainly among them. Though landlocked and populated by no more than 5.4 million people, it is one of the most desirable European destinations due to a few points that we are going to reveal below. So, without further ado, let us explore the ups and downs of the parent country of the capital city of Bratislava!

1. A natural preserve: The above words are some of the most adequate when it comes to describing the natural grandeur of Slovakia. Being located in the centre of Europe has a few perks in terms of landscape. In fact, Slovakia has a staggering total of 9 national parks (quite a feat for a country of its size) and an additional 14 protected zones. If you are up for some camping, be sure to check out the High Tatras, for they are simply fabulous (as are most of the Slovakian areas above 2,500 metres). Get yourself a tent and hesitate not, for the natural mysteries of Central Europe await!

2. Budget: We know that by this time, it is absolutely impossible to wash away the stereotypical image that the film “Eurotrip” has granted Slovakia. What’s interesting about it is that, though a bit exaggerated, the film did allude to the fact that Slovakia is cheap – and yes, it is cheap. It is so inexpensive that it has made it on most top lists concerning the cheapest countries to travel to. Budget-savvy travellers are going to have a good time on a relatively thin budget and we especially recommend that you check out the fine restaurants of Bratislava. Though a bit more pricy, they still cannot reach close to the standards of First World countries. Oh, and did we mention that taxi fares and housing are also perfectly affordable (wink)?

3. Tipping: If you thought that Slovakia cannot get any cheaper, think again, for the only reason why some people tip there is because international standards sometimes make it through the borders. Yes, it is only the foreign tourists who are accustomed to tipping and thus it is not expected. Of course, the more touristy locations are a bit different, so always mind where you are. If you know that you are in a place where tourists outnumber the locals, chances are that the restaurant workers in the vicinity expect tips. In that case, the extra that you may leave varies between 10-20%.s

4. Castle heaven: Did you known that Slovakia is the most castle-filled country in the world if we consider the number of such edifices per capita? The exact numbers are the following: within the bounds of its total area of 49,035 square kilometres, Slovakia harbours 425 majestic chateaus and 180 unmissable castles. Some of them, such as Spiš Castle (one of the largest ones in Europe), are even on UNESCO’s List of the World’s Cultural and Natural Heritage Sites. If you are an architecture-buff, you must absolutely go castle-hopping (wink)!

5. Language barriers: If you’ve never been to Slovakia, the first thing that will stick out to you right away is that almost everyone speaks English there. The teenager population combined with the group of the locals in their 20s and 30s might even beat you at English grammar and even some of the older folks can make themselves understood with their hands and feet. Of course, this latter group is much more adept at either Russian or German (though proficiency is more likely in the former language). The tourist-filled areas are all full of English speakers, so you are not likely to get lost while exploring. Visiting rural Slovakia might reveal more people without English knowledge but they are so friendly that you’ll understand them by their benevolent body-language.

6. Fungi: Quite a queer subtitle, isn’t it? Well, it appears that Slovakia is not only a natural preserve on its own but also one of the top vanguards of biodiversity. Over 4,000 species of fungi decorate its inner bounds and, of these, over 1,500 are lichen-forming specimens. What’s lamentable, however, is that more than 40% of these grandiose life-forms are endangered in some shape or form. If you are a biology-buff, you are bound to have great deal of fun trying in vain to document all your findings. We say “in vain”, because we know that their sheer numbers are going to outrun your multitasking capabilities (wink).

Did you enjoy our list? What experiences have you had in Slovakia and how have they shaped your overall impression of Central Europe? Share your thoughts below in the comment section and be sure to check back from time to time for some exciting updates! Safe travels and lichen-hunting (wink)!

6 Things to Know Before Visiting Slovakia was originally published on Freeminimaps - discover authentic experiences!

[fuploudly-blog]

Intersectionality.

I’ve been thinking a lot about intersectionality lately, a word the right bloviates as hate-speak at my feminist-queer-Jewish-New-York-living-body. Its image appears as a Venn diagram: concentric circles of identity, story, culture, race, religion, you name it, that are within each of us. “The personal is political,” says writer Hannah Arendt, and so I have turned a more focused eye on intersectional aspects within me. The contradictions, the privilege I enjoy as a white, middle-class, well-educated woman, and the misogyny I also experience daily as a woman. I am not particularly special, but I am the only example I feel comfortable writing about to give a clear idea of what’s been in my mind.

My father is Jewish, my mother is Christian, and for my entire life they have meditated and studied many forms of Buddhism, beginning with a teacher named Thich Nhat Hanh. I know very little about my father’s family and their Judaism. My Jewishness growing up consisted of bagels with lox on Christmas morning, Grandma Rose’s horror at what she perceived to be my “cross-shaped” earrings, and an immense capacity to imagine the worst happening at any moment. What I do know is that my great-grandfather immigrated to the United States sometime in the early 20th century, I believe in 1913, during the worst of the pogroms in Odessa. During my free trial on ancestry.com (One of those white privilege perks that we have an ancestry.com to use. Where do my black friends go for their history?) I found three US census forms dating from 1920-1930 that showed Russia, Poland, and Romania as possible countries of origin for Louis Liebman, his wife Rebecca, and their four children, including my grandfather Charles Liebman. Bits and pieces of stories I have picked up from various family members indicate that Louis was a rather nasty bit of business. In my own work dealing with generational trauma, I can almost feel the darkness emanating from my great-grandfather, a sense of failure. Louis Liebman had been a shopkeeper in the Old Country, so the legend goes, and was brought to the US via land grants in rural Connecticut purchased by Lord Rothschild and given to Jews fleeing the pogroms, where they would make their homes as tobacco farmers.

Apparently Louis made a terrible farmer, and his rage and bitterness swelled to the point of forbidding my grandfather to attend high school in order to work, despite young Charles’ love of learning. To give you an idea of the extreme disconnect and pain on my father’s side, we only learnt in 2016 (and by we I mean me, my father, and his brother and sister) that my great-grandmother Rebecca had committed suicide after the family settled in the United States. I was twenty-eight, my dad, uncle, and aunt in their sixties learning this tragic and essential part of our history. I don’t even know for sure the date that Rebecca died. As an adult, I have become more of a practicing Jew and am endlessly fascinated with Judaism, primarily in an effort to reclaim this part of my spiritual and familial DNA. The knowledge of my ancestors’ Jewish faith, how they practiced if it all, their stories, are all lost. The more I learn about epigenetics, and delve deeper in Buddhist, Jewish, and shamanic knowledge, the more I feel certain that the trauma of persecution, assimilation, and lost identity my family experienced has indelibly marked my family and our collective spirit in deep and varied ways.

My mother’s family feels like old money Revolutionary War heroes compared to my Jewish patriarchal displacement and relatively recent arrival in the United States. The specifics like dates are equally hazy, but my mother’s line is descended from English and German immigrants who arrived in America in the 1840s (or 1830s) and settled in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with the Moravian Church. Founded in the fifteenth century and one of the oldest Protestant denominations in the world, the Moravians’ beliefs were quite similar to those of the Quakers, with an emphasis on community, music, and a belief in the divinity of the self with less deference to a minister-figure. The Moravians had been established in Winston-Salem since 1766, and my mother’s ancestors were active in both community and church life, founding Salem Academy, an all-girls school that sparked my intention to go to boarding school. During a 7th grade visit to North Carolina over Christmas break, I remember attending Christmas Eve “lovefeast” service at the Moravian church, a beautiful white building still standing. The blissfully short yet music-filled service concluded with the congregation sitting together holding hands, then literally breaking bread together. I munched the traditional soft buns and drank the sweet milky coffee and felt utterly at peace.

As an adult, though, as my own wokeness in the aftermath of police brutality and Black Lives Matter developed, I questioned for the first time something so nakedly obvious: Had my coffee drinking, Southern school founding ancestors owned slaves? The fact that I was nearly thirty before it even occurred to me to consider that question is evidence that white privilege is in all of us, even the radically liberal ones. “Can’t be,” I thought to myself anxiously, “the Moravians were so chill! They were like the Quakers in so many ways, and they were abolitionists! Can’t have been slave owners.” Immediately I Googled “Moravian Church owning slaves North Carolina.” I was initially delighted to learn that the state of North Carolina had more free black people residing there than were in the entire South. Even better when I read that Moravians believed that while individuals may have different stations on the earthly realm, that all Moravians were equal under God, and in 18th century Winston-Salem, white and black Moravians worshipped and were buried in the same church. My moral superiority bubble lasted only an instant longer, as I continued to read that the Moravian Church did not believe in their members owning personal slaves, only the church itself. Apparently the South grew more deeply attached to the institution of slavery, and by the early 19th century the Moravian egalitarianism had faded. African Americans soon were required to sit in a balcony separate from the white Moravians, then had to be buried in the Strangers Graveyard far away from the white God’s Acre cemetery, and finally forced to have their own segregated black Moravian church. The memory of the sweet lovefeast coffee I had consumed turned to ash in my mouth. This is all of the information I know thus far. It is possible that my ancestors did own slaves, it is possible that they did not. It is certain that the religious institution that was such a large part of their lives did.

So. Bitter traumatized Jew on one side, Southern potential slave-owners on the other. Descended from terrified refugees persecuted for religious beliefs, and descended from a genteel people whose religious beliefs excused and allowed them to profit off of the subjugation of a human being. I use myself as a starting place to make a point. I believe these inherent contradictions in ourselves are what unite, not divide us. There is no place on earth (except perhaps New Zealand. Can we all move to New Zealand?) that is not built on generations of bloodshed, subjugation, and displacement. This act of looking inside ourselves is just the first step of a larger, much more crucial process: the act of recognizing the oneness we share with all living things. We are each made of the dust of the bones of our ancestors, each of us descended from people who were conquerors and oppressed, and within each of us are those concentric circles: in my case “Jewish” “female” “slavery supporters” “white” “feminist” “writer” “wife” et. al living in diametric opposition, suspended animation. Look at your own history for a moment; I am convinced that in your own unique, divine flavor, these opposites live inside you, too. Even the source of all of my fear these days, 45 cannot wall up, shower off, or alternative fact them away for himself.

Shema yisrael! Adonai Eloheinu adonai echad. This is the most important prayer in Judaism, one that observant children are taught to say first thing upon arising in the morning, before going to sleep, and the last words they say before death. My husband served in the Israeli army and told me stories of soldiers in the last Lebanon War screaming the Shema as they launched themselves on top of a grenade to shield their fellow soldiers. I am not a rabbi, but my un-nuanced translation is  “Hear Israel! Our Lord Our God is One.” I have been taking Hebrew for a year, and am falling in love with the brevity and poetic simplicity of the language. It is evocative in a way that makes me believe in the presence of Spirit manifested in words. A whole tradition of mystical Judaism called Kabbalah explores this in depth. I love the Shema because it expresses the crucial idea of self-examination, and the importance of intersectionality: we are all one. It is an idea that I see beginning to mobilize and unify the resistance. Our collective liberation is personal liberation. Our self-care, as Queen Audre Lorde wrote, is our radical act of resistance. The unwillingness to accept intersectional, radically different parts of ourselves only serves to enforce the walls, the us versus them, the sense of superiority towards the “other,” when in actuality it is only evidence of a deeper, divine separation within us.

Resist. We must resist together, and be as one. At one with our neighbor, at one with our planet and all the life it holds, and at one with ourselves. We have the space to contain an infinitude. The infinitude within us, our different stories and ideas and cultures and cooking styles and religions are assets to share with the world. Let us unite, and in uniting, use what they seek to divide us.

Shabbat shalom, Inshallah, Namaste. In Peace.

[macarocajardim]

Sobre lesbiandade e ruralidade.  Queer stories  in the rural america : 1 foto Michaela Hayes is one of the four women who lead Rise and Root Farm, 3 acres of farmland in the small village of Chester in New York’s Hudson Valley.The four women, Hayes’ wife Jane Hodge among them, met while working with the non-profit organization Just Food in the South Bronx and are in their second season of growing vegetables, herbs and flowers using organic methods.Hayes says she was attracted to farming because of its “amazing capacity to be a tool of healing,” and that’s something she wants to bring to spread to more people by allowing visitors to come up to their farm, get their hands in the soil and connect with where their food comes from.She’s seen firsthand the impact it has on Rise and Root’s visitors.“It’s incredibly transformative for people to get out in the soil, touch the plants and listen to the frogs and the birds and seeing the bees and insects that are here,” Hayes said.The women see themselves as having an impact, too, on the typical demographics of the farming industry — typically male and overwhelmingly white. It’s an impact that is long overdue.

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Courtney Skeeba always dreamed of having her own land, living in the country and making her own food. And in 2001, through the Homestead Ranch, she realized that dream.

Alongside her wife and son, Skeeba operates her small ranch in Lecompton, Kansas, as a sustainable goat farm, selling soaps, creams, shampoos and other products derived from their milk.

Skeeba says she loves “being able to sustain life without relying on having to buy something.” But with that perk comes a lot of downsides.

“Not everything is sunshine and rainbows,” she told HuffPost. “Sometimes, when it’s three-o’clock in the morning and it’s below zero and you’re trying to catch baby [goats] so they don’t freeze to death, you ask why you’re doing what you’re doing.”

Another benefit that makes sleepless nights worthwhile is the close bond they’ve developed with the community members they see every week at the Lawrence, Kansas farmers’ market.

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Of course, queer people aren’t just farming in the country. They’re also farming in cities, too. Kay Grimm and Sue Spicer are at the helm of Fruit Loop Acres, a permaculture fruit farm on the near east side of Indianapolis, Indiana.

Their farm started in 1994 as four adjacent city lots and has since grown to almost three-quarters of an acre, plus about 2 more acres of scattered-site farmland.

They are working to increase the amount of locally-grown, healthy food available to their neighborhood, an economically struggling food desert. When their black raspberries and tart cherries are in season, the farm is open for you-pick appointments, and they also sell their fruits to local restaurants.

Their mission has since expanded to include their Basic Roots Community Foods delivery service, for which the couple partners with other local growers. The service has been in operation since 2005.

“We have developed our prosperity and are working to help spread it throughout our challenged community,”