#How To Have Unlimited Abundance with Women | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mariacallous · 2 years

Text

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overruling Roe v. Wade has raised unsettling questions about the status of the Court’s right to privacy jurisprudence. On a more immediate level, though, the decision has also triggered deep concern about its impact on the information privacy of women who have abortions while living in states that ban abortion, as well as others who help them, promote travel to other states, or sell abortion medications.

With abortion bans in several states taking immediate effect, state prosecutors—or anti-abortion activists—can begin to investigate and prosecute. As they do, they may seek evidence not only from devices and accounts of targets but also from the wide array of app providers, communications services, advertisers, and data brokers able to collect unlimited information today. This kind of evidence can include geolocation data that reveals visits to places where abortions are performed and the duration of visits; data from “femtech” apps and devices that show interruptions in menstrual cycles; web searches for abortion services or help; data or communications with providers or family about obtaining an abortion; and payments data reflecting purchases of abortion services or medications, among many sources of digital evidence. For example, Fitbit data has already been used to discredit a rape allegation, so it could be used to discredit a similar exception to abortion restrictions.

In response to the Dobbs decision, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to write House members flagging work on legislation to “[p]rotect women’s most intimate and personal data stored in reproductive health apps.” In anticipation of the decision, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) introduced a bill to prevent data brokers from selling health and location data and Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) filed a My Body, My Data Act to establish privacy protections for “personal reproductive or sexual health information.” Advice to women about covering digital tracks has been abundant.

In this light, it is worth examining how pending comprehensive privacy legislation would protect these kinds of information. The bipartisan American Privacy and Data Protection Act (ADPPA) is the most likely vehicle for such legislation since it was reported out unanimously by the Consumer Protection and Commerce Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on June 23, 2022, and is expected to go to full committee for a markup after the July 4 recess. Thus, the bipartisan ADPPA is the bill with by far the best prospect of passage in this Congress—and the first comprehensive information privacy legislation ever with any real prospect of passage.

The ADPPA would provide material boundaries for more focused data collection, use, and sharing in place of today’s anything-goes system, and provide rights that give individuals greater control over information that can be linked to them. Women’s health information is a subset of the bill’s “covered data” and would be subject to additional protections as “sensitive data” (as in some other comprehensive privacy bills, including the Comprehensive Online Privacy Rights Act filed by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.)). The ADPPA would accomplish the essence of the Warren-Wyden and Jacobs bills—and then some.

Under the heading of “sensitive data,” the ADPPA includes information about “the past, present or future physical health, mental health, disability, diagnosis, or healthcare condition or treatment.” Unlike HIPAA, the health information statute many people are familiar with in the healthcare context, this coverage applies to all such information regardless of whether is in the hands of a covered provider. That would encompass most of the data of concern as a result of Dobbs, including from femtech apps, smart watches, and web searches, as well as the health information and sexual and reproductive health information targeted by the Warren-Wyden and Jacobs bills.

In addition to this important category, the definition of “sensitive data” includes genetic information and biometric information, which can be used as identifiers, and any and all data about anyone under the age of 17. The latter category would add protection for younger teens who may be subject to unwanted pregnancies. Sensitive data under ADPPA also includes precise geolocation information, which is a subject of the Warren-Wyden bill.

The definition of covered information includes “derived data,” personal information obtained from analysis, inferences, and predictions based on covered personal data. This would cover instances like Target’s famous targeting of ads for pregnancy and infant products to a pregnant teenager whose family did not know about her pregnancy.

The ADPPA protects all personal information by requiring that collection, use, and sharing be “limited, necessary, and proportionate” for the provision of services and products requested by, or communication reasonably expected by individuals, and allows for specified uses such as fulfilling orders, billing, security, and maintaining and improving services. For sensitive data, it also prohibits sharing personal information with third parties such as advertisers and data brokers without affirmative express consent from individuals. And if such data is shared, it may not be processed beyond the purposes for which consent was given.

Some have advocated that women should get rid of apps or devices that monitor menstrual cycles and all their data. The ADPPA proposes some means to control such information. It would give individuals rights to get access to data linked or linkable to them (at no cost at least two times per year) and to have it deleted. It also requires a means for individuals to withdraw consent previously provided and to opt out of targeted advertising and transfers of data to third parties, providing some control over online tracking or data aggregation that could be revealing, as in the Target case.

The protections covering the collection, use, and sharing of personal information in the ADPPA would allow compliance with federal, state, local, and tribal legal requirements. This means that even sensitive information is not immune from lawful processes by law enforcement. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) does provide significant constraints, particularly for the stored contents of electronic communications, although a widely-followed judicial decision imposing a warrant requirement has never been codified as law or adopted by the Supreme Court. Law enforcement access involves a different legal regime and privacy debate about what constraints should be placed on such processes, either in general or for health information.

The protection proposed in the ADPPA nevertheless should reduce the volume of data in private hands available by lawful process as well as freely available to law enforcement (or vigilante bounty hunters) through commercial sources, on the web, or by tracking devices and behavior online. It also would give covered entities a legal basis to decline providing information simply because a police officer or prosecutor asks for it and, as the later-enacted law, should override the latitude in ECPA for non-governmental entities to obtain non-content data, or metadata, about electronic communications.

The ADPPA also extends civil rights protections to processing of personal information that discriminates on the basis of protected classes, which includes discrimination “on the basis of sex.” Coupled with provisions obligating companies to assess and mitigate “privacy risks” and to evaluate algorithms, these protections should increase mindfulness about the impact of data use on women.

Sen. Maria Cantwell’s majority staff on the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee sent a memo to members arguing the ADPPA does not adequately protect women’s reproductive information because constraints on private lawsuits will make it harder for women to sue for violations. The basic scope of private rights of action in the ADPPA and a Cantwell draft are similar, but the ADPPA’s right would not be available until four years after the law’s effective date and subject to very specific notice and pleading requirements that could throw out some claims. The ADPPA also does less to limit mandatory arbitration clauses and class action waivers in privacy claims.

These constraints on litigation do not alter the significant changes that the ADPPA would make to existing information ecosystems. If House passes the ADPPA, Sen. Cantwell and Senate Democrats should think long and hard about whether they want to stand in the way of enacting far-reaching privacy protections encompassing reproductive and sexual health information over the limits on lawsuits. There are aspects of the ADPAA that can be improved, but the major differences among the negotiators have space for compromise. Four years leaves room to move up the date when lawsuits can begin while allowing ample time to adapt to compliance. There are many different ways to limit lawsuits (some suggested in our 2020 report on ways to bridge gaps in privacy bills). And both bills provide for some limits on pre-dispute arbitration waivers, having moved off polar all-or-nothing positions in 2019.

At the end of the day, as with gun legislation, it will be better to do something than to leave in place an unfettered system—and the ADPPA would accomplish far more for information privacy than the new gun law does for gun safety. And rather than requiring specific legislation, the risk to information about women’s health and health care adds urgency to the opportunity for a baseline of protection for the personal information of every woman, man, and child in America.

1 note · View note

everythingthemoontouches · 3 years

Text

You guyssssss I just found out that Kate Midlleton and MEGHAN markle both have punarvasu moon / Venus placements. Like. Wow. The royal family certainly has a type

Kate went to a super prestigious school. Meghan was on suits.

The royal weddings were internationally publicized and the entire world attended their wedding. Like yep, cancer is literally the royal wife placement.

Punarvasu nakshatra is in moon and ruled by Jupiter the great benefic planet that bestows unlimited abundance. It gives from a place of love and does not ration your treats the way saturn does. Jupiter is the sweet cuddly wise grandpa who tells you good stories, gives great spiritual counsel and hands out cakes or money when you need it.

Punarvasu is ruled by Aditi, the Great Mother goddess in Hindu mythology. All crops and growth + sustenance providing things on the planet fall under her domain. She is mother to Indra Dev, the king of the gods. Women with strong punarvasu placements are supremely blessed by this divine mother.

Theyy do well at work -reaching unimaginable heights of success. Their domestic life too is super sappy and happy. Wedded bliss.

They're such good moms too. A picture of grace and poise. Intelligent. Resourceful. They know how to make the connections they need. Always present a graceful image to the public eye.

Poised.could do very well at feminine beauty pageants.

#Cancer moon #Cancer venus #Punarvasu #Punarvasu nakshatra #Vedic astrology #Blessed #Jupiter #Jupiter ruled Nakshatra #Luck placements astrology #Lucky #Astrology #Kate Middleton #Meghan Markle #Duchess of Sussex #Duchess of Cambridge #The royal family #Queen #Wifey

52 notes · View notes

and-then-there-were-n0ne · 4 years

Text

The Minnesota Starvation Study

In the 1940s, when starvation was widespread throughout war-torn Europe, little was known about the effects of human starvation or how to best refeed people who’d suffered from such deprivations. Dr. Keys led the first scientific study of calorie restrictions, at the Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene at the University of Minnesota, for the War Department. The researchers wanted to understand the medical needs facing millions of starving war victims and how best to renourish and rehabilitate them to health after the war. Their study was known as the Minnesota Starvation Study and the results were published in the legendary two-volume, Biology of Human Starvation (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 1950). The study itself was so comprehensive and intense, however, that even Dr. Keys admitted no other human experiment quite like it will ever be done again because, given what we now know, it would be seen as too cruel and life-threatening. While the degree of suffering the participants underwent would violate what is seen as the ethical rights for human research subjects today, in one respect this study was different from obesity and weight loss research done today. These men were not volunteering because they felt they needed to lose weight for fear that their own lives were endangered, nor were the study authors motivated by personal gain or selling a weight loss program. Even the recruitment poster for the Minnesota Experiment, dated May 27, 1944, asked for men willing to starve so others may be better fed. The volunteers were all conscientious objectors to the war who said they wanted to do something of real meaning for their country, make a contribution to science and help to improve the medical care for the millions of starving people in Europe. They gave their consent freely, without a feeling of personal duress and with full knowledge of the risks. The recruitment information they were given stressed how difficult the experiment would be. One participant later said: “They explained what was going to happen. There was nothing held back. They explained that they could not assure me that there would be no permanent damage… They did not know what would happen. This is what they were trying to find out… really they emphasized the discomfort… this was not going to be an easy task down the road.” Sixty years later, Johns Hopkins interviewed the surviving study participants for their first-hand experiences and they all said they would do it again:

[T]he men continued to look back on participation in the Minnesota Experiment as one of the most important and memorable activities in their lives. Wesley Miller reported, “It’s colored my whole life experience… [and was] one of the most important things I ever did… I’m proud of the work the Civilian Public Service did during the war.“ Samuel Legg seemed to speak for all of the men when he commented, “I think probably most of us are feeling we did something good and are glad we did it, and that helps us live a better life.”

The experiment — the starvation syndrome

The 40 young male participants were carefully selected among hundreds of volunteers for being especially psychologically and socially well-adjusted, good-humored, motivated, well-educated, active and healthy. They were put on calorie-restrictive diets of about 1,600 calorie/day, meant to reflect that experienced in war-torn regions, for 3 months. They dieted to lose 2.5 pounds a week to lose 25% of their natural body weight. The calories were more generous than many weight loss diets prescribe today! What this study was actually studying, of course, was dieting and restrictive eating — our bodies can’t tell the difference if they’re being semi-starved involuntarily like war victims or voluntarily. During the 3-month nutritional rehabilitation period after the diet, the men were randomly assigned to various nutritional regimens, with differing levels of calories, proteins and vitamins. The men lived at the lab and everything they ate and did was closely monitored, as was their health with a battery of tests. Daily exercise was walking about 3 miles a day. As difficult as the diets were for the subjects, they knew their hunger was less than that of the war victims they were trying to help. All but four completed the study. One of the participants said: “The difference between us and the people we were trying to serve: they probably had less food than we did. We were starving under the best possible medical conditions. And most of all, we knew the exact day on which our torture was going to end. None of that was true of people in Belgium, the Netherlands, or whatever.” Dr. Keys and colleagues painstakingly chronicled how the men did during the 6 months of dietary interventions and for up to a year afterwards. This study scientifically defined for the first time “the starvation syndrome.” As the men lost weight, their physical endurance dropped by half, their strength about 10%, and their reflexes became sluggish — with the men initially the most fit showing the greatest deterioration, according to Dr. Keys. The men’s resting metabolic rates declined by 40%, their heart volume shrank about 20%, their pulses slowed and their body temperatures dropped. They complained of feeling cold, tired and hungry; having trouble concentrating; of impaired judgment and comprehension; dizzy spells; visual disturbances; ringing in their ears; tingling and numbing of their extremities; stomach aches, body aches and headaches; trouble sleeping; hair thinning; and their skin growing dry and thin. Their sexual function and testes size were reduced and they lost all interest in sex. They had every physical indication of accelerated aging. As the physical effects became more dramatic, one study participant said Mrs. Keys confided that Dr. Keys “went through terrible times during the experiment as we lost weight and became gaunt and so on. And he would come home and say, ‘What am I doing to these young men? I had no idea it was going to be this hard.’” But the psychological changes that were brought on by dieting, even among these robust men with only moderate calorie restrictions, were the most profound and unexpected. So much so that Dr. Keys called it “semistarvation neurosis.” The men became nervous, anxious, apathetic, withdrawn, impatient, self-critical with distorted body images and even feeling overweight, moody, emotional and depressed. A few even mutilated themselves, one chopping off three fingers in stress. They lost their ambition and feelings of adequacy, and their cultural and academic interests narrowed. They neglected their appearance, became loners and their social and family relationships suffered. They lost their senses of humor, love and compassion. Instead, they became obsessed with food, thinking, talking and reading about it constantly; developed weird eating rituals; began hoarding things; consumed vast amounts of coffee and tea; and chewed gum incessantly (as many as 40 packages a day). Binge eating episodes also became a problem as some of the men were unable to continue to restrict their eating in their hunger. The act of restricting food and the constant hunger “made food the most important thing in one’s life,” said one of the participants. “Food became the one central and only thing really in one’s life. And life is pretty dull if that’s the only thing. I mean, if you went to a movie, you weren’t particularly interested in the love scenes, but you noticed every time they ate and what they ate.” These experiences are familiar to those who’ve spent their lives dieting. In fact, many of the symptoms once thought to be primary features of anorexia nervosa are actually normal biological responses of undernutrition and restrictive eating, said David M. Garner, PhD., director of River Centre Clinic in Sylvania, Ohio, in Psychoeducational principles in the treatment of eating disorders (NY: Guilford Press, 1997). It was actually Dr. Keys’ research that first evidenced the role of dieting in increasing risks for eating disorders. The extreme physical and mental effects Dr. Keys observed led to his famous quote: “Starved people cannot be taught democracy. To talk about the will of the people when you aren’t feeding them is perfect hogwash.” This was also what led early feminist activists to see dieting and weight concerns as a way to keep women preoccupied with food, filled with guilt and self-hatred, more easily influenced by others, and too mentally and physically exhausted to succeed professionally and politically.

The aftermath

The last part of the Minnesota Starvation Study revealed perhaps the most important effects. When the men were allowed to eat ad libitum again, they had insatiable appetites, yet never felt full. Even five months later, some continued to have dysfunctional eating, although most were finally regaining some normalization of their eating. As they regained their weights, their suppressed metabolism and energy levels returned, although even three months after ending the diet none of the men had yet regained their former physical capacity, noted Dr. Keys. While it seemed the men were “overeating,” Dr. Keys discovered that their bodies actually needed inordinate amount of calories for their tissues to be rebuilt:

Our experiments have shown that in an adult man no appreciable rehabilitation can take place on a diet of 2,000 calories a day. The proper level is more like 4,000 kcal daily for some months. The character of the rehabilitation diet is important also, but unless calories are abundant, then extra proteins, vitamins and minerals are of little value.

In other words, they weren’t really “overeating,” it was a biological, normal effect of hunger and weight loss. The men regained their original weights plus 10%. The regained weight was disproportionally fat, and their lean body mass recovered much more slowly. With unlimited food and unrestricted eating, their weights plateaued and finally, about 9 months later, most had naturally returned to their initial weights without trying — giving scientists one of the first demonstrations that each body has a natural, genetic set point, whether it be fat or thin. Despite the fear that with unrestrained eating everyone would continue to grow larger, it isn’t true. As Dr. Garner explained:

One of the most notable implications of the Minnesota experiment is that it challenges the popular notion that body weight is easily altered if one simply exercises a bit of “willpower.“ It also demonstrates that the body is not simply “reprogrammed” at a lower set point once weight loss has been achieved. The volunteers’ experimental diet was unsuccessful in overriding their bodies’ strong propensity to defend a particular weight level. Again, it is important to emphasize that following the months of refeeding, the Minnesota volunteers did not skyrocket into obesity.

[…] Scientists at Rockefeller University replicated the findings of the Minnesota Starvation study and went on to learn that the body has an incredibly complex and sophisticated system to regulate its fat stores. And when those fat levels deviate from the body’s genetic setpoint, compensatory mechanisms kick in to return the body to is normal state without us having a lot of say about the matter. Decades of sound studies have continued to show that healthy obese people eat and behave no differently than anyone else to explain why their bodies are bigger. It’s not “overeating,” or eating “unhealthy” foods or not enough “healthy” foods, or too little activity, that explains why some of us are fat and others lean. Conventional wisdom on obesity’s cause hasn’t changed appreciably from the time of Galen, who held obese individuals responsible for their size, said obesity researcher Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, M.D., Ph.D., head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University. The commonly held belief that obese people can simply decide to eat less and exercise more to control their weight is “at odds with substantial scientific evidence illuminating a precise and powerful biological system that maintains body weight within a relatively narrow range (10-20 pounds),” he said. Fat people are victimized by a social stigma predicated on these myths, he wrote in a 2004 issue of Nature Medicine. Our body shapes and sizes are, to a most significant extent, genetically determined. “The heritability of obesity is equivalent to that of height and greater than that of almost every other condition that has been studied,” said Dr. Friedman. Someone genetically predisposed to obesity will become obese independent of their caloric intake, he explains. And, while it may explain a few extra pounds, it’s not the environment, where almost everyone as unlimited access to calories, that explains the marked difference in body weights in our population today. “Why has the scientific evidence from long-standing obesity research not found its way into the minds of the public and even a significant proportion of the scientific community?,” asks Dr. Friedman. “Perhaps,“ he says, "it is because these views are shaped by a constant barrage of advertisements from the diet industry which has a multibillion dollar interest in promoting the view that weight can be controlled through volition alone… Perhaps it is because humans prefer to believe that the conscious wish to be trim is an element of our “free will” and should therefore dominate” our genes. But the average person eats one million or more calories each year, while weight changes very little, because energy balance is biologically regulated with a precision of greater than 99.5%, which far exceeds what can be consciously controlled, he explained.

#dieting

155 notes · View notes

kny111 · 4 years

Photo

Decolonizing Healthcare: Addressing Social Stressors In Medicine

What does it mean to have a healthcare system that serves everybody? And what can physicians do to address the ways in which societal challenges impact our diagnoses?

Image Source: HealthSystemsGlobal

Rupa Marya, M.D., is exploring these concepts through numerous projects aimed at researching our current medical climate and collaborating with marginalized populations to make healthcare more effective and compassionate.

Following is a transcript from Marya’s 2018 Bioneers keynote presentation, in which she discusses her research and vision for the future of medicine. Watch the full keynote video here.View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

Rupa Marya: I am the daughter of Punjabi immigrants who came to this country in 1973, with little money but plenty of caste privilege. We grew up with family vacations driving a VW van around the Western lands. My father would stop at the reservations. He would make us get out and listen and learn and look, and see what had happened to the original people of this land. He would talk to me about colonization, because we are also a people who had been colonized by Europeans.

I am a mother of two beautiful mixed heritage boys, and I am a farmer’s wife. I’m a physician who works in adult medicine, and who witnesses society’s ills manifest in my patients’ bodies, and a doctor who sees racism and state violence as an urgent public health issue. I’m a touring musician who has played in 29 different countries, singing in five different languages with the band Rupa and the April Fishes. To use a phrase taught to me by a Miwok elder, Wounded Knee, I am an Earth person.

What I’m going to describe for you is a system of domination in which we live, and what I believe are the direct health consequences of that system for all of us. I’ll begin with a description of how we have come to understand disease in a modern post-industrial context. In the 1850s, the germ theory was developed, which described how organisms such as bacteria and viruses made us sick. That led to the development of antibiotics and vaccines and systems to limit the spread of infectious disease.

In the 1960s, with the elucidation of DNA, we entered the molecular genetic era, where we are today. Here the gene creates a protein that can cause or protect from disease. How sick or well you were was thought to be preordained somehow by your genetics. This understanding has led to many powerful diagnostic tools and targeted therapies for specific diseases.In 2004, with the discovery of the role of RAS gene mutation in the development of colon cancer, exactly 2,000 years after Roman physician Celsus described the cardinal signs of inflammation, we are entering the era of inflammation. Instead of a reductionist approach to understanding disease, we are seeing how many pathways lead to chronic inflammation, which in turn creates the conditions for illness.

Today we will be talking about the impact of social stressors, which have been shown to cause chronic inflammation. These diseases require more systemic approaches, not simply focusing on the individual, but rather moving our gaze to the structures of society, helping us see how the individual pursuit of health is actually futile in a system that makes health impossible.

To understand the root causes of pathologies we see today, which impact all of us but affect black, brown and poor people more intensely, we have to examine the foundations of this society, which began with colonization. To me, to be colonized means to be disconnected and dis-integrated from our ancestry, from our Earth, from our indigeneity, our Earth-connected selves. We all come from Earth-connected peoples, people who once lived in deep connections with the rhythms of nature. I believe it is not a coincidence that the colonization of this land happened at the same time Europeans were burning hundreds of thousands of witches, those women who carried the traditional indigenous knowledge of the tribes of Europe.

Colonization is the way the extractive economic system of capitalism came to this land, supported by systems of supremacy and domination, which are a necessary part of keeping the wealth and power accumulated in the hands of the colonizers and ultimately their financiers.

In what we now know as the United States, this system of supremacy is expressed in many ways and with many outcomes. Today, we will focus on specific ones. First, white supremacy, which created a framework that legitimized slavery and genocide. Slavery created cheap labor, which is necessary for a functioning capitalist system. Genocide created unlimited access to resources in the form of land, animal parts, minerals, and raw materials, which are also necessary for a fully functioning capitalist economy.

As capitalism functions, it further entrenches these systems of supremacy.We all know that white supremacy is the scary guy with the swastika and the hood. But it can also look like any place where there is an abundance of white people in exclusive contexts, where power and access is not readily ceded to others. Please remember, lest you get caught up in a tsunami of guilty feelings, that as I talk about these things, I’m talking about systems of oppression that we are actually all a part of and that we all recreate, and these systems are what need to be dismantled.

There’s white supremacy and then there’s male supremacy, also known as patriarchy, which leads to the invisibilization of women’s labor, like creating the entire human race out of our bodies. Or in this context, reproducing the entire workforce and suppressing our wages, which further supports capitalism.

Patriarchy also leads to femicide, domestic violence and child abuse, which we see across all groups. We also see human supremacy, where people feel superior to the rest of living entities, thereby subjecting living soils, seeds, animals, plants, and water to horrific treatment in the name of exploiting resources, which in turn feeds the capitalist need for ever-increasing profits.

While this wheel of domination, exploitation, generation, and sequestration of wealth continues, we experience trauma as the byproduct and common pathway. Many studies show us that chronic stress and trauma create chronic inflammation. When we look at the top ten causes of death in occupied Turtle Island, we see diseases that have been described to us as diseases of lifestyle or ones that come about because of poor choices. Maybe we eat too much fried food. Maybe we don’t exercise enough. Maybe we have a genetic predisposition. What these diseases have in common in their pathogenesis is a component of inflammation, and we are just starting to parse out how the social stressors and the very structures of society contribute to and exacerbate this chronic inflammatory state.

It is unfounded to see these diseases as caused by individual poor choices in the context of a genetic predisposition. I see them as diseases that are virtually impossible to avoid because of the system in which we live, which generates a biological milieu of inflammation through trauma, chronic stress, environmental degradation, and damaged food systems. I see these as diseases of colonization.

If you’re a Native person, you’re like... It takes science and medicine a long time to catch up with Native knowledge. This is not news to Native people. When I met Oglala Lakota elder Candace Ducheneaux in Standing Rock, she talked to me about how these diseases that are so common in modern society and more heavily so in Indian Country are diseases that were brought by the colonizers.

We talked about diabetes, which I had been taught in medical school is a disease of insulin resistance. Either your pancreas doesn’t make enough insulin or your body’s cells are not sensitive to the insulin. These are both ways of seeing things that are based in a sense of individualism and predetermination.

On the Standing Rock reservation, before the damming of Mni Sose or the Missouri River, diabetes was rare. Actually across Turtle Island, diabetes was virtually nonexistent. Once the river was dammed, it ended up flooding nearby cottonwood forests. By shifting the ecology through a colonizing force, the people became more dependent on the cash economy for their food and medicine, and they lost the essential cultural connection to their traditional ways. This tragic loss of the commons is a hallmark of capitalist society, and the impact is felt in the individual body.

After the damming of the river, rates of diabetes skyrocketed. This story is similar for tribes all over Turtle Island. It is important to recognize this didn’t happen simply because people became more sedentary and consequently more obese. This happened because of colonization, not by changing the indigenous body, but by changing the social structures around that body, which in turn creates disease.

One powerful study from Alberta demonstrated that First Nations tribes that had maintained their cultural continuity specifically through language had lower rates of diabetes. Just imagine that.

This is what is protective. It’s not the low carb, paleo diet. It’s not exercise. It’s not the latest fad or trend. This study also showed that self-determinism has a powerful protective effect from diabetes for Indigenous People. These same factors had a protective effect against suicide for Indigenous People in Canada, who experience rates two to five times the national average. This example, to me, demonstrates how disease is a complex manifestation of social and biological influences on groups of individuals that results in a common expression – here, diabetes.

While we can understand this clearly from a Native American experience, we must be aware that these social structures of domination produce trauma and inflammation for all of us. We are all affected.

So what can we do in the face of this knowledge that can seem so overwhelming? Simple things can have huge effects.

To heal the diseases that are caused by the trauma of colonization, we must decolonize. If colonization represents a dis-integration and a disconnection, we must reconnect. Our work is two-pronged: to reintegrate and to dismantle. We must reintegrate what has been divided and conquered in our societies, between our peoples, between us and the natural world around us, and within ourselves. We can do this in many ways: by promoting acts that increase local autonomy and self-determinism, by exposing the myth of treating the individual as limited in its ability to actually address root causes of diseases, by reconnecting to who we were before our respective colonization – through songs, traditional knowledge, reawakening our food and medicine ways, and reawakening our relationships to each other, to the Earth around us, and to other beings. We must dismantle those systems of domination that create and recreate cycles of trauma and inflammation, those systems that work in service of capitalism.

This is my vision of holistic healthcare.

Integrated, Holistic Healthcare

What does that look like for my work? How do I use my whitecoat privilege to address things systemically? Aside from starting to address diseases with my patients in the hospital as directly related to these phenomena, I’m doing these things:

With regards to integration, I have been invited to help create a clinic and farm to develop the practice of Decolonizing Medicine at Standing Rock, together with tribal members and healers Linda Black Elk and Luke Black Elk, great-grandson of Black Elk medicine man. We have been developing a framework for how to offer care that centralizes Lakota cosmology, an understanding of disease and health, and to create a model that can be replicable to other places and in other specific contexts.

We have incredible partners, including Mass Design Group and National Nurses United, as well as the Do No Harm Coalition at UCSF, who are over 400 healthcare workers committed to ending systems of oppression as a way of insuring health for all. We have raised over a million dollars so far, thanks to generous gifts from the Jena & Michael King Foundation, Colin Kaepernick, and crowdfunding, and seek five million more to break ground on this exciting project.

The Justice Study

With regards to dismantling systems of oppression, I have been working on a national study of the health effects of law enforcement violence or terrorism, called the Justice Study. We were asked by the community fighting for justice for 26-year-old Mario Woods, who was gunned down by SFPD in 2016, to create a study that would answer this question: If the wound is police violence and the medicine is justice, what happens to our health when the medicine is not given?

We gathered a team of public health workers and researchers, and we are currently actively compiling data. It’s already illuminating, showing how many areas of people’s lives are affected by police violence. We know that Native Americans, Black and Latinx people experience disproportionate rates of police violence, and we can see that they are most impacted by the long-standing effects of violence. How does this reality contribute to the health disparities that we see?

Across all races, we are being traumatized, with black, brown, and Indigenous people being affected more intensely. We are continuing to collect data, and we’ll be offering it to policy makers who wish to shape community safety away from models that uphold white supremacist frameworks into ones that create safety and mitigate harm for all of us.

What I want you to remember is this:

Health is impossible when living in systems of oppression.

We cannot effectively treat diseases like diabetes with a drug without addressing the systems that make diabetes so prevalent.

We must redefine the scope of healthcare workers and the work of healthcare to include not only care at the bedside of the individual, but dismantling the systems of oppression that create the conditions for illness.

And finally, we must reintegrate with the Earth, with each other, and within ourselves. We must decolonize.

#medicine #health #science #decolonizing #decolonization #sustainability #sustainable #healthcare #medical science #colonialism #capitalism #white supremacy #resources #resource #info #information #decolonizing healthcare #wellness

140 notes · View notes

thecandywrites · 4 years

Text

Of Heaven and Fire Part 16

And this is the part that will hurt the most. This is it. The fiery crash that no one can look away from, only wince and grimace and watch on helplessly as everything falls apart and goes to shit. The part that will hopefully hurt so good.

@probablyclever @imherefortheforthefanart @funmadnessandbadassvikings

Of Heaven and Fire

Part 16

“Good morning,” you greeted Rhos as you met with her in the market the next morning as she embraced you, careful not to put too much pressure on your abdomen.

“Good morning Sweetheart, how are you?” Rhos greeted before she eagerly put her hands to your belly to feel for kicks before you moved her hands to where you had felt them.

“Good morning Brock.” You greeted him graciously.

“Is it?” Brock sneered before his mother glared at him.

“Brock, have some decency and be nice.” Rhos insisted.

“What? It’s not a good morning, it’s barely a few hours after sunrise and the heat is already getting too high.” Brock complained.

“It was a greeting, you can return a greeting.” Rhos insisted with a look that could freeze lava.

“He doesn’t…” You tried to dismiss.

“Yes, he does, he can have some manners or else the entire clan will think I’m an unfit mother and warchiefress that I couldn’t teach my own son manners.” Rhos insisted.

“Because it’s always about you.” Brock grumbled under his breath and rolled his eyes but you and Rhos still heard it.

“Brock, I swear to the gods that if you don’t pull your shit together right here right now and grow up and have some decency and manners, I will yank down your trousers and beat your ass like you’re 2 and I’ll get everyone around me to help me do it too, you set the tone for how you’re treated.” Rhos threatened as her and her son had a stare off as your cheeks flushed with embarrassment for Brock’s sake.

“Ahem. We’re waiting.” Rhos cleared her throat and stared him down.

“Good morning Ms. Auksa.” Brock begrudgingly offered because calling you by your name was too intimate for him.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m hungry, I’m gonna get something to eat.” Brock huffed before he turned and stomped away.

“Was he like this before?” You asked Rhos.

“Gods no, I have no idea what’s gotten into him. Even when he was 2 he never acted this badly.” Rhos answered. “And I can not apologize for him enough. Come on, let’s go shopping.” She urged you as she started to notice a few items in the market place and suggested you do something similar for Brock’s courting gifts.

Brock watched on skeptically from a chair at a pub nearby as he seemed to want to drink his weight in ale even at this early hour, the stronger the better and was happy to turn a whole chair into gold to pay for unlimited food and drink at the pub for the day as he ate the leg of a roasted hog that had been roasting on a spit all night with a heavy spiced black bread and a spicy sauce on the side for dipping the bread and meat into along with a whole dozen fried eggs.

He almost hated how much abundance there was in the clan, he felt like yesterday everyone was hungy and today everyone was stuffed with food going to waste as the dogs themselves got fat off the scraps. Ale flowed like the river and everyone was opening up their little eateries in front of their houses both in the clan and in Drauch as the short stairwell to it was nearby, where you could get everything from livestock to wild game prepared how you wanted it in addition to all the seafood that now flowed into the clan from the sea and everyone got a share of all the sales of all the seafood in Suchi so that everyone had more money than they knew what to do with.

He hated it because according to everyone else, it was because of your presence in the clan that things were this way. It didn’t matter how much praise he got from the clan for going through all the trouble of getting you here, he felt ignored and abandoned whenever he was in your presence and even away from it because all anyone could do is look upon you with joy and adoration, but yet he felt resentful when their eyes went from you to him. And even now as you walked through the market with his mother and Kari, like you were her daughter or a close friend, it burned him up inside. He felt a jealous rage that somehow you had replaced him in the family and you were everyone’s favorite now. But every time he tried to voice any of this, he couldn’t get the words out and what little he could get out, made no sense to anyone so he kept his mouth shut because who would hear him without contradicting him? According to everyone, you could do no wrong and you were some perfect goddess from heaven here walking about and mingling with them. And he couldn't complain or criticize you in the least because if he did, suddenly he was the mean asshole and everyone came to your defense. So here he sat and stewed.

“So, how did you and Drad court?” You asked her as you strolled through the spice vendor’s booth, putting together spice mixes from the vast array of spices.

“Well, I had it easy, my sister Esri and I were the prettiest women in the clan but one of the poorest families because it was just her and I and our mom Rhidra and we had no father or brothers to go on raids but we made our living by finding mussels and clams and oysters for pearls in waters shallow enough to dive in and clear enough that we could see what we were diving for. We had a little row boat and two mismatched oars and we managed to make a little hut for ourselves and the sale of those pearls was how we survived and the meat from all those shellfish was how we fed ourselves and we experimented a lot with how to prepare it all so that our palattes didn’t get too bored or too sick of the flavor of them. At that time, the current warchief’s eldest son Tar, who Drad had been a commander to, had wanted me as a third wife because I was so beautiful and such a hard worker and he was sure I could give him the sons he craved because his current wives had only given him daughters which he wasn’t happy about but I had no desire to compete for his attention but he felt he was entitled to me anyway and vowed that if he brought back enough gold from the raid to give to my mother for me so she could afford a decent house, he would buy me outright.” Rhos revealed and you could tell even after all this time, she still was repulsed by the idea by the shudder of her shoulders.

“Both my sister and I had an affinity for cooking because we were so poor most of our food was either grown in our garden or foraged for or caught and we learned how to make fruits and vegetables delicious and learned how to make smaller game good in addition to the shellfish because that’s all we could catch on our own and we could walk all over the marsh and find all kinds of healing herbs and we both seemed to know what they were and how to use them instinctively. Anyway, so one day my sister and I went out on a hunt, wanting to get some venison and some herbs while Drad and his brother Sarg went out on a raid nearby with the rest of the warriors from the clan.” Rhos recalled.

“We waited until the roar of the fight died down to emerge from our tent and we found Drad and Sarg trying to drag each other away from the battle ground and in the far distance we could see others from our clan who had fallen. Each of them had a broken limb and had pretty serious wounds and we immediately went to them and helped them back to our tent where we put them on our own bedrolls while we slept on the deer hides inside the tent, thankfully we had each gotten a deer earlier and had skinned them and were in the process of tanning the hides and smoking the meat which that scent is what drew Drad and Sarg to come our way. We used what herbs we had found for medicine and cooked the couple of deer we had managed to kill more quickly to feed them and us along with the mushrooms and other herbs for flavoring we had gathered and we did our best to patch them up and set their bones straight and we saved their lives because of how we were able to mix the herbs together, we got the wounds to stop bleeding and eased their pain and so we just tried patch them up and let them rest and recover in our tent and the other female warriors from the other clan just saw Esri and I outside the tent gathering what we could, thinking we were on a foraging trip and left us alone since we didn’t pose any kind of threat to them and in fact we helped them find their own mushrooms and other herbs and they were happy to leave us in peace and even gave us pointers about where all the good fish in the river nearby was as we tried to make sure they stayed away from our tent to protect Drad and Sarg which worked. They didn't suspect a thing. The next day we went back to the river to the spots the female warriors had told us about and Esri had managed to catch a giant catfish in the river and I had found some huge mussels, these things had to be 20 plus years old, they were the biggest mussles I had ever seen in my life and the mussels had the prettiest most colorful pearls in them when we brought them home and cooked them for Drad and Sarg and Drad took that as a sign and a blessing that I would bring him riches and he let me keep all the pearls from all the mussels because I was the one that found them and gathered them but was very pleased that I shared them with my sister but let him and his brother keep the biggest two so they wouldn’t go home empty handed from the raid.” She revealed as she then picked up a muscle from the pile at one of the seafood vendors and shucked it and found a little pearl in it and handed it to you with a grin because the woman couldn’t pick up any shellfish without finding something akin to a pearl inside it.

“The next day after that we went foraging again and I found a cave where a dragon had once lived, the dragon had been caved in and couldn’t get out of the sea cave and once I got in there, I found it’s skeleton and scales. I gathered all the scales and teeth I could, I made several trips and I made Drad a suit of armor out of the dragon scales along with a brace for his leg and one of the dragon’s canine teeth I made him a dagger and one of the smaller dragon teeth I had made a sewing needle out of so I could sew the scales together and after that, Drad was convinced that I had the god’s blessings because of of my luck with the warriors from the other clan, because all the mussels I got had pearls, and all the medicine I made for him healed him, and the fact that I found a dead dragon in the cave and got the scales and was clever enough to know what to do with them, was enough for him to propose himself as my mate and swear to me that I would never have to compete with anyone else for him and so I agreed and that mating session was quite good because even though he was hurt and couldn’t mount me, I mounted him and rode him like a stallion and he was just in awe of me ever since.” She remembered with a bit of a giggle as her own cheeks flushed a little at the happy memories.

“Once they were healed and could walk, we broke down camp and went back to the clan and by then, everyone realized the failure of the raid and no one from the warchief’s family had survived and the victors had come to claim the lands and the little village itself and Drad being Drad immediately seized the opportunity, convinced the clan that he should be the next warchief because he had survived the battle and was second in command to Tar and had a mate and I was already blessed by the gods and was the “best warchieftess possible” because I was there to heal his wounds and feed him food and make him armor which he was all too proud and happy to show off and what was left of the clan agreed and started to follow him and he put Sarg in charge of the fishing fleet and we set our sights on the sea and rivers, in fact it was this river and this patch of sea since the old ones had been taken by the conquerors who you now know as Hurricane Breaker and this land was unclaimed and it was this river that I found the huge mussels that had the pearls. And that night Drad mated with me, pretty loudly for the whole clan to show how verile he was, which I thought was a little embarrassing but he is hung like a horse and he knows how to use what the gods have given him and he had me moaning and keening and forgetting that the outside world ever existed with how he made love to me and to no one’s surprise I got pregnant with Brock and that was that.” Rhos revealed and all you could do was remember how Brock used to have sex with you and how similar Brock was to his father in that respect.

“So since Brock is definitely his father’s son, what you need to do is show Brock how you’re the best option for him. Give him betrothal gifts that no one around here can match and prove to him that there is no one better for him than you and his sense and honor should do the rest.” Rhos advised as you nodded in understanding.

By the time you came back around to the pub, Brock had drank enough that his inhibitions were out the window and some musicians had started to play music and to everyone’s surprise, Brock was dancing. But he wasn’t dancing like most drunks usually try to do, no he was dancing as if he was born to dance and all you could do is watch in astonishment yet feel somewhat saddened that you wished the old Brock would return to you if it meant he could give up his new dancing skills and you felt jealous when his former courters were dancing with him because ever since he was born again in the flames and they found out he lost his memory of the last six months, they suddenly realized they had a chance to win him back, despite the rest of the clan recognizing you as his betrothed.

“Oh so when Benyana dances, she’s a whore, but when you dance with actual whores, it’s ok?” Rhos chastized him when he was done as the women he had been dancing with flushed with shame because they had tried to move on but the moment Brock was suddenly “available” they came flocking back to him and Rhos made no mistake of calling them out and making sure the whole clan knew who she approved and disapproved of.

“Don’t you two have more money to spend?” Brock spat as he tried to brush her off as he picked up his stien to drink some more but the round of ghastly gasps was the only warning he got when the stein was slapped out of his hands before his dad seemed to appear out of nowhere and punched him in the face and sent him landing on his ass, clutching his face before he looked up at who had hit him and fear suddenly filled his eyes.

“Don’t you ever disrespect your mother, your warchieftess and your future warchieftess boy! Have you lost all sense and propriety?!” Drad thundered as the skanks suddenly dissappeared from the scene as Rhos simply stood and grinned smugly.

“I just...I was...I drank too much and forgot myself.” Brock tried to excuse his behavior.

“Really? That’s the excuse you want to use? Fine. From this day forward, you will abstain from all alcohol l and I don’t care how much gold you give to anyone. Anyone giving you any alcohol in this clan will be expelled from this clan. And any vendor who is not from this clan will no longer be able to sell here if they provide you with alcohol either. This will never happen again, will it?” Drad commanded.

“No,” everyone else readily shook their heads no as Brock’s shoulders sagged in defeat.

“Come on Dad, don’t you think that’s a little too extreme?” Brock tried to reason.

“The alternative is I kick you out of the clan for disrespecting your warchieftess.” Drad leveled as Brock grimaced.

“Fine.” Brock submitted.

You waited until everyone disbursed and Brock got up and dusted himself off before he watched you go to his father and pull Drad aside and talk to him and he could tell just from the look on your face and body language and gestures that you were pleading in some kind of way as Rhos also joined in the conversation as the three of them suddenly made a decision and nodded before even his father put his hands to your belly to feel for the kicks and was so happy when he felt them before even he hugged you and kissed the crown of your head affectionately before you bid them goodbye and quickly left with Kari in tow as you made your way home since all that girl wanted to do was hang out with you and was your best friend despite your age difference.

“Now what?” Brock asked as he came over.

“Your future warchieftess is too good to you. The only alcohol you’ll be drinking from now on, if you so choose to partake in it- will come from her hands and only after you have asked nicely for it and only if she feels safe and comfortable enough with you and welcome in your presence and is sure you won’t make a fool out of yourself if you do drink it and you must drink it in her presence and only her presence all while being the most charming, respectful version of yourself that you can be. And when she cuts you off, you’re cut off.” Drad compromised.

“I’d rather never drink again then.” Brock angrily hissed before he stalked away as Drad kept Rhos from actually killing her son.

“What are we going to do about him?” Rhos growled.

“If he continues to act like a child, then we will treat him like a child. Hell put him on an allowence and put him on restrictions until he remembers how to act right.” Drad suggested before he sat his wife down at the table Brock had occupied and finished the rest of Brock’s meal since they didn’t want it to go to waste as they brainstormed together about ways to make Brock snap out of this childish phase he was born again into as you were at your house and trying to think of ways to court Brock in such a way that he would want to be mated with you before you went over to Dastrin’s house.

“Hey Yana,” Dastrin greeted as he came out from his kitchen, having been helping, well, more groping than helping his mate make some bread, both of them covered in some flour and white handprints all over the other as they did their best to dust themselves off.

“Sorry, I should come back at another time.” You tried to excuse yourself.

“No, no, you’re fine, stay.” Kallimisa reassured you as she sat you down in a chair.

“So how are things?” Kallimisa asked before you revealed what had just happened as Dastrin just let his shoulders sag as he face palmed himself.

“That man is going to be in a world of hurt if he doesn’t knock it off.” Dastrin could only shake his head.

“Well, Rhos has advised me to court him in the traditional orc sense and give him betrothal gifts that have no equal,” you revealed.

“Oh, make him an offer he can’t refuse, smart.” Dastrin grinned schemingly.

“Basically. She told me about the suit of armor she made for Drad out of dragon scales.” You recalled.

“Oooh, that would be easy to replicate. Just go back to Suchi and you’d get crates of dragon scales.” Kallimisa realized.

“And you could use Cugas as your model since Cugas and Brock are near identical.” Dastrin advised.

“You could even make him clothes out of dragon wool and dragon silk to go under the armor and boots from dragon leather. I’ll hook you up.” Kallimisa reassured you since her family bred a lot of the dragons in Suchi and were masters at dragon goods.

“And weapons, commission the best blacksmith you know of to make the best swords and battle axes they can since that’s a gift you don’t have to make yourself.” Dastrin suggested.

“That way, he’ll be armed and protected from head to toe. No warrior would ever turn that down.” Dastrin reassured you as a plan formed in your mind.

You could do this, you would win and earn him back, one gift at a time if you had to.

It took time, about a month in total. But you went with Drauch back to Suchi and got crates of dragon scales of all different colors and patterns and got a ton of help from Kallimisa’s family with all kinds of dragon wool and dragon silk and began to use Cugas as your model to make Brock clothes and armor so that when and if Brock ever saw battle, he would be safe while Kaive also bought his fair share of dragon products so that he and Cugas could match in attire which Cugas thought was the most romantic thing ever.

Your dad helped you make a sword and a battle ax for Brock since your father was one of the best blacksmiths you knew of. Using those meteorites from the first orc attack and other metals that had been mined out of the mountains. They would stay insanely sharp but were harder than any other swords and battle axes and you helped make a special shield for him too. You bought a special bow with dragon toothed tipped arrows for Brock as well.

While you did all that, you gathered every recipe for medicine you could get your hands on along with actual medicines. You had horn of unicorn and dragon bone powder along with milk of poppy and other medicines and had a special satchel made that was embossed with the clan’s symbol and colors and Brock’s name in it and many more gifts and once all these gifts were done and made and gathered, then you got to work making him a feast that would end all feasts, making sure to include dishes that were not only favorites of his but of the clan as a whole too.

You got a herd of cows from another colony known for their amazing beef and these cows were the fattest cows you had ever seen in your life that had been raised im padded stalls and fed grains their whole lives and massaged daily and given sake and beer so that when you butchered them, there was just as much fat marbling in the beef than there was actual meat if not more so. You also got a flock of huge chickens, Brahmas, these chickens were actually incredibly tame and sweet along with several other kinds of chickens so that you had a whole rainbow of eggs. You even got special breeds of milking cows so that you would have a steady supply of milk, cream, butter and cheese. You also bought horses, lots of horses and got the most amazing stallion for Brock along with all kinds of livestock, the best of their kinds, having to build a huge barn in a cloud to keep them all.

You spent three days preparing for this feast since it had to be made by your hands and it could have fed a hundred people but it was only for Brock and his family and his closest generals and commanders, all while battling morning sickness and sexual cravings that were driving you insane because you only wanted Brock to alleviate them but he was the last person who wanted to help so you were stuck suffering and trying to pleasure yourself which the bigger your belly got, the harder that was to do too.

The day before, you had Brock’s siblings and friends help you set up a large tent outside of Brock’s house as you set up the many tables for the food to be brought over and the kegs of different ales and wines were delivered and yet Brock was nowhere to be found and when he came back at midnight, he was as drunk as could be and passed out the moment he crashed onto his bed and everyone seemed to have witnessed Brock getting little flasks of liquor from his former courters but he could only drink it in the safety of the woods away from the prying eyes of the clan. Whether he bedded them for the liquor no one knew but you just had to pray that if he did, his seed would not take root in them because the last thing you wanted for your son was to compete with others for his father’s attention and affection even though Drad and Rhos assured you and reassured you that in their eyes, only your son would be heir and all others would be cast out of the clan and recognized to the clan as the clan’s whores and all their children would be deemed bastards if need be. Which that seemed to be enough to keep all the other women from making any claims or even hinting at a potential pregnancy where Brock was the father.

Meanwhile Brock was just in a perpetual state of frustration. Because even out of spite, he had tried to fuck his whores but his cock was as small and flacid as a seasponge and nothing they could do could entice it to “wake up”. Sea cucumbers could boast of being bigger and harder than his manhood because it acted like he was constantly in the coldest of water. He couldn’t even masterbate. But one look or hopeful smile from you or just the sound of your laughter when you were with his family, he was bigger and harder than a boulder. Like his cock would only get hard with you around and no one and nothing else. And it didn’t matter what you wore, you looked amazing no matter what, you could just be walking and he could see grace in your steps and when you had danced with his little sister Kari, showing her how to dance a particular very innocent dance, you might as well have been naked in his eyes because all he could do is look at you and imagine your body in motion and he wanted you but he was loathe to admit it. Even when you were in the simplest of clothes, his eyes could find your curves and your pregnant belly was especially attractive to him and there were so many times he just wanted to come over to your house and fuck you raw just for some semblence of a release. He was so desperate he was close to his breaking point but he couldn’t admit that to anyone, especially himself and instead he seemed to want to revolt against these leanings. The more he was attracted to you, the meaner he got and the harder he tried to resist this. To the point he lost all freedoms, all autonomy, all privacy and all power and say so in anything unless it was in agreement with you and he felt he couldn��t breathe without his parents, especially his father coming down on him. But all that did was make him even more embittered and resentful.

He could tell you were preparing courting gifts and the closer you got to completing them, the more panicked he felt because his parents had made it clear, that if he didn’t accept you and the gifts, then he was was not going to be accepted in the family and was never going to be warchief without you as his warchieftess. Even his siblings distanced themselves from him, Kari especially wanted nothing to do with him because he wasn’t ‘the same Brock’.

The morning of, you managed to kill four cows and one bull with the help of Brock’s generals and commanders who were all too happy to help you any way they could because they accepted you as their future warchieftess and they wanted to help ensure your success. All of whom marveled at the intense marbling of the beef and while they did most of the heavy lifting, they let you direct them since this was your feast that you were preparing as Cugas and Kaive brought you every delicacy from the sea and Rhos went hunting for pearl mussels, something she had not done in a while but she had forgotten how much she used to enjoy it as she found the best and biggest ones since she had gifts of her own for it while Drad helped keep Brock distracted with other clan matters, mainly where to get all the lumber needed to keep all these building projects going.

When everything was ready, it was arranged in the tent and Brock was brought into it and you ceremonially washed his hands and his feet so that he could sit at the head of the table before you repeated the process to his generals and commanders, making sure each one sat at the table according to rank along with his family. This was seen as the most humble and gracious of acts as hostess and while you had some difficulty because of your pregnant belly making it awkward for you to carry the wash basin, you persevered. All Brock had to do was eat to the point he was stuffed, drink until his heart was merry and accept your gifts with grace and take you to your home where you would hopefully mate and he would hopefully use gentleness with you and that would be that, or so everyone hoped and prayed for.

Once everyone was seated you served Brock first, showing him the marbling of the steaks and letting him pick whatever he wanted before you cooked them how he told you he wanted them as the mates of the married generals and commanders did the same with their mates while Brock’s sisters cared for the others.

“So how do you like the ale My Lord?” You asked respectfully.

“It’s too weak, it tastes like piss.” Brock answered as his generals and commanders nearly spit it out and choked.

“You can’t be serious, this is the best ale in the clan!” Dastrin argued.

“Yana, seriously, this is, hands down the best ale I have ever drank.” Cugas added as the others agreed to those sentiments which left Brock glaring at them for taking your side.

“Well, that is an ale...I do, um, have a stronger, darker beer, it’s a stout, let me get you that and hopefully you’ll like that better.” You tried to appease as you took the ale away and got a fresh stein and filled it with the stout and served that to him before he took a sip and spit it at your feet as it splashed up on the edges of your skirt as others from the table gasped in horror as Drad got up from the other end of the table and started walking over.

“I’m sorry that got on you.” Brock begrudgingly apologized before his father could get to him and beat him into the dirt which finally gave Drad a moment of pause before Brock sipped the stout.

“This is much better, thanks.” Brock begrudgingly offered which made his dad grin smugly before he turned around as everyone blew out a breath of relief.

“Even if it is a bit bitter.” Brock added which had everyone glaring at him as you let your shoulders sag because if this is the way it was going to start, it didn’t bode well for the rest of the meal. You feared that by 12th refill that he was beyond drunk but he would not smile, not laugh, not make any indication that anything you had done had pleased him at all.

In fact, he found fault with every single thing.

The steaks were either too tender and too fatty. So you brought out every other kind of cut of meat from every kind of animal and he found something he didn’t like about all of them, they were all either too lean, too fatty, too tough, too tender, too undercooked, too overcooked, too spicy, too under flavored and he critiqued every, single, thing and everyone by this point was beyond fed up with this and everyone was about to pull their hair out. He even hated the decorations of the tent because they were too luxurious.

He thought that the mussels were too big and the dozens of pearls inside were obviously fake because they were too perfect and you had some how implanted them in the mussles. He thought the complex dishes were obnoxious, he thought the simple dishes were lazy, he thought the scented woods you used to grill the steaks and other foods stunk up the space, he thought the soothing incense was a waste if not distasteful. He thought the beer was too bitter or too smooth or not strong enough, the wine was too sweet or too dry and that you were insubordinate and traitorous because you enlisted help from others for the feast and he berated you for not being strong enough to do it all on your own even though it was his commanders and generals who insisted on helping you. Your betrothal gifts were given the same treatment and all you could do is stand there and watch helplessly as he verbally ripped everything apart.

It didn’t matter how much his family and his generals and commanders tried to defend you, he wouldn’t let them speak. You and they were all embarrassed and ashamed of him and you could tell everyone in the room wanted to kill him for acting the way he did.

All you could do is kneel next to him and do your best to accept his criticisms. But you had to finish the rest of the ceremony at least. You were not going to take him to bed. Even if he did accept these gifts, you knew he was too drunk and too angry and it was too much of a risk to your son if you tried bedding him.

“Do you accept my betrothal?” You asked, even though you could already tell he would not as this nightmare that had been plagueing you finally came to fruition.

“No! Of course not! How dare you try to court me with such atrocious things you wicked, conniving bitch! This was the worst courting ritual ever!” He roared as you winced and barely got out of the way fast enough when he over turned the table, all the food flying off as everyone barely managed to escape getting hurt before he grabbed at the tent and began to pull it down, ripping it off it’s frame before he picked up the gifts you got him and aimed them at you before you and the others fled out of the tent, barely able to dodge the objects as he threw them most viciously at you as his commanders and generals tried to block them before you tripped and fell to the ground, everyone else trying to come to your rescue and stop him from going further into his tirade before he managed to shirk them and get to you and picked you up by your neck and face and all you could remember was the first time he held your face on that first night. How he had firmly held your face to get your attention but not hard enough to hurt you.

Now though, any semblance of control or gentleness was gone, it was all just pain as you struggled to breathe and kick as the others tried to stop him as benar flowed out of your eyes and down his hand before they fell off his hand and arm to the ground as you begged and pleaded for mercy as your moura cloak surrounded you in armor.

“Please, Brock, stop!” You sobbed before he dropped you, your wings barely getting a chance to come out and curl around you to protect you from the fall as you managed to sit on the ground at his feet and cough and sputter and hold your burning throat as Brock was now surrounded by his generals, all of them having their swords and battle axes drawn and pressing at every spot on his body to keep him from moving lest he be impaled.

“Leave! While you still have life in your body to do so!” Brock seethed and you could see the fire in his eyes and his throat, he was ready to burn you as you sat there and all you could do was nod in agreement before you got on your knees and reached into your satchel and retrieved the orb that the water dragons had gifted you as the whole clan gathered around to witness Brock’s worst tantrum yet as all you could do is feel regret that this horrible nightmare had come true.

“Please accept this as a parting gift then. It was given to me by the water dragons and inside is the most precious possession anyone could ever want.” You offered shakily as you held it out in your dirtied and bloodied shaking hands out to him as you kept your head down, your benar falling to the ground at your knees. While you still didn’t know what was inside, you had kept it safe and hidden from everyone all this time and you were suddenly moved to give it to him.

“Please know that I will raise the son you gave me with the utmost care. He will know happiness and love as well as he knows his own shadow. I shall teach him all the great legends of his father…” Your voice broke at the utterance of that term. “And of the legends from his mighty clan of Stormbreaker. Since you no longer wish to look upon my face, I shall do as you demand and leave. I will never again seek to see your face or hear your voice. May you and this magnificent clan know success and prosperity forever.” You bid him before he begrudgingly took the orb before you yanked your hands back to yourself, afraid he would grab them as Kaive, Rhos and Cugas, all who had tears in their eyes quickly gathered you up and Kaive carried you back to your house before Cugas and his siblings as well as Brock’s siblings used their moura abilities to lift your house off the ground and back into the cloud form with a huge chunk of land so that your son would at least have some soil from his clan and flew you away to Suchi as Rhos screamed her own damnation for ever conceiving and birthing Brock and disowned him on the spot as did the rest of his siblings. Kari especially flying up to your house to stay with you and her mother along with Brock’s siblings. Leaving Drad to deal with Brock.

The surrounding waters pooling in the now cratered land and it revealed five large black eggs in an ancient abandoned nest buried deep underground and the moment the water touched the eggs, the waters themselves grew dark with silt before everyone in the clan glared at Brock before they disbursed and immediately started to gossip about what had happened as the wives of the commanders and generals made sure to tell them every detail about how you made the perfect betrothal gifts and perfect feast but Brock wouldn’t accept it and how awful Brock had been before Drad’s servants got to work trying to clean up everything.

“Brock, you will be no warchief of this clan or any other for rejecting your rightful warchieftess and I quit being your commander.” All of his generals and commanders told him before they also went and tried to salvage what they could before Drad ordered for all your gifts to Brock to be gathered in the house so that they could be displayed for the whole clan to see what Brock had rejected as Drad took the orb from Brock’s hand so he couldn’t break it as Brock just growled in frustration and stomped away, his gait ever so unsteady from his drunkenness.

By the time Brock had cooled his rage and came back, Drad was waiting for him on the front porch as all of Brock’s belongings were dumped unceremoniously in the yard as the whole clan had gathered around it, all of them continuing to glare hatefully at him.

“No ungrateful son of mine will ever sleep in my house or eat my food or drink my ale, from this day on, you no longer live here and you are no longer my son because no son of mine would ever treat a woman, any woman like the way you just treated Benyana, she was pregnant and you held her by the throat and choked her and threw things at her, you disgust me and you have disgusted this clan. Since your mother has since disowned you, I also disown you and you are now the illegitimate bastard of a dead whore with no father and all your honor is being stripped of you.” Drad said before he gestured before Brock was seized and put into the ground and tied up before a blade was brought over and Drad cut his own son’s hair off to take off all the beads and all the braids of glory from his head.

“Dad please! Please stop! I take it back! I take it all back! I accept Benyana. I accept her gifts and her betrothal.” Brock tried to desperately plead but everyone could tell, his heart was not in it, only his self preservation.

“You can’t go back and take anything back! The damage and hurt you have inflicted with your own hands can never be healed and never be forgiven!” Drad roared as he yanked his son’s hair to cut it off chunks.

“No one trusts you, no one respects you! You are worse than our greatest enemies!” Drad insisted as pained tears stung his own eyes as his own heart was breaking.

“You are lucky I don’t kill you!” Drad threatened as he let the blade rest on the back of Brock’s neck as Brock began to tremble and fear that his life was about to end for good.

“But death is too good for you! So instead you will be no better than a beast of the field. If you want a roof over your head, build it yourself, if you want food in your belly, you catch it and make it yourself. You will get no help from me, anyone else in my household and definitely not from anyone in my clan, you are not welcome on clan grounds and anyone who helps you is considered unclean and cursed.” Drad announced as his own generals and commanders, the fathers of the very men who had been Brock’s former generals and commanders who were now behind Drad as everyone readily agreed to those terms before Drad had taken most of Brock’s hair off and they let Brock go before Brock gathered his stuff before he was chased off of the clan’s lands, everyone throwing stones at him and chased him into the wilderness onto a small, lone island in the marsh where the mosquitos immediately feasted on him as the flies started to buzz around him and he could do nothing except try to cover himself and sleep on the grasses in the island and mourn for all that he had lost.

“Why didn’t you just accept her?” Brock whimpered as he hugged himself and rocked himself into fitful sleep because even he could not answer such a question.

#Yeah I know #I'm a bad horrible person #evil really #Just a little more hurt then it get's better #this does have a happy ending I promise.#Of Heaven and Fire #Of Heaven and Fire Part 16 #orc #orc reader insert #orc love story #except for this part where there is no love #moura #monster love #monster romance #monster boyfriend #monster reader insert #exo #exophilia #please forgive me

21 notes · View notes

kalakian · 4 years

Photo

Mahirap maging Pilipina, ngunit masarap sa pakiramdam na sa panahon ni Rizal, itinuring n’yang kapantay ng kalalakihan ang kababaihan. Malinaw ito sa kanyang sulat para sa kababaihan ng Malolos.

To the Young Women of Malolos

by José Rizal

When I wrote Noli Me Tangere, I asked myself whether bravery was a common thing in the young women of our people. I brought back to my recollection and reviewed those I had known since my infancy, but there were only few who seem to come up to my ideal. There was, it is true, an abundance of girls with agreeable manners, beautiful ways, and modest demeanor, but there was in all an admixture of servitude and deference to the words or whims of their so-called "spiritual fathers" (as if the spirit or soul had any father other than God), due to excessive kindness, modesty, or perhaps ignorance. They seemed faced plants sown and reared in darkness, having flowers without perfume and fruits without sap.

However, when the news of what happened at Malolos reached us, I saw my error, and great was my rejoicing. After all, who is to blame me? I did not know Malolos nor its young women, except one called Emila [Emilia Tiongson, whom Rizal met in 1887], and her I knew by name only.

Now that you have responded to our first appeal in the interest of the welfare of the people; now that you have set an example to those who, like you, long to have their eyes opened and be delivered from servitude, new hopes are awakened in us and we now even dare to face adversity, because we have you for our allies and are confident of victory. No longer does the Filipina stand with her head bowed nor does she spend her time on her knees, because she is quickened by hope in the future; no longer will the mother contribute to keeping her daughter in darkness and bring her up in contempt and moral annihilation. And no longer will the science of all sciences consist in blind submission to any unjust order, or in extreme complacency, nor will a courteous smile be deemed the only weapon against insult or humble tears the ineffable panacea for all tribulations. You know that the will of God is different from that of the priest; that religiousness does not consist of long periods spent on your knees, nor in endless prayers, big rosarios, and grimy scapularies [religious garment showing devotion], but in a spotless conduct, firm intention and upright judgment. You also know that prudence does not consist in blindly obeying any whim of the little tin god, but in obeying only that which is reasonable and just, because blind obedience is itself the cause and origin of those whims, and those guilty of it are really to be blamed. The official or friar can no longer assert that they alone are responsible for their unjust orders, because God gave each individual reason and a will of his or her own to distinguish the just from the unjust; all were born without shackles and free, and nobody has a right to subjugate the will and the spirit of another your thoughts. And, why should you submit to another your thoughts, seeing that thought is noble and free?

It is cowardice and erroneous to believe that saintliness consists in blind obedience and that prudence and the habit of thinking are presumptuous. Ignorance has ever been ignorance, and never prudence and honor. God, the primal source of all wisdom, does not demand that man, created in his image and likeness, allow himself to be deceived and hoodwinked, but wants us to use and let shine the light of reason with which He has so mercifully endowed us. He may be compared to the father who gave each of his sons a torch to light their way in the darkness bidding them keep its light bright and take care of it, and not put it out and trust to the light of the others, but to help and advise each other to fiind the right path. They would be madman were they to follow the light of another, only to come to a fall, and the father could unbraid them and say to them: "Did I not give each of you his own torch," but he cold not say so if the fall were due to the light of the torch of him who fell, as the light might have been dim and the road very bad.

The deceiver is fond of using the saying that "It is presumptuous to rely on one's own judgment," but, in my opinion, it is more presumptuous for a person to put his judgment above that of the others and try to make it prevail over theirs. It is more presumptuous for a man to constitute himself into an idol and pretend to be in communication of thought with God; and it is more than presumptuous and even blasphemous for a person to attribute every movement of his lips to God, to represent every whim of his as the will of God, and to brand his own enemy as an enemy of God. Of course, we should not consult our own judgment alone, but hear the opinion of others before doing what may seem most reasonable to us. The wild man from the hills, if clad in a priest's robe, remains a hillman and can only deceive the weak and ignorant. And, to make my argument more conclusive, just buy a priest's robe as the Franciscans wear it and put it on a carabao [domestic water buffalo], and you will be lucky if the carabao does not become lazy on account of the robe. But I will leave this subject to speak of something else.

Youth is a flower-bed that is to bear rich fruit and must accumulate wealth for its descendants. What offspring will be that of a woman whose kindness of character is expressed by mumbled prayers; who knows nothing by heart but awits [hymns], novenas, and the alleged miracles; whose amusement consists in playing panguingue [a card game] or in the frequent confession of the same sins? What sons will she have but acolytes, priest's servants, or cock fighters? It is the mothers who are responsible for the present servitude of our compatriots, owing to the unlimited trustfulness of their loving hearts, to their ardent desire to elevate their sons Maturity is the fruit of infancy and the infant is formed on the lap of its mother. The mother who can only teach her child how to kneel and kiss hands must not expect sons with blood other than that of vile slaves. A tree that grows in the mud is unsubstantial and good only for firewood. If her son should have a bold mind, his boldness will be deceitful and will be like the bat that cannot show itself until the ringing of vespers. They say that prudence is sanctity. But, what sanctity have they shown us? To pray and kneel a lot, kiss the hand of the priests, throw money away on churches, and believe all the friar sees fit to tell us; gossip, callous rubbing of noses. . . .

As to the mites and gifts of God, is there anything in the world that does not belong to God? What would you say of a servant making his master a present of a cloth borrowed from that very master? Who is so vain, so insane that he will give alms to God and believe that the miserable thing he has given will serve to clothe the Creator of all things? Blessed be they who succor their fellow men, aid the poor and feed the hungry; but cursed be they who turn a dead ear to supplications of the poor, who only give to him who has plenty and spend their money lavishly on silver altar hangings for the thanksgiving, or in serenades and fireworks. The money ground out of the poor is bequeathed to the master so that he can provide for chains to subjugate, and hire thugs and executioners. Oh, what blindness, what lack of understanding.

Saintliness consists in the first place in obeying the dictates of reason, happen what may. "It is acts and not words that I want of you," said Christ. "Not everyone that sayeth unto me, Lord, Lord shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in Heaven." Saintliness does not consist in abjectness, nor is the successor of Christ to be recognized by the fact that he gives his hand to be kissed. Christ did not give the kiss of peace to the Pharisees and never gave his hand to be kissed. He did not cater to the rich and vain; He did not mention scapularies, nor did He make rosaries, or solicit offerings for the sacrifice of the Mass or exact payments for His prayers. Saint John did not demand a fee on the River Jordan, nor did Christ teach for gain. Why, then, do the friars now refuse to stir a foot unless paid in advance? And, as if they were starving, they sell scapularies, rosaries, bits, and other things which are nothing but schemes for making money and a detriment to the soul; because even if all the rags on earth were converted into scapularies and all the trees in the forest into rosaries, and if the skins of all the beasts were made into belts, and if all the priests of the earth mumbled prayers over all this and sprinkled oceans of holy water over it, this would not purify a rogue or condone sin where there is no repentance. Thus, also, through cupidity and love of money, they will, for a price, revoke the numerous prohibitions such as those against eating meat, marrying close relatives, etc. You can do almost anything if you but grease their palms. Why that? Can God be bribed and bought off, and blinded by money, nothing more nor less than a friar? The brigand who has obtained a bull of compromise can live calmly on the proceeds of his robbery, because he will be forgiven. God, then, will sit at a table where theft provides the viands? Has the Omnipotent become a pauper that He must assume the role of the excise man or gendarme? If that is the God whom the friar adores, then I turn my back upon that God.

Let us be reasonable and open our eyes, especially you women, because you are the first to influence the consciousness of man. Remember that a good mother does not resemble the mother that the friar has created; she must bring up her child to be the image of the true God, not of a blackmailing, a grasping God, but of a God who is the father of us all, who is just; who does not suck the life-blood of the poor like a vampire, nor scoffs at the agony of the sorely beset, nor makes a crooked path of the path of justice. Awaken and prepare the will of our children towards all that is honorable, judged by proper standards, to all that is sincere and firm of purpose, clear judgment, clear procedure, honesty in act and deed, love for the fellowman and respect for God; this is what you must teach your children. And, seeing that life is full of thorns and thistles, you must fortify their minds against any stroke of adversity and accustom them to danger. The people cannot expect honor nor prosperity so long as they will educate their children in a wrong way, so long as the woman who guides the child in his steps is slavish and ignorant. No good water comes from a turbid, bitter spring; no savory fruit comes from acrid seed.

The duties that woman has to perform in order to deliver the people from suffering are of no little importance, but be they as they may, they will not be beyond the strength and stamina of the Filipino people. The power and good judgment of the women of the Philippines are well known, and it is because of this that she has been hoodwinked, and tied, and rendered pusillanimous, and now her enslavers rest at ease, because so long as they can keep the Filipina mother a slave, so long will they be able to make slaves of her children. The cause of the backwardness of Asia lies in the fact that there the women are ignorant, are slaves; while Europe and America are powerful because there the women are free and well-educated and endowed with lucid intellect and a strong will.

We know that you lack instructive books; we know that nothing is added to your intellect, day by day, save that which is intended to dim its natural brightness; all this we know, hence our desire to bring you the light that illuminates your equals here in Europe. If that which I tell you does not provoke your anger, and if you will pay a little attention to it then, however dense the mist may be that befogs our people, I will make the utmost efforts to have it dissipated by the bright rays of the sun, which will give light, thought they be dimmed. We shall not feel any fatigue if you help us: God, too, will help to scatter the mist, because He is the God of truth: He will restore to its pristine condition the fame of the Filipina in whom we now miss only a criterion of her own, because good qualities she has enough and to spare. This is our dream; this is the desire we cherish in our hearts; to restore the honor of woman, who is half of our heart, our companion in the joys and tribulations of life. If she is a maiden, the young man should love her not only because of her beauty and her amiable character, but also on account of her fortitude of mind and loftiness of purpose, which quicken and elevate the feeble and timid and ward off all vain thoughts. Let the maiden be the pride of her country and command respect, because it is a common practice on the part of Spaniards and friars here who have returned from the Islands to speak of the Filipina as complaisant and ignorant, as if all should be thrown into the same class because of the missteps of a few, and as if women of weak character did not exist in other lands. As to purity what could the Filipina not hold up to others!

Nevertheless, the returning Spaniards and friars, talkative and fond of gossip, can hardly find time enough to brag and bawl, amidst guffaws and insulting remarks, that a certain woman was thus; that she behaved thus at the convent and conducted herself thus with the Spaniards who on the occasion was her guest, and other things that set your teeth on edge when you think of them which, in the majority of cases, were faults due to candor, excessive kindness, meekness, or perhaps ignorance and were all the work of the defamer himself. There is a Spaniard now in high office, who has set at our table and enjoyed our hospitality in his wanderings through the Philippines and who, upon his return to Spain, rushed forthwith into print and related that on one occasion in Pampanga he demanded hospitality and ate, and slept at a house and the lady of the house conducted herself in such and such a manner with him; this is how he repaid the lady for her supreme hospitality! Similar insinuations are made by the friars to the chance visitor from Spain concerning their very obedient confesandas, hand-kissers, etc., accompanied by smiles and very significant winkings of the eye. In a book published by D. Sinibaldo de Mas and in other friar sketches sins are related of which women accused themselves in the confessional and of which the friars made no secret in talking to their Spanish visitors seasoning them, at the best, with idiotic and shameless tales not worthy of credence. I cannot repeat here the shameless stories that a friar told Mas and to which Mas attributed no value whatever. Every time we hear or read anything of this kind, we ask each other: Are the Spanish women all cut after the pattern of the Holy Virgin Mary and the Filipinas all reprobates? I believe that if we are to balance accounts in this delicate question, perhaps, . . . But I must drop the subject because I am neither a confessor nor a Spanish traveler and have no business to take away anybody's good name. I shall let this go and speak of the duties of women instead.

A people that respect women, like the Filipino people, must know the truth of the situation in order to be able to do what is expected of it. It seems an established fact that when a young student falls in love, he throws everything to the dogs -- knowledge, honor, and money, as if a girl could not do anything but sow misfortune. The bravest youth becomes a coward when he married, and the born coward becomes shameless, as if he had been waiting to get married in order to show his cowardice. The son, in order to hide his pusillanimity, remembers his mother, swallows his wrath, suffers his ears to be boxed, obeys the most foolish order, and and becomes an accomplice to his own dishonor. It should be remembered that where nobody flees there is no pursuer; when there is no little fish, there can not be a big one. Why does the girl not require of her lover a noble and honored name, a manly heart offering protection to her weakness, and a high spirit incapable of being satisfied with engendering slaves? Let her discard all fear, let her behave nobly and not deliver her youth to the weak and faint-hearted. When she is married, she must aid her husband, inspire him with courage, share his perils, refrain from causing him worry and sweeten his moments of affection, always remembering that there is no grief that a brave heart can not bear and there is no bitterer inheritance than that of infamy and slavery. Open your children's eyes so that they may jealously guard their honor, love their fellowmen and their native land, and do their duty. Always impress upon them they must prefer dying with honor to living in dishonor. The women of Sparta should serve you as an example should serve you as an example in this; I shall give some of their characteristics.

When a mother handed the shield to her son as he was marching to battle, she said nothing to him but this: "Return with it, or on it," which mean, come back victorious or dead, because it was customary with the routed warrior to throw away his shield, while the dead warrior was carried home on his shield. A mother received word that her son had been killed in battle and the army routed. She did not say a word, but expressed her thankfulness that her son had been saved from disgrace. However, when her son returned alive, the mother put on mourning. One of the mothers who went out to meet the warriors returning from battle was told by one that her three sons had fallen. I do not ask you that, said the mother, but whether we have been victorious or not. We have been victorious -- answered the warrior. If that is so, then let us thank God, and she went to the temple.

Once upon a time a king of theirs, who had been defeated, hid in the temple, because he feared their popular wrath. The Spartans resolved to shut him up there and starve him to death. When they were blocking the door, the mother was the first to bring stones. These things were in accordance with the custom there, and all Greece admired the Spartan woman. Of all women -- a woman said jestingly -- only your Spartans have power over the men. Quite natural -- they replied -- of all women only we give birth to men. Man, the Spartan women said, was not born to life for himself alone but for his native land. So long as this way of thinking prevailed and they had that kind of women in Sparta, no enemy was able to put his foot upon her soil, nor was there a woman in Sparta who ever saw a hostile army.

I do not expect to be believed simply because it is I who am saying this; there are many people who do not listen to reason, but will listen only to those who wear the cassock or have gray hair or no teeth; but while it is true that the aged should be venerated, because of their travails and experience, yet the life I have lived, consecrated to the happiness of the people, adds some years, though not many of my age. I do not pretend to be looked upon as an idol or fetish and to be believed and listened to with the eyes closed, the head bowed, and the arms crossed over the breast; what I ask of all is to reflect on what I tell him, think it over and shift it carefully through the sieve of reasons.

First of all. That the tyranny of some is possible only through cowardice and negligence on the part of others.

Second. What makes one contemptible is lack of dignity and abject fear of him who holds one in contempt.

Third. Ignorance is servitude, because as a man thinks, so he is; a man who does not think for himself and allowed himself to be guided by the thought of another is like the beast led by a halter.

Fourth. He who loves his independence must first aid his fellowman, because he who refuses protection to others will find himself without it; the isolated rib in the buri is easily broken, but not so the broom made of the ribs of the palm bound together.

Fifth. If the Filipina will not change her mode of being, let her rear no more children, let her merely give birth to them. She must cease to be the mistress of the home, otherwise she will unconsciously betray husband, child, native land, and all.

Sixth. All men are born equal, naked, without bonds. God did not create man to be a slave; nor did he endow him with intelligence to have him hoodwinked, or adorn him with reason to have him deceived by others. It is not fatuous to refuse to worship one's equal, to cultivate one's intellect, and to make use of reason in all things. Fatuous is he who makes a god of him, who makes brutes of others, and who strives to submit to his whims all that is reasonable and just.

Seventh. Consider well what kind of religion they are teaching you. See whether it is the will of God or according to the teachings of Christ that the poor be succored and those who suffer alleviated. Consider what they preaching to you, the object of the sermon, what is behind the masses, novenas, rosaries, scapularies, images, miracles, candles, belts, etc. etc; which they daily keep before your minds; ears and eyes; jostling, shouting, and coaxing; investigate whence they came and whiter they go and then compare that religion with the pure religion of Christ and see whether the pretended observance of the life of Christ does not remind you of the fat milch cow or the fattened pig, which is encouraged to grow fat nor through love of the animal, but for grossly mercenary motives.

Let us, therefore, reflect; let us consider our situation and see how we stand. May these poorly written lines aid you in your good purpose and help you to pursue the plan you have initiated. "May your profit be greater than the capital invested;" and I shall gladly accept the usual reward of all who dare tell your people the truth. May your desire to educate yourself be crowned with success; may you in the garden of learning gather not bitter, but choice fruit, looking well before you eat because on the surface of the globe all is deceit, and the enemy sows weeds in your seedling plot.

All this is the ardent desire of your compatriot.

JOSÉ RIZAL

***

Ang mga larawan ay kuha sa pelikulang Dahling Nick.

Ang buong kopya ng To the Young Women of Malolos ay nakuha sa https://kwentongebabuhayrizal.blogspot.com/

2 notes · View notes

geneshaven · 4 years

Text

A King Of Heroes

Now that Arrow has reached its zenith, this is my homage to a show that captured me with so many hours and weeks and years of action/adventure, of family and fandom, of love and the power that it brings. Watching the show all these years was like being entrenched with a lover I could not get enough of. I know this story, these characters, and this endgame. I’ve never written fantasy before, at least not in the ‘once upon a time’ narrative. I started this project three years ago, just before the beginning of Season 5. But I became daunted by the task of writing about Oliver and Felicity’s genesis, the events that brought them together and made them superheroes. It seemed too vast and I felt the narrative would not be strong enough to tell the story. So, I put it aside and stored what I had already written on my computer. But it would not go away, like being haunted by voices that finally led me back to my computer to have another look.

Chapter 1

Once Upon A Time…

…there was a young man born into wealth and privilege. He was a Prince in a city called Starling, ruled by corruption and travesty. He moved through the realm of this kingdom, assuming that anything and everything he needed or wanted was his by royal right. His parents, part of the hierarchy who ruled the city, were grooming their son to be an heir, to one day ascend the family throne and do great things.

Life was good for the young Prince. Apart from having the love and financial support of his parents, he also lavished adoration on his younger sister, Thea. At this time in his life, and really unbeknownst to him, she gave our unlearned Prince lessons of how to love and care for and protect someone other than himself. They had a connection that bonded them, that pulled them together through all the complicated business dealings and the choices their parents made to ensure the continued growth and survival of the family empire.

To be sure, the young Prince was not always a beacon of admiration. He did not set an example that would inspire other people in the realm. He did have an abundance of acquaintances, but most of those who did come into his orbit was not overly impressed by the shallow, self-centered way he granted them an audience. His motivation to adopt these people into his life was not out of any need to forge life-long relationships. He did not need them to fill the avenues in his life that brought loneliness and a requirement for acceptance. His wealth and privilege gave him that, like an antidote to the sickness of his indifferent soul. There wasn’t really anything these people could give that he had already amassed for himself as if he was buying and selling commodities. Anything and everything came easily and he didn’t have to put out any effort to earn it. He already had all he wanted the moment he was pulled from his mother’s womb and out into a golden world.

There needs to be mentioned here two people who did and would play important roles in our young Prince’s life. One, Tommy Meryln, was like himself, a Prince of the realm in business and industry, a man who started his close friendship with our hero when they were children. This best friend was fathered by a man suffering a sociopathic loss of a cherished wife, murdered in the streets like a simple commoner. That action would have a grave outcome and cause more damage and misery, not just for his son who grew up in the shadows of loss his father created, but for the whole city as well.

The other person in our hero’s early life was the beautiful daughter of a Law enforcer; Laurel. She grew into a woman in love with the young Prince. She envisioned a life with him and the hope that he wanted and needed her in the same way.

These three friends created a triangle that would follow them into their adult lives with unimagined consequences.

Life rolled on for our hero. It was a life of bright lights and expensive pleasures. Drinking and partying and living in the fast lane became his identity. His reputation propelled him into many short-term liaisons. Women appreciated his rugged good looks, his unlimited capacity to impress upon them a brief taste and desire for the good life, no matter if it was an illusion. He would sway them into his debauchery and naked passions, taking them deep into the night.

He could have stepped out of that illusion and have something real with Laurel, but it wasn’t enough for our Prince. He wanted and needed more stimuli, a self-appreciating pace to his life that would fill him with a satiation not to be given by just one person. Because of his personality, he often strayed from normalcy and felt he could only garner what he truly needed through his wealth and privilege.

So he hurt people on an emotional level, unaware that it was not normal to do so. He used them to fill the parts of himself that were immature and callous. Our young Prince saw that things and people in his life were nothing more than bright, shiny baubles. He could not fathom that they might be able to lift him above his vain and selfish persona and make him realize it wasn’t a weakness of character to love and need and be supportive. He could be giving and also be given to.

So, one night, before our hero’s life would be altered in ways he could not imagine, he met yet another commoner amid the swirling lights and music of a nightclub. She was a raven-haired beauty called Samantha, and the Prince gravitated towards her like she was something to be conquered. He used charm and guile as his weapons, and she saw and felt the excitement he exuded. This woman was captivated and captured, and she left with the Prince for a night of sex and false passion. It was a one-time affair, and when it was over, the Prince left a seed of himself behind, setting off a chain of events that would later come back to both gratify and haunt him.

The young Prince did not know what he had wrought that night. Along with his mother’s help, he dismissed any potential complications and continued on with his privileged life. Laurel furthered his distress by suggesting they try living together, that she would be the one to ground his reckless life. Our Prince became alarmed at that kind of commitment and gave her false hopes by telling her he would consider it. She clung to that and was willing to wait for him to resolve his uncertainty.

A few weeks later, he finally made a choice. His father was taking the family yacht on a journey and the Prince took it as an opportunity to avoid his “girlfriend” and her suggestions. On what would turn out to be a bombshell that would blow up two families, the Prince had been secretly seeing Laurel’s sister, Sara. He took her on the voyage with him. The yacht pulled away from the dock. They set a course, for him and everyone on board, which would become legend.

Our brash, young Prince’s real life was about to begin…

@it-was-a-red-heeler @memcjo @hope-for-olicity @swordandarrow @icannotbelieveiamhere @cruzrogue

#once upon a time #swan song #olicity

27 notes · View notes

sustainabilitysarah · 4 years

Text

Progress in Food Production Illustration

In 1968, when I was and impressionable six years old horrified by what the television was showing about the Vietnam War, listening to the Beatles sing 'All you need is love', my parents bought a book called "The Population Bomb" by scientist Paul Ehrlich. It suggested that we were running out of resources because our population was growing too fast and we were consuming our earth's life support system faster than it could

regenerate. Two years later, on the first Earth Day, I began my activism, rounding up the neighborhood kids and staging a clean up of the polluted stream behind our apartment that ran into the Hudson River.

A year later my Beatle idol George Harrison held a "Concert for Bangladesh" to raise awareness of the suffering there. Like many kids worried about the "starving kids in Bangladesh" I asked in school why things were getting so bad. Like most school children around the world, we were told how the population bomb supposedly worked, how it ticked. The idea went back to the Reverend Thomas Malthus who argued in 1798 that "population increases geometrically, while food supplies increase only

arithmetically". This has been the prevailing wisdom for over 2 centuries and is often illustrated by the following graph:http://www.biology.iupui.edu/biocourses/N100/images/ageomgrowth.gif

http://occ.crescentschool.org/geography/human/unitvagricultural/malthusgr aph.jpg

Looks neat, right -- so mathematically precise and inevitable. The problem is that it is wrong. I felt it as a kid. It bothered me throughout middle school and high school and on in to college. The reverend's now famous "Malthusian" predictions of doom and gloom came from a man who never studied biology... we now realize that he was a religious zealot and bigot who made up theories to try and stoke anti- immigration fever, arguing that undesirable poor people were basically breeding like rats. The problem in his logic is easy to spot when you use Nexus thinking: FOOD IS A POPULATION. Food comes from living creatures who have populations. They expand GEOMETRICALLY. If you let them. If you encourage them. It doesn't matter if we are talking about Brewer's yeast or earthworms or oak trees or apple trees or chickens or ears of corn or cattle or cocoa covered ants... whatever you eat comes from living organisms that are programmed to reproduce as fast as they can... that WANT to reproduce... geometrically. Just like us. So... population increases geometrically, whether it is us or our food. Starving kids in Bangladesh or Ethiopia simply shouldn't happen, and, I will insist to you, WOULDN'T, if we allowed the organism we eat to do their thing.

The key to keeping food production in line with food consumption, I have been arguing, is to use the "food-waste-to-fuel-and-fertilizer-and-food" or FW2F3 formula wherein every molecule of nitrogen, phosphorous, pottasium and carbon and micronutrients found in our wastes in our burgeoning cities is transformed immediately, in situ, back into food through the magical transduction of anaerobic and aerobic biodigestion and urban vertical farming and micro-livestock.

Using these simple techologies to close the loops in the food/energy/water nexus, the curves on those graphs should continue to go up in lock step, until we reach the limits set by sunlight. And then we will have to figure out safe, harmless ways to grow not just ourselves and our "economy" but our ecology, and eventually help grow new planets. But even that... the promise of space stations and terraforming planets, isn't out of the question. After all, the one thing that doesn't seem to ever be in any danger of NOT expanding... is the universe."

Today’s lecture is about “Progress in food production: a new wave of ancient practices and post-modern technologies that use less water and less energy, produce less waste and can even produce more energy.”

And I believe, to paraphrase Deuteronomy 12:3, we have to start by “tearing down the altars and smashing the sacred pillars” that were erected by wrong headed Malthusians who used a gross misunderstanding of biology and a total lack of nexus and systems thinking to scare us into what I call “induced paralysis for profit”. The idea comes from what is called in economics classes “The Scarcity Model: the fundamental economic assumption of having seemingly unlimited human needs and wants in a world of limited resources, which states that society has insufficient productive resources to fulfill all human wants and needs”.

When the scarcity model is used to create fear, to create an atmosphere of doom and gloom, to predict the inevitable arrival of the four horsemen of the apocalypse (Conquest, War, Famine, and Death), political economists and political ecologists suggest that it is much easier for elite groups to manipulate the masses. They control the machinery of conquest and war, and they use the specter of famine to gain their power.

Food production sits at the heart of the nexus – every animal on this planet (and doubtless the vast majority of beings in our universe) finds food to be the fundamental. It is priority number one, for unless you are a being of pure light you need the food that grows with light to survive. And if you spread misinformation that famine is imminent, that starvation is just around the corner, you can mobilize armies.

However, looked at from a FEW Nexus perspective, this fear of famine we

have been living with since Biblical times (the four horsemen are part of the Book of Revelation of Jesus Christ to John of Patmos, at 6:1-8 in the New Testament written during the Roman occupation of Palestine) is a peculiar Middle Eastern and North European phenomenon it turns out, coming from civilizations in regions of the world where water stresses constrained food production. People in well-watered tropical regions rarely felt threatened by food scarcity and in fact were described by anthropologist Marshall Sahlins as living in a state of perpetual abundance. He postulated that hunter- gatherers were, in fact “the original affluent society” at a symposium entitled "Man the Hunter" in 1966 and this idea has been tested and found true for most peoples around the world where water was not a limiting factor. It explains why hunting and gathering and subsistence farming persist to this day, and why so many people resisted being brought into modern civilization or adopting modern agriculture methods. In fact the work of historian Anthropologist Eric Wolf, such as “Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century” and Yale professor James Scott in books such as “Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed” teach us that there have been enough failures due to the form of agriculture that emerged from the conquering civilizations that the conquered were willing to sacrifice their lives to revolt against them. Somehow, it seems, those certain schemes to improve yields were social and ecological disasters that should have been rejected by civilizations but instead were used to confirm the Reverend Malthus’ scientifically unfounded hypothesis – a classic but often neglected example of what is known as confirmation bias – which wiki defines as “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative

possibilities”. When it comes to food production, the alternative possibility, which is persuasively argued in Richard Manning’s book “Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization” is that monocropping annual vegetation and basing civilization on grain agriculture, on the use of plants in the family Poaceae/Graminae, that is the grasses – wheat, rice, corn, barely, oats and sugar – yes, sugar is a grass – is, to caricature the 45th president of the world’s most powerful agriculture and military empire, “ a disaster”.

History records that agriculture and famine are the Jekyll and Hyde of the long and often militarized march of civilization. The one came because of the other, says Manning. Most of us were taught the opposite weren’t we? Taught that human life, as the 17th century imperial philosopher Thomas Hobbes decried in his book Leviathan, was “nasty, brutish and short” We were told that humans lived in a state of semi-starvation UNTIL they discovered agriculture. We were told that agriculture saved our species from hunger and misery, gave us the surpluses that enabled our climb to civilization. Sounds good, turns out not to be true.

Even Harvard’s Spencer Wells, a friend of mine who is the geneticist who leads the National Geographic Genographic project writes in his book “Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization” that when humans shifted from hunting and gathering in that original affluent society to grain agriculture the average height of men dropped from about 5 foot 7 to 5 foot 2 and women’s pelvic girdles narrowed to the point where death in childbirth increased in frequency.

These were clear signs of malnutrition recorded in the fossils. Agriculture was to blame... floodplain agriculture dependent on disturbance species that grow like weeds after a disaster because they are weeds. And they end up causing disasters thereafter because they evolved to live in disaster environments, places where floods and fires ravage the countryside on a regular basis. In effect they DEPEND on disasters for their own reproductive survival. It is as though once we hitched our caboose to the weeds and became weed eaters, we started living for them and not the other way around.

Michael Pollan talks about this in his wonderful book that reframes our relationship to addictive plants called “The Botany of Desire”.

He points out that you could look at us as the slaves of addictive plants that evolved to control us through their effect on our brains so that we would help them reproduce. This idea, which British Scientist Richard Dawkin’s calls “The Extended Phenotype” in the battle of Selfish Genes, isn’t really new.

In 1872, when Samuel Butler published his utopian fiction “Erewhon” the major premise of the people who fled Europe to live on the island of Erewhon in the hopes of creating a better civilization was that they would not allow themselves to submit to the control of their addictions or any system that makes us into its own slave. On the island they refuse to use technology like cars and steam engines and typewriters and telegraph or any machines. It isn’t that they don’t know about these things – in fact they have an entire museum where they keep them safely on display in glass cases. They tell visitors, “in your civilization machines don’t serve you, you serve them. You go to work in the morning and waste your days slavishly building more machines and oiling them and fixing them and keeping them running. It is like the bee that is the servant of the flower... flowers can’t move to reproduce themselves, so they addict the bee with beauty and nectar and perfumes and the busy bee spends its whole life toiling just to help make more flowers”. The phenotype of the bee is being controlled by the genes of the flower, not the bee. This is the concept of the extended phenotype, which finds its purest expression in parasitology.

So there are some who believe that the crops we turned to in our modern agricultural systems are acting more like Parasites that food stuffs, and that when we think we are serving food in the “restaurant service” sense , we literally are serving food – i.e. we now serve THEM, as servants.

This makes sense from the perspectives of evolutionary psychology and behavioral ecology.

Whether it was drought in arid desert regions or winter freezing water into ice, the limits to plant growth and reproduction, and hence to animal fecundity were set by the availability of water. In the Middle East, certainly, it was not energy that was missing from the Nexus. Sunshine has always been abundant in those latitudes to provide energy for food production.

In the European countries the harsh winters did indeed constrain plant productivity and famines could result in winter if care wasn’t taken to take the enormous fecundity of the spring, summer and fall and store the harvest surplus for the fallow period. But Hunter Gatherers North and South, in the cold regions or the hot ones, originally depended on agroforestry, on tree crops, on perennials, not annuals. And they depended on the animals that depended on forests – on forest boars and jungle fowl and woodland ungulates – all the ancestors of our modern pigs and chicken and cows. In the north the forest leaf fall in the fall built up incredible rich soils during the winter ready for an explosion of food in the spring and summer which created enough surplus for the mammals we ate to survive the winter. In the south the forests retained the water that fell sporadically and created their own microclimates through transpiration. They forests created environments so rich in the cornucopia of foodstuffs that our mythology now recalls as “The Garden of Eden”.

And if you want some mythological proof of the disaster or agriculture, just look at the curse we were to endure after eating the tree of knowledge and getting kicked out of the garden, “To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat from it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field; 19By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground”. So eating bread isn’t salvation, eating bread is the CURSE. No wonder so many hunters and gatherers said, “shoot, I’m going back into the forest, no way I’m doing hard time through painful toil to eat when I can pick fruits and vegetables and trap

animals.” And the fossil evidence of malnutrition affecting the pelvic bones of women, noted by Spencer Wells in Pandora’s Seed, is corroborated in the curse in Genesis when God says, “To the woman he said, "I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."

We can even comment on what this reveals about the emergence of patriarchal rule due to the shift to grain agriculture. My experience with hunter-gatherer populations is that the women are usually the ones who

understood the sheer abundance of biodiversity that nature offered to put into the cooking pot. I experienced it when I was living with Melayu and Dyak tribes in the rainforests of Borneo and was taken into the forest by the medicine woman who was cooking our meal and her grandson who climbed the trees to get the foods. She was called the “witch doctor” and as she laid out the huge variety of foods we collected to put in the cooking pot I had images of the witches’ cauldron with its “eyes of newt, frogs legs, bats wings” – all things that would have provided great inexpensive abundant protein but which today are shamefully associated with evil and

witchcraft. After all, women were BURNED at the stake for understanding and promoting biodiversity in diet by the European patriarchy, and children punished or mocked for thinking they could go into the forest as kids do and come back munching on lizards and grubs. Agriculture can be blamed not only for this tremendous patriarchal violence and loss of biodiversity as we simplified the landscape to a handful of weedy grasses, but for what James Scott calls the “dummification” of humanity. At one time, as I experienced among the hunters and gatherers of Borneo, harvesting food was an educational adventure that made women and children experts who rivaled the best Ph.D. botanists and naturalists who Harvard sent out. With agriculture we turned brilliant self-sufficient peasants into outdoor factory workers and, of course, quite literally when you are talking about the first 400 years of agriculture in the European colonized Americas, slaves. The violence inherent in agriculture rears its ugly head everywhere.

And it could be said that Genesis itself records the clearest indication that grain agriculture is the scourge of mankind, the source of its original sin of violence in The story of Cain and Abel. This chapter of the Bible is the clearest indictment of wheat agriculture one could imagine, and nobody seems to comment on it. Abel is a pastoralist who tends a flock of animals who wander about like ungulate hunter gatherers, eating what God has given them. His brother Cain is... a wheat farmer, somehow stupidly living out God’s curse to scratch a living in the hot sun through toil amidst the thistles and thorns that always accompany weed agriculture. Abel brings a lamb meat sacrifice to the altar of God, along with diverse fruits and vegetables he has gathered, and God is pleased.

Cain then comes with a bunch of wheat and the Bible says, “but for Cain and for his offering He had no regard. So Cain became very angry and his countenance fell. Then the LORD said to Cain, "Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen?7"If you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it."...

To me this is a clear indication that the ancients saw wheat offerings as a kind of sin, the sin of an addiction, an addiction which Cain could not

master. In his anger he turns around and kills his gentle carnivorous animal slaughtering brother.

Think about it for a moment... it is enough to make Vegans go mad: The vegetarian is the killer, the slaughterer of baby goats is the gentle one.

Could it be that this ancient myths were there to warn us that wheat is a weed, that grains are drugs, that we haven’t been growing food all along, but addictive substances that will end up mastering us through the Botany of Desire?

So, to get back to Reverend Malthus, who in my opinion must not have spent an awful lot of time delving into the hermeneutic interpretation of the books he preached in his fiery diatribes against the poor and the immigrants, it is clear to me that the entire Matlhusian premise is based on a fabrication of the weed eaters, who most likely did observe that if they kept planting grains and consuming starches and sugars their own sickly but ever increasing population would outstrip the fecundity of the land and so human populations would increase geometrically while their drug-food agriculture would only increase arithmetically if at all.

But if Abel had been Abel, we might have returned to the garden a long long time ago, where food is a self-increasing population grown in permacultural symbiosis into perpetuity. The good news is, that the world as we know it IS coming to an end. And what is ending isn’t the good life, but the bad life we inherited from our dummified forebears. We can begin again. Permacultural Food Production shows us how.

1 note · View note

lindoig4 · 5 years

Text

Iceland - all in one long post

(It is now Saturday 24 August and we are in St Johns, Newfoundland, and before I wade into Iceland, I thought I would summarise the birds we have identified so far. Some we have seen in more than one place, so the number of discrete species we have seen is still less than 100 – 99 in fact. But by country, my count currently stands at 138, made up of 36 in the US; 4 when we were in Montreal and a further 11 here, making it 15 for Canada; 9 in Oslo and 21 more in Svalbard making 30 for Norway, 20 in Greenland and 10 in the Denmark Strait – so possibly 30 for Denmark, depending on how we define it and 27 for Iceland. I don’t intend canvassing international relations or interpreting the Law of the Sea so it is up to you to define Greenland, the Denmark Strait and international waters however you choose – I decline to enter into any dispute on the issue.)

Now back to wonderful Iceland.

We arrived early in the morning after a pretty wild day and night at sea and we were probably happy enough to be on land again. Not because of the rocking and rolling, but because we were a bit overloaded with all we had experienced on the expeditions and felt that anything else would likely be more of the same. The only thing we hadn’t seen that would have been nice was more whales, specifically belugas and narwhals, but we can’t have everything – or at least, we have been told so.

On the other hand, our expectations of Iceland left us a little cold (so to speak) but we were wonderfully wrong! We disembarked at 9am and were bussed to a stop just down the hill from our hotel. Not sure why they couldn’t drop us off as we went past, but it was only a couple of hundred metres back up the hill lugging our luggage. (There is a reason it is called Luggage.)

We spent most of the day in our room but went out to the supermarket and had a drink on the way back. I spent some time dashing in and out of the hotel into the garden at the back chasing a bird that kept calling every now and then, but I never found it. I eventually discovered that an identical sound came from a squeaky lift the was right next to where I thought the mythical bird was calling!

In the late afternoon, we went to the hotel bar for a 2 for 1 drink Happy Hour and fell into conversation with two local women almost our age and we had a really wonderful hour or so with them. They were both lovely intelligent women and it was a complete pleasure to share our respective thoughts with a wonderful couple of locals.

We then went to a Vietnamese restaurant we had sussed out whilst shopping and it was a big disappointment. Very ordinary food in pretty scungy surroundings for about $90 Oz with no drinks!

We went on two tours whilst in Reykjavik. I clearly recall being taught in high school that there is no green in Greenland and no ice in Iceland. But like many of the gems imparted to naive teenagers at school, both are entirely wrong.

We saw a lot of green in Greenland - no towering forests or endless savannahs but plenty of green ground-cover in lots of places. Similarly, in Iceland, there is not a lot of summer snow, but they play few winter sports because everything is blanketed in snow, inhibiting outdoor sports, even if competitors and spectators were able to attend snowbound venues (which they aren’t!)

But Iceland is certainly spectacular in summer. As I said, we went on two wonderful tours (thank you Nice Tours), but a few observations first.

Iceland has fewer than 350,000 residents (and 3,000,000 summer tourists each year), over two-thirds of them living in Reykjavik. Most of the others are farmers and their small beautiful farms are a picture of neatness, looking like they sweep the hills and comb the grass before the tourists arrive each morning. They desperately want more residents (their unemployment rate is effectively zero) and despite some resentment about the changes brought about to accommodate us, they are heavily dependent on tourism as their biggest contributor to GDP.

They have virtually unlimited geothermal energy and squander it outrageously. Similarly, water is abundant and profligacy is considered absurd. The geothermal water powers some of their electricity needs and is then returned to the earth or used to heat every building in the country. The rest of their energy comes from hydro plants. Even some small collectives of farmers agree to install a small power plant to provide for their own needs and feed the surplus into the already overloaded grid. The only other fuel source appears to be imported petroleum at a little over $A2 a litre.

The hot water contains a bit of a cocktail of harmless minerals but smells a bit, so is used for showers and heating and the cold meltwater for most other things.

In the winter, some parts of the country are virtually inaccessible and the roads in those areas are atrocious but nearer Reykjavík, they are quite good - and the city itself is very modern-looking. No high-rises because they have plenty of room, but there are a few 5 or 6 level buildings.

There are NO trees away from the city, although a few farmers have attempted to grow some without a lot of success. But around Reykjavík, there are plenty of trees due to a concerted effort to provide some windbreaks for a few clicks around. I went for a walk this morning and found it very hard going, but apparently, the wind has been known to blow many people over, even to blow cell phones out of their hands (Shock, horror!). People stay indoors during the worst of the wind.

It is a very expensive place to live. We paid over $A85 for a very crummy meal at a Greasy Joe Chinese restaurant a couple of nights ago (our second expensive meal out) and even the supermarket gives rise to a few nasty shocks. One interesting point is that it costs more to build a house here than its sale price so a lot of people build their own rather than buy something that costs more than they could sell it for.

Having said all of that, Iceland is a wonderfully beautiful place with heaps of great things to see and do. It is very progressive. They had a National Pride Parade on the day we arrived and the whole city was decked out with rainbow flags and paraphernalia. The whole city seemed involved in celebrating the march and its participants. They are a very inclusive society and I found some of their more progressive ideas a little surprising - in a very good way.

Our tours were brilliant. Although we didn’t have any great expectations of the country before we arrived, I now wish we could just squeeze another month or so into our visit.

Golden Circle Tour

This is one of the more popular one-day tours and the scenery is amazing. (Most tours are multi-day and many are about 11 days and circumnavigate the island on their version of our Highway 1, although it is a little more rustic than ours in the north.). Rugged mountains, massive volcanic lava-fields, giant glaciers, thousands of waterfalls, wonderful wildlife (mainly birds) and miniature flora – simply superb. There are far more Icelandic horses than Icelanders - a unique breed that will remain pure because no other horses are allowed in, including any local horses that leave the country to compete in events - they are not allowed back in under any conditions! The sheep run free and have right of way on the road and all look very healthy: fat and woolly. There are cattle here, but they are mainly kept indoors - as are all the sheep in the colder months.

We visited the world’s second largest geyser (after Yellowstone) and watched it shoot almost 40 metres skywards every 5 to 8 minutes. It is the Geysir Strokkur and is source of word ‘geyser’ worldwide. We were careful to stay upwind, but some people got very wet trying to get the perfect selfie. There are numerous hot springs around and we saw plenty of thermal activity as we ate our packed lunch and walked to and from our bus. (I am tired of typing ‘spectacular’ so please just insert it once or twice in each paragraph. If any needs me to, I will provide a few hundred copies of spectacular, beautiful, amazing, astounding, wonderful, awesome, mindboggling, fantastic, fabulous – even fantabulous if you must - and any other superlatives you wish and you can just copy and paste them into each sentence or clause as you prefer – because they are all highly appropriate!)

We went to an awesome volcanic crater, obviously inactive, but huge, very steep-sided with a beautiful lake inside. We walked right around the ridge and photographed it from many angles. It was very windy and getting close to the rim was quite scary at times.

And what a spectacular waterfall Gulifoss was! It is fuelled by meltwater but totally awesome - mind-bogglingly so but still not Iceland’s biggest! The volume of water cascading down was truly (insert several superlatives here) but this was after a veritable drought - the driest period they have had for years. The water is funnelled into a huge canyon, way below anything we could see, but in a normal year, the volume is so huge, it fills the canyon! When I finally get some pics posted, you might imagine why it defies description.

We called in at a working farm for an icecream. Icelanders are the world’s most voracious consumers of icecream and we stopped at a couple of other places later in the day to avoid our guide suffering withdrawal symptoms.

Another stop was at the site of the world’s oldest parliament, dating to the 9th century. The tribes in the area decided that they needed more order in their community so elected a leader each 3 years and presented him with all their disputes and issues requiring resolution. He was given one day to think about them all and then stood on this particular rocky outcrop and addressed the assembled throng with his binding decisions the following day. It is now a UN World Heritage site and our guide was able to fill out a bit of history about it. Perhaps more significantly though is that the rock is on the very edge of the North American tectonic plate. We walked through an amazingly impressive fissure to get to the rock and it was a sobering thought that we were on such prehistorically significant ground. There is 6 kilometres between this and the nearby Eurasian plate at this point, with this distance growing by about 2.5 cm a year. At some point in the future a cataclysmic rupture is bound to happen right where we stood.

Then it was on the Eurasian tectonic plate, but with no fanfare or obvious geological features to mark it - but then, after the grandeur of the other side, it would be hard to match anyway. We spent much of the rest of the day in Eurasia - no passport required!

A truly fantastic tour and overloaded with historical, geological and simply grandeural(??) overload, we ate bread rolls and supped on Aquavit in our room at night.

Monday was a rest day, soaking in some of the previous day’s experience, washing, blogging, Happy Houring and finally eating at an extraordinarily sub-ordinary Chinese café at great expense at night.

Snaefellsnes Peninsula Tour

But next day was the Snaefellsnes Peninsula Tour: perhaps even more spectacular than the Golden Circle Tour. The giant glacier atop the mountain was distant, but omnipresent even at 200km distance. We saw dozens/scores of waterfalls (fosses in Icelandic), cascading down the mountains from the interior snowmelt and creating hundreds of crystal-clear creeks and rivers. At one time, some locals sent a sample of the river water to an international laboratory to see what minerals it contained. Receiving no response, they contacted the lab to enquire as to progress with the testing - only to be ridiculed by the analysers for wasting their time sending obviously distilled water for testing! Did I say crystal clear!?

We explored one wonderfully picturesque foss and associated lake close up - pics will eventually be posted. Just across the road from this great waterfall is a mountain that was historically assumed to be rather nondescript until a photo of it was unexpectedly voted one of the world’s ten most iconic mountains and a tourism cavalcade ensued. The mountain has featured in quite a lot of films, but alas, I don’t recall which. Maybe my photos will prompt some memories.

We had a superb fish lunch at a restaurant where our guide knew the chef. He seemed to know a lot of people, but had worked in a small local hotel with this chef - recently returned to Iceland as chef at a 3 Michelin hat restaurant in Europe. The food was excellent and because at least 10 of us agreed to purchase the fish special, we got it at half price: much closer to what we would pay for a similar meal in Oz.

We walked along the cliff from a charming tiny enclosed fishing harbour, past some awe-inspiring sink-holes too scary to get close enough to see the bottom, past a delightful bird-encrusted lake, past more cliffs filled mainly with nesting gulls, lava caves and blowholes, a fantastic rocky arch to a lookout with more caves, more nesting kittiwakes and a mass of hexagonal basaltic columns formed by the lava cooling more slowly. To add spectacle to amazing wonder, the columns were not straight, but twisted and bent in line with the strata being formed at the time. A geology lesson in itself!

Then on the way back to our little bus, we passed a man-made stone structure representing a monument to a local troll. Icelanders are very superstitious and many still believe in good and bad trolls and other forces that seem quite alien to us. Most of the island’s roads were built about 100 years ago when superstition was even more rife and many roads take unexpected detours to avoid crossing evil troll-infested sites (or to proceed through beneficent troll areas), much like our sacred sites in Australia only more so. And many people still ascribe or predict events to the beneficial or vengeful actions of trolls - and act accordingly, doing good things or avoiding bad omens just to be on the safe side.

We visited a beach made of black pebbles and vicious looking lava outcrops. It was surrounded by a lava field, mostly covered with wonderful soft silvery-green moss and lichens. After the lave cools, dust is blown in and microscopic lichen, fungus and algae start to grow, followed a few millennia later by the mosses that continue to break down the lava into what eventually becomes arable land - if it is not then covered by more lava or a glacier.

It was a long tour, almost 12 hours of utter wonder. We had walked several delightful kilometres and climbed quite a few steps and were quite tired by the time we reached our hotel so just ate what was in the fridge and went to bed, weary but still buzzing with the excitement of all we had seen. For me, a little bonus was the improved variety and number of birds we saw along the way, many of which we had been able to view with surprising clarity.

Our last day in Iceland was almost an anticlimax. I went for a long walk around Reykjavik in the morning. Heather’s ankle that she broke a couple of years ago was too sore to accompany me and we just reviewed photos, wrote stuff, repacked and had a Happy Hour in preparation for the long trip to St Johns on the morrow.

But given the chance, we would be back in Iceland with a campervan for a month or more perhaps risking the shoulder period to see the best of the whole island in all sorts of weather. It is definitely a place that should be on everyone’s Bucket List and even after being here, it is still on ours!

1 note · View note

meridianadventure-blog · 5 years

Text

Meridian Adventure Academy - A Fully-Sponsored Cadet Training Programme

Historically, a sailing school has been viewed as an elitist hobby-maker’s paradise. With Meridian Sail Academy, that image will no doubt start to crack. Our fully-sponsored cadetship programme gives young people from around the world the chance to pursue their passion and launches them into an exciting and dynamic career in the yachting industry.

Many children dream of growing up and sailing on adventures across the seven seas – but the prohibitive costs of learning to sail often cut those dreams short. Another structural barrier into entering the yachting industry is knowledge of luxury hospitality. Private guests who charter fully-crewed sailing yachts expect a premium service, but young people often lack the skills necessary to provide that sort of experience and so struggle to find and keep employment in this highly competitive industry. Meridian Sail Academy is an all-paid for 21-month programme – no, not just a sailing school – for young people the world over, which prides itself in rearing the future masters of the seas, while taking care of the captains of industry of today. After graduating the programme, cadets are likely to find work anywhere in the industry; many stay on as permanent staff for Meridian Adventure, taking their guests to wild, unspoilt pockets of the ocean.

A GRUELING PROCESS

Unsurprisingly, given that it is a fully-sponsored programme which catapults its graduates into lucrative positions in the yachting industry, Meridian Adventure Sail Academy is an incredibly competitive programme. Prospective cadets are recruited from all over the world in a demanding six-step selection process. They are chosen on the basis of their eagerness to grow, intelligence, leadership potential, adaptability, motivation and last but not least, their passion for the ocean. As Captain Sean Galleymore, Meridian Adventure’s CEO, says: “By enlisting, you will grow and develop not only the theoretical and practical knowledge of your chosen profession, you will also grow as a person. You will understand your strengths, your weaknesses, and your limitations, as well as find within yourself the skills to lead. It is an opportunity to find in oneself self-discipline and accountability, whilst enjoying the adventure of a career at sea.” The goal is to pick out only the very best – and to train them to be even better.

All selected cadets undergo 3 months of introductory and safety training in Siğacik, Turkey. This sheltered, coastal district just south of Izmir (also known as the “pearl of the Aegan”) is the perfect place to become acquainted with what a career at sea entails. It is a picturesque locale, with warm, calm waters and temperate weather. The course itself, however, is challenging. The goal is not only to explain the basics of safety and equipment, but to have each cadet value the importance of ‘the drill’. In Turkey, the cadets learn that everything on board a luxury yacht is done as a set drill to ensure professionalism, efficiency and safety. They learn that no short cuts are possible on board a luxury yacht, and that following the drill is always the most efficient way to complete any given task. At the end of the three months, only six of the cadets are selected to study on further, for the on-board cadetship training.

Those six who do qualify to this next phase are flown to Raja Ampat on Indonesia’s Pacific Coast, and embark on their 18 month on-board cadetship programme. The cadets were treated kindly by the oceanic conditions of Turkey, but they are still always blown away by the magnificence of Raja Ampat. This unspoilt nook of the planet is most certainly a paradise on earth. It boasts the best waters and most abundant marine life in the region, and has been nicknamed “The Four Kings” by locals and tourists alike. Described by marine biologists as a biological hotspot and called the most beautiful island chain in all of South East Asia, Raja Ampat makes an everlasting impression on the cadets.

At graduation, each cadet would have obtained four highly recognised external qualifications (the VHF basic radio license certificate, Master of Yachts 200gt Limited (Sail) certificate, Master of Yachts 200gt Unlimited certificate and PADI Open Water Diver Certificate) and six certifications designed in-house, which test additional competencies. These in-house certifications test vital soft skills like housekeeping and guest services, as well as hard know-hows such as engineering and rigging. Cadets also go on to receive Adventure Activity Accreditation, ensuring the safety of all of their future guests. The combination of certifications has become well-regarded throughout the industry, in that the Academy’s graduates are exceptionally well-prepared for permanent employment.

The candidates selected for the on-board cadetship are the brightest and the best of the people who have applied; young men and women whose deep love for sailing is unparalleled and whose people skills are fine-tuned. They are intelligent, disciplined, helpful and above all, passionate about their chosen profession. Each one has been hand-picked and identified as a future industry leader. Even so, each intake of the Academy’s cadets has had candidates drop out prior to graduation. This cadetship, most especially the on-board training section, is a gruelling one. The Academy does not “do mediocre” – its cadets are expected to continuously give the best of themselves, and to grow and learn constantly. They are expected to leave the programme ready to take care of equipment, and to take care of – nay, spoil – their exceptional guests. They are also expected to show a commitment to sustainability and a desire to look after the wonders of the ocean world.

FILLING A GAP

The reason the programme is as challenging and competitive as it is, is simple: the industry these young people are applying to be a part of is a challenging and competitive one! Contrary to the romanticised image folks have built in their heads, the hull of a yacht offers one of the most intense and demanding workplace environments. Not only is each crew member working and living in close confines with all of their colleagues, which requires of each one of them a high level of teamwork and respect, but a genuine love and appreciation for the ocean is vital in order to succeed.

In 2017, Meridian Adventure founded the Academy after Galleymore noted that they themselves struggled to find permanent staff of requisite calibre. There simply were not sufficiently well-trained candidates on offer, which promised to present an even greater problem for the future. Meridian Adventure SAIL has always and will always offer impeccable hospitality and service on board; their luxury yachts allow premium guests to feel spoiled while exploring the unspoilt pockets of the world. Such a feeling is only possible when the staff on board is thoroughly committed, and knows exactly how to achieve to that standard. Rather than sit idly by or accept the sub-par status quo, Meridian Adventure launched its Academy – which quickly became a resounding success. Firstly, it gave Meridian Adventure a pool of qualified candidates to choose from – and allowed the company to ensure impeccable and consistent service on their expeditions going forward in decades to come.

Of the first six candidates to go through the programme, three are currently employed in the company and continue to grow from strength to strength. Renaldo Brand, who started on the programme in March 2017, immediately proved to be a crew member of utmost distinction. He quickly surpassed the understanding and skill sets of those who have been in the industry for years. On graduation, he was immediately employed by Meridian Adventure SAIL, and will no doubt find himself running a successful Mega Yacht one day. Another member of this cohort, Bradley Nelson, became the youngest cadet ever employed by Meridian Adventure SAIL. He had entered the Academy right out of high school, yet unlike most teenagers brought with him an unparalleled determination to not only succeed, but to surpass all expectations. He will no doubt rise through the ranks of the industry, and will become a key figure in the industry.

The second intake of cadets was an even greater success for Meridian Adventure’s HR department, with every single graduate finding permanent employment internally. Amongst these new hires was the programme’s first female cadet, Marli Haasbroek, who excelled throughout her time on board and continues to hone her leadership skills on board Meridian SAIL’s luxury yachts.

In short, the programme has successfully filled Meridian Adventure’s internal needs – but it has also worked towards changing the industry and creating meaningful, sustainable change.

PASSIONATE ABOUT THE OCEAN

As much as the Academy was born out of a need, it also stemmed from Meridian Adventure’s constant desire for positive change. That is why the Academy is not just a sailing school, nor simply an at-sea hospitality programme. It is rigorous and intense because it has been designed to forge industry leaders who are passionate about every aspect of the ocean. Meridian Adventure wants to ensure that tomorrow’s masters of the sea know that a yachting career means taking care of the vessels, taking care of people on board and, finally, taking care of the environment.

The graduates of the Academy appreciate the importance of tidal streams, nature and the delicate balance of the ocean environment. They seek to limit any damage that reckless tourism may cause, and prioritise sustainability at all times. That is the kind of attitude that is necessary in order to explore untouched corners of the world, like Raja Ampat. A place as serene, as beautiful and as thoroughly unblemished by civilisation as Raja Ampat needs to be looked after. Meridian Adventure’s staff does just that – and its cohorts of cadets commit to those same standards.

Going on a trip with Meridian Adventure is about the journey, not about the destination. It is about exploring the unexplored and undoing the harm that people’s thoughtless pollution has caused the oceanic habitats. It is about finding beauty in corals, marine animals, and nature at large. And Meridian Adventure Academy’s exceptionally trained cadets are at a massive advantage when it comes to delivering on all of the above. They are committed to making the yachting industry a better, greater and more impactful one. They are committed to conservation, to luxury, to service. They are the future masters of the seven seas. So, when will you be joining them on board?

#yacht #travel #maritime #career #yachtcharter #sailing

1 note · View note