Visit Lesotho and you will know why this tiny country is called "Kingdom in the Sky". Here are the best things to do in Lesotho, Africa's mountain Kingdom.
Making a trip down to Mexico anytime soon? You're in luck! Check out our recommendations for cliffside hot springs and infinity pools to visit during your stay.
Imagine a national pet adoption day where all the animals left shelters for great homes. That's the goal of this year's Clear the Shelters. Find out how you can help!
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You can take a thousand photos, but if you don't capture something at just the right moment, you may never get the exact photo that you want. Sometimes, the perfect timing can make or break a photo, turning it into a hilarious coincidence or a beautiful illusion.
There are plenty of unusual places to see as we roam the planet, like the majestic Wisteria tunnel in Japan. This site is the main feature of the Kawachi
Black cats are thought to bring bad luck—but we think they’re absolutely adorable, ultra pettable, and cuddletastic. Not to mention utterly magnificent and, really, just tinier versions of noble panthers. That’s why Bored Panda compiled this mega-awesome super-duper massively-fluffy list of the cutest and funniest pictures of black cats.
Autumn Scenery of Hemu (China) by Liang Hsiao
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Appalachian Trail Vermont via pinterest
Cortisol keeps our body functioning well. Too much of it can lead to feeling stressed and anxious. Discover foods that reduce cortisol.
If you live in the U.S., you don't need a passport to see what mother nature has to offer.
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This place in Colmar is called the "Little Venice" because there are many pretty houses at both sides of the channel with lots of small boats moving past it.
Fire rainbows are the rarest of all naturally occurring atmospheric phenomena. For a fire rainbow to occur, cirrus clouds must be 20,000 feet in the air with the precise amount of ice crystals, and...
Our home planet is truly a wondrous place.
Uma das maiores sensações cinematográficas do ano é sem dúvida ‘Call Me by Your Name’, junto com o girl-power ‘Lady Bird’ e o black-power ‘Pantera Negra’. Mas d...
Often people make the mistake of thinking of art as something that is to do only with the senses and nothing to do with practicality. People who think like this are right in thinking that art can please the senses and wrong in that they think art has no practical use. Did you know that some arts have practical uses? In fact, when you consider aspects like elegant backyard pond ideas, you can see both the practical and artistic aspects of art. In fact, it is a good idea to involve younger people like teenagers in practical projects that also involve art to ensure that this aspect of their personality develops as they grow into adulthood.
❥‿↗⁀simply-beautiful-world Beautiful!!
Mooonjellies mother nature moments
Old bridge through the "Yuzhniy Bug River" Ukraine
Forget Paris or London, add any of the most underrated destinations in the world to your travel itinerary for a truly unforgettable vacation.
(@earthspirit) Your home is filled with energy. The quality of that energy has all to do with how you feel at home. For example: If you're having a great day and come home and the energy in your house is stagnant, draining... maybe you have a big mess to clean up... Suddenly or gradually, but definitively, you'll start to feel the energy affect you. Maybe you become upset, deflated, exhausted, overwhelmed... or the momentum sort of stops moving forward. maybe other worries pop up in your mind or you become distracted? A great day can become washed out by negative
From one of the most original thinkers on the role of religion in the modern world, a profound exploration of the spiritual power of nature--and an urgent call to reclaim that power in everyday life. "Much has been written on the scientific and technological aspects of climate change.... But Armstrong's book is both more personal and more profound. Its urgent message is that hearts and minds need to change if we are to once more learn to revere our beautiful and fragile planet." --The Guardian Since the beginning of time, humankind has looked upon nature and seen the divine. In the writings of the great thinkers across religions, the natural world inspires everything from fear, to awe, to tranquil contemplation; God, or however one defined the sublime, was present in everything. Yet today, even as we admire a tree or take in a striking landscape, we rarely see nature as sacred. In this short but deeply powerful book, the best-selling historian of religion Karen Armstrong re-sacralizes nature for modern times. Drawing on her vast knowledge of the world's religious traditions, she vividly describes nature's central place in spirituality across the centuries. In bringing this age-old wisdom to life, Armstrong shows modern readers how to rediscover nature's potency and form a connection to something greater than ourselves. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9780593319437 Media Type: Hardcover Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Publication Date: 09-06-2022 Pages: 224 Product Dimensions: 5.20(w) x 7.60(h) x 1.00(d)About the Author KAREN ARMSTRONG is the author of numerous books on religious affairs, including The Case for God, A History of God, The Battle for God, Holy War, Islam, Buddha, and The Great Transformation, as well as a memoir, The Spiral Staircase. Her work has been translated into forty-five languages. In 2008 she was awarded the TED Prize and began working with TED on the Charter for Compassion, created online by the general public, and crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. The charter was launched globally in the fall of 2009. She is currently an ambassador for the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations. She lives in London.Read an Excerpt Read an Excerpt 1 Mythos and Logos A great deal of environmental discussion is scientific: we constantly hear about emissions, particles, pollution levels and the ozone layer. This provides us with essential information and we have become familiar with the terminology. But it does not move us emotionally. Today we tend to use the term “myth” rather vaguely to mean something that is not true. When we hear of gods walking on the earth, a dead man striding out of his tomb or a sea parting to release an enslaved people, we dismiss these tales as “only myths.” But in the past, “myth” meant something entirely different. For most of human history, there were two ways of thinking, speaking and acquiring knowledge about the world: mythos and logos. Both were essential to comprehending reality: they were not in opposition to one another but complementary modes of arriving at truth, and each had its special area of competence. Mythos was concerned with what was considered timeless. It looked both back to the origins of life and culture and inward to the deepest levels of human experience. It was concerned with meaning not practical affairs. Humans are meaning seeking creatures. If our lives lack significance, we fall very easily into despair, and it was mythos that introduced people to deeper truths, making sense of their moribund and precarious lives by directing their attention to the eternal and universal. As far as we know, cats do not agonise about the feline condition, worry about the plight of cats in other parts of the world, or try to see life from a different perspective. But from a very early period humans felt compelled to devise stories that enabled them to place their lives in a different setting and give them a conviction that—against all the depressing evidence to the contrary—life had some meaning and value. A myth is an event which, in some sense, happened once, but which also happens all the time. Mythology points beyond the chaotic flux of historical events to what is timeless in human life, helping us to glimpse the stable core of reality. It is also rooted in what we call the unconscious mind. Myths are an ancient form of psychology. When people told tales of heroes descending into the underworld, struggling through labyrinths or fighting with monsters, they were bringing to light fears and desires from the obscure regions of the subconscious mind, which is not accessible by purely logical investigation but has a profound effect on our experience and behaviour. Myth could not be conveyed by rational proof; its insights were intuitive, like those of art and poetry. What’s more, myth became a reality only when it was embodied in rituals and ceremonies, enabling participants to apprehend the deeper currents of life. Myth and ritual were so inseparable that it is a matter of scholarly debate which came first. Without spiritual practice, the mythical story would make no sense—in rather the same way as a musical score remains opaque to most of us until it is interpreted instrumentally. We are far more conversant today with logos, which is quite different from mythical thinking. Unlike mythos, logos corresponds to objective facts. Logos is wholly pragmatic: it is the rational mode of thought that enables human beings to function. It is the basis of our modern society. We use our logical powers when we want to make something happen, to achieve something or to persuade others to adopt a particular opinion. Where myth looks back to origins, logos forges ahead, develops new insights and invents something fresh. It also, for good and ill, helps us to achieve greater control over the natural environment. But logos, like mythos, has limitations. It cannot answer questions about the ultimate value of human life. It cannot assuage our sorrow. It can unveil wonderful new facts about the physical universe and make things work more efficiently, but it cannot explain the meaning of life. From a very early period, Homo sapiens understood this instinctively. He used logos to develop new weapons and hunting skills; and he turned to myth, with its accompanying rituals, to reconcile him to the inevitable pain and grief that might otherwise overwhelm him. Before the modern period, both mythos and logos were regarded as essential, but by the eighteenth century the people of Europe and America had achieved such astonishing success in science and technology that they began to discount myth as false and primitive. Society was no longer wholly dependent on a surplus of agricultural produce—like all previous civilisations—but relied increasingly on technological resources and the constant reinvestment of capital. This freed modern society from many of the constraints of traditional culture, whose agrarian base had always been precarious. The long process of modernisation took some three centuries and involved profound changes: industrialisation, the British agricultural revolution, the political reform of society and an intellectual “enlightenment” that dismissed myth as futile and outmoded. Yet while our demythologised world may be comfortable for those of us fortunate enough to live in First World countries, it has not become the earthly paradise predicted by Francis Bacon and other Enlightenment philosophers. We must disabuse ourselves of the fallacy that myth is untrue or represents an inferior mode of thought. We may be unable to return wholesale to a premodern sensibility, but we can acquire a more nuanced understanding of the myths of our ancestors because they still have something to teach us. And of course, we continue to create our own myths, even if we don’t describe them as such. The twentieth century saw the emergence of some very destructive myths that ended in massacre and genocide. We cannot counter these bad myths with reason alone because undiluted logos cannot deal with deep-rooted fears, desires and neuroses. We need good myths that help us to identify with our fellow human beings, and not just with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need good myths that help us to realise the importance of compassion, which challenges and transcends our solipsistic and tribal egocentricity. And, crucially, we need good myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, because unless there is a spiritual revolution that challenges the destructiveness of our technological genius, we will not save our planet. The great myths of the past presented the natural world as imbued with sacrality. But—I repeat—a myth makes no sense unless it is translated into practical action. Myths were not just cautionary tales: they had to be put into practice and were therefore always accompanied by ritual. Ritual, like myth, is often misunderstood in our pragmatic world; in the early modern period, it was rejected even by religious people as outdated superstition. Yet ritual ceremonies were indispensable to premodern religion, and they never were wholly spiritual affairs but involved the body and, through the body, the emotions. Neurophysicists tell us that, without being consciously aware of it, we receive and transmit important information through our senses, physical movements and gestures. Carefully crafted rituals making use of emotive music, dance and drama can dramatically bring a mythical event of the distant past into the present. If devised with sufficient skill, they can also yield an aesthetic ecstasy that enables participants to “stand outside” their mundane selves for a moment. By acting out a ritual role with skill and concentration, we can leave the self behind and, paradoxically, achieve self-enhancement. Through the arts we experience a more in
Nicola Iseard assembles a panel of experts and persuades to reveal their personal favourites
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ladoescurodalua: “ Misty Valley (by Fresnatic) ”
Photoshop is a tricky, tricky thing.
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