Internet Bread Crumbs for Sustenance
Some stories I have loved recently
I haven’t been posting many links lately, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t found many beautiful things across the internet (and in the real world). Here’s a collection of stories and news that has inspired my creativity, joy, and a sense of kinship in me.
This Emergence Magazine story by Lucy Jones is a lovely dive into the world of slime molds
“Another mystery is why slime molds have evolved to be so bright and beautiful. What function does the iridescence have? This has not been studied at all, but she has a theory. She thinks it’s a protective layer which may strengthen the membrane and protect the spores from rain, which makes them vulnerable to fungal attack.”
In this essay, Lucy Jones winds her way through her own fascination with slime molds near her home in the UK, their gross-out factor, and the history of slime molds as well as their innate slimy intellect and the concepts of awe. It’s gorgeous, like everything over at Emergence.
Victorine Meurent was once considered a model for other painters, but in
this Herstory blog post Drēma Drudge examines Meurent’s lost paintings and her identity as a painter in her own right.
Sharon Blackie, writer and mythologist, on “Hagitude” and reimagining the second half of life.
As a nonbinary person who will enter into menopause at some point over the next fifteen years, I loved this reimagining of the second half of life. I also enjoyed Blackie’s segment of To the Best of Our Knowledge podcast/
Speaking of To the Best of Our Knowledge podcast, they’re always doing good work over there. Last week they spoke to Trans historian Jules Gill Peterson about Trans experiences in the early 20th century.
Jules tells the story of Val, a Trans girl living in the 1930’s:
“Val is incredible: one of the most remarkable trans youth that I was able to write about in my book. What I know about Val comes from a little bit later in her life in the late 1940s when she was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Hospital hoping to finally get gender-affirming surgery. If she had been successful, she would've really been one of the first Americans to, at least on paper, officially get that kind of surgical set of procedures because American doctors were just pretty far behind their European counterparts in that regard.
Anyway, at one point while she's kind of stuck in the hospital ward, while truly on another floor, a whole room of doctors are arguing about whether or not they're going to actually go through with the surgery that everyone else has approved her for, a psychologist kind of wanders into her room and as they often do, just takes her life history again.
In telling her story we learn this incredible tale of her trans childhood. We're talking here the turn of the 1930s, the very beginning of the Great Depression. Val's growing up in a family outside of Milwaukee in a more rural county. The way she narrates it is that it was just obvious to everyone from a really young age that she was a girl, even though she had been assigned male at birth. And her parents were fine.
They let her dress as a girl. They treated her as a girl. They called her by a girl's name. And when it came time for her to enter into school and go to kindergarten, her parents got together, talked to the county judge, talked to the school officials, and she went to school as a girl. It wasn't a problem at first.
It's so interesting because we are being told every day that the idea of trans girls using the restroom or playing on girls sports teams is some sort of radical threat to the norms of American society. Here we have evidence from 1930 that that's not true. I just think it really stretches the mind and reframes where we think we are today.”
What I loved about this interview is demonstrated above— Trans people, nonbinary people, gender-expansive and gender-diverse people have been around forever. We’re not going anywhere.
Share something beautiful in the comments!
Please share something that gave you joy or beauty or revelation in the comments. It can be a link, or your own personal story. This week I have been looking at trees. Just…being grateful for trees. I know there are a lot of horrible things happening in the world. What’s helping you find joy and grounding?
Tell me in the comments.