17steps:

xaos:

Death - The Urban Tarot - Robert Scott

Robert Scott

“It seems to me that the Death card in the tarot is sort of a running joke, because every time it comes up in a reading, it has to be accompanied by the words “Oh, but don’t worry! It doesn’t MEAN death necessarily.” It feels necessary to say that, because people see the card and immediately think it means they’re going to die, or someone else is, and that the card is a simple prophecy of doom. Which of course it isn’t. 

“The Death card symbolizes change. Sometimes a painful change (and what large changes are not painful?), but one that is often necessary in order to allow new things to take root and grow. It has implications of rebirth and renewal as well as of endings. 

“Or, in other words, it does mean death. But perhaps you need to think more deeply about what death really is. Death isn’t always the enemy, as much as we want to cast the grim reaper as a movie villain. Sometimes when things, when people pass on… it is simply time. 

“With this card, I wanted to create an image that was immediately one that created a sense of discomfort… even when death is necessary, even when it is anticipated or wished for, it is never a comfortable idea. Especially in our modern world where we are more removed from death and dying than generations past have been. In the urban context, death happens most often in a hospital, under the care of doctors and harsh fluorescent lights. Doctors spend their career trying to save lives, but they are also often the people standing at our sides when life ends.

“I wanted to indicate with this card how death can lead to life, and it occurred to me that the perfect modern metaphor for that cycle comes with being an organ donor. Because there is a little heart on my state ID, there’s a very real chance that if I’m killed unexpectedly, my organs may go to help someone else live. That’s a kind of very real reincarnation and rebirth.

“Quick note on some of the other symbols included in the card - you may notice that the heart is overlaid on a pattern of 10 dots and a Star of David, which together indicate the kabbalistic tree of life. It’s not really my intent to delve too deeply into kabbalistic mysticism with the deck, but I wanted to make a nod to it here as a cycle of life and creation, and draw a connection between the veins of the body and the roots of a tree. The insects on the wall are dung beetles, or scarabs, a classic Egyptian symbol of rebirth and immortality. And the scarabs are of course crawling to a clock without hands which should be a fairly obvious symbol of endless time/timelessness.”

The process of crafting these cards is fascinating.

These are really great.

regurgitron3000:

the Yellow Wallpaper by Michael Manomivibul- illustration for IDW’s short story anthology In the Shadow of Poe.

slickarmstrong:

tatteredbanners:

by Max Ernst

This is awesome

ascruffylookingnerfherder:

Fucking genius.

ascruffylookingnerfherder:

Fucking genius.

telescopics:

cybertr0n:

Stairs like this get me so excited.

I was just like *scroll* *scroll* *scroll* Hey, I took that!

I absolutely love that staircase. It’s what would have been the entrance to the power station back when it was functioning. Obviously the main doors are boarded up, so now the “entrance” is a window where the bars have been bent apart, but I digress.

fuck-yeah-tumblrs-best-posts:

girlinthegreenscarf:

 

She remembers the moment. The photographer took her picture. She remembers her anger. The man was a stranger. She had never been photographed before. Until they met again 17 years later, she had not been photographed since.

The photographer remembers the moment too. The light was soft. The refugee camp in Pakistan was a sea of tents. Inside the school tent he noticed her first. Sensing her shyness, he approached her last. She told him he could take her picture. “I didn’t think the photograph of the girl would be different from anything else I shot that day,” he recalls of that morning in 1984 spent documenting the ordeal of Afghanistan’s refugees.

The portrait by Steve McCurry turned out to be one of those images that sears the heart, and in June 1985 it ran on the cover of this magazine. Her eyes are sea green. They are haunted and haunting, and in them you can read the tragedy of a land drained by war. She became known around National Geographic as the “Afghan girl,” and for 17 years no one knew her name.

Names have power, so let us speak of hers. Her name is Sharbat Gula, and she is Pashtun, that most warlike of Afghan tribes. It is said of the Pashtun that they are only at peace when they are at war, and her eyes—then and now—burn with ferocity. She is 28, perhaps 29, or even 30. No one, not even she, knows for sure. Stories shift like sand in a place where no records exist.

Time and hardship have erased her youth. Her skin looks like leather. The geometry of her jaw has softened. The eyes still glare; that has not softened. “She’s had a hard life,” said McCurry. “So many here share her story.” Consider the numbers. Twenty-three years of war, 1.5 million killed, 3.5 million refugees: This is the story of Afghanistan in the past quarter century.

“There is not one family that has not eaten the bitterness of war,” a young Afghan merchant said in the 1985 National Geographicstory that appeared with Sharbat’s photograph on the cover. She was a child when her country was caught in the jaws of the Soviet invasion. A carpet of destruction smothered countless villages like hers. She was perhaps six when Soviet bombing killed her parents. By day the sky bled terror. At night the dead were buried. And always, the sound of planes, stabbing her with dread.

Here is the bare outline of her day. She rises before sunrise and prays. She fetches water from the stream. She cooks, cleans, does laundry. She cares for her children; they are the center of her life. Sharbat has never known a happy day, her brother says, except perhaps the day of her marriage.

Such knife-thin odds. That she would be alive. That she could be found. That she could endure such loss. Surely, in the face of such bitterness the spirit could atrophy. How, she was asked, had she survived?

The answer came wrapped in unshakable certitude.

“It was,” said Sharbat Gula, “the will of God.”

 Submitted by wayne-twentyone

loveyourchaos:

“The human heart stripped of fat and muscle, with just the angel veins exposed.”