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On Love
Posted 2 months agoLove as a commanding roar in the dark
Love as a violent rebuke to indifference
Love as a spark thrown into gasoline
Love as defiance
Love as soft as a whisper
Love as bright and relentless as flame
What moves us to our greatest acts of sacrifice?
What pulses through the threads of all our holiest scripture?
What force compels us so irresistibly to create, and even to destroy?
It is encoded into our biology (romantic love), demanding we protect our genes (familial love).
It moves equally the hearts and souls of poets, rebels, kings, and priests.
As a Romantic Naturalist, I believe this with all of my being:
Love is the only sane and satisfactory human answer to the ambiguity of reality and the dilemma of existence.
When I was ~15 years old, I met my first love on Furcadia. She lit my candle in the dark. I never would have made it to adulthood if she had not. She taught me the meaning of the word, and I have striven to live my life in its service ever since.
When I was ~30 years old, I met my mates/life partners on Pounced.org. I cannot imagine how I would have come to know love if it were not for the furry fandom. This is the only place I have ever felt truly seen and accepted (mostly).
In acknowledgement of that debt, I thought I'd share a couple favorite quotes here. I hope they may be useful for you:
“Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.” - Siddhartha Gautama
"Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being." - Rumi
“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” - Ernesto “Che” Guevara
“The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.” - Eden Ahbez
If you have any of your own (or stories, songs, poems, art that captures the essence for you), I'd love to hear them sometime. 💜
Love as a violent rebuke to indifference
Love as a spark thrown into gasoline
Love as defiance
Love as soft as a whisper
Love as bright and relentless as flame
What moves us to our greatest acts of sacrifice?
What pulses through the threads of all our holiest scripture?
What force compels us so irresistibly to create, and even to destroy?
It is encoded into our biology (romantic love), demanding we protect our genes (familial love).
It moves equally the hearts and souls of poets, rebels, kings, and priests.
As a Romantic Naturalist, I believe this with all of my being:
Love is the only sane and satisfactory human answer to the ambiguity of reality and the dilemma of existence.
When I was ~15 years old, I met my first love on Furcadia. She lit my candle in the dark. I never would have made it to adulthood if she had not. She taught me the meaning of the word, and I have striven to live my life in its service ever since.
When I was ~30 years old, I met my mates/life partners on Pounced.org. I cannot imagine how I would have come to know love if it were not for the furry fandom. This is the only place I have ever felt truly seen and accepted (mostly).
In acknowledgement of that debt, I thought I'd share a couple favorite quotes here. I hope they may be useful for you:
“Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.” - Siddhartha Gautama
"Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being." - Rumi
“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” - Ernesto “Che” Guevara
“The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.” - Eden Ahbez
If you have any of your own (or stories, songs, poems, art that captures the essence for you), I'd love to hear them sometime. 💜
On Zoophilia
Posted 2 months agoI have lived my entire adult life in the pursuit of love, and of truth. Amorphous and nebulous they may be.
It is precisely the tugging of these twin threads that has led me to the unenviable position where I feel it necessary to post this journal.
Before I start, to any detractors who should like to position themselves from the moral high ground, I'd like to communicate, clean and clear, that:
---
We live among *persons* not of our species.
To eat them, cage them, or to mutilate them, for pleasure or for profit, is to deny their personhood.
It is *sentience*, not species, that sets the ethical threshold.
Animals can love, suffer, hope, and grieve.
It should not take a neurology paper to be able to recognize a soul in a dog’s eyes. But the Cambridge declaration on animal consciousness is over a decade old now.
If you are willing to rise to meet me here, at animal personhood, then we can have meaningful conversations about the tremendous and horrific cruelty that is perpetuated invisibly by human societies across the planet, every. single. day. We can talk about the Taiji dolphin hunts, the asiatic black bear bile trade, factory farming, chicken de-beaking, laboratory testing (very nuanced!), the hanging of Mary the Elephant - on and on and on we can go. I will weep with you.
But if you are *not* willing to rise to meet me here, yet are still willing to judge *me* and condemn *my* love; then you had better be *damn* sure of your convictions, human.
Because judgement is not a one-way street. And I swear this to God above, when the final word is said and done:
I will be waiting for you at the Gates.
Do we understand one another?
---
Sorry for the confrontational tone. But there are too many people in this world who think the only people who are people are the people who look and think like them.
What I want to say, simply, is this:
Zoophilia is an *inevitable* and *necessary* moral growth and ethical expansion of human empathy.
Let's not trip on semantics. To say it again, more slowly:
Zoophilia (human/animal trans-species love (sometimes with a sexual component)) is an inevitable (it *will* happen. It *cannot be prevented* from happening (It is, in fact, already happening)) and necessary (it *must* happen, it is *vital* that it happens) moral growth (morality: right vs wrong. growth: to become something more, to become something better) and ethical (morally permissible) expansion of human empathy (our ability to imagine ourselves in someone else’s place - to extend our compassion beyond our selves).
I find it profoundly depressing and distressing that I live in a society where it is considered more acceptable to murder and consume another sentient creature for the pleasure of tasting its flesh than it is to extend to them the *agency* that they deserve - which must include, to the extent that we can permit it, *sexual* agency.
I know many here already believe this or something similar - to those who do, I light this lantern for you. May you find some solace in its light.
I know many here disagree vehemently, even violently - to those who do, a song lyric for you:
Brandish your ropes and your boards and your basket-hilt swords;
But what is there that can punish like a conscience ignored?
It is precisely the tugging of these twin threads that has led me to the unenviable position where I feel it necessary to post this journal.
Before I start, to any detractors who should like to position themselves from the moral high ground, I'd like to communicate, clean and clear, that:
---
We live among *persons* not of our species.
To eat them, cage them, or to mutilate them, for pleasure or for profit, is to deny their personhood.
It is *sentience*, not species, that sets the ethical threshold.
Animals can love, suffer, hope, and grieve.
It should not take a neurology paper to be able to recognize a soul in a dog’s eyes. But the Cambridge declaration on animal consciousness is over a decade old now.
If you are willing to rise to meet me here, at animal personhood, then we can have meaningful conversations about the tremendous and horrific cruelty that is perpetuated invisibly by human societies across the planet, every. single. day. We can talk about the Taiji dolphin hunts, the asiatic black bear bile trade, factory farming, chicken de-beaking, laboratory testing (very nuanced!), the hanging of Mary the Elephant - on and on and on we can go. I will weep with you.
But if you are *not* willing to rise to meet me here, yet are still willing to judge *me* and condemn *my* love; then you had better be *damn* sure of your convictions, human.
Because judgement is not a one-way street. And I swear this to God above, when the final word is said and done:
I will be waiting for you at the Gates.
Do we understand one another?
---
Sorry for the confrontational tone. But there are too many people in this world who think the only people who are people are the people who look and think like them.
What I want to say, simply, is this:
Zoophilia is an *inevitable* and *necessary* moral growth and ethical expansion of human empathy.
Let's not trip on semantics. To say it again, more slowly:
Zoophilia (human/animal trans-species love (sometimes with a sexual component)) is an inevitable (it *will* happen. It *cannot be prevented* from happening (It is, in fact, already happening)) and necessary (it *must* happen, it is *vital* that it happens) moral growth (morality: right vs wrong. growth: to become something more, to become something better) and ethical (morally permissible) expansion of human empathy (our ability to imagine ourselves in someone else’s place - to extend our compassion beyond our selves).
I find it profoundly depressing and distressing that I live in a society where it is considered more acceptable to murder and consume another sentient creature for the pleasure of tasting its flesh than it is to extend to them the *agency* that they deserve - which must include, to the extent that we can permit it, *sexual* agency.
I know many here already believe this or something similar - to those who do, I light this lantern for you. May you find some solace in its light.
I know many here disagree vehemently, even violently - to those who do, a song lyric for you:
Brandish your ropes and your boards and your basket-hilt swords;
But what is there that can punish like a conscience ignored?
On Nihilism
Posted 8 months agothinkin' bout it lately
dark little pit so easy to get trapped in
if i could travel back in time and plant a seed in a younger leopard's mind
it would go something like:
“Life has no objective meaning, so nothing matters.”
Meaning is emergent, like consciousness—it doesn’t exist until it does. You are the meaning-making creature, the only known being in the universe capable of asking the question of meaning.
Your *responsibility* as a thinking animal is to craft meaning from ambiguity. Your answer to this question defines who and what you are.
Do you believe you are nothing?
“But if meaning is subjective, then it’s not real.”
Is consciousness real? Is the color red real? These things don’t exist objectively—they exist because we experience them.
This is Descartes' Cogito in action: You *are*. The things you create *are*. The meaning you craft *is*.
If love is subjective, does that mean it's not real?
“But the universe is cold and indifferent.”
And beautiful! Vast galaxies, shimmering starlight, supernovae that seed new worlds.
Look at where you are: Trillions of galaxies, ~100 billion stars per galaxy, and *one* star with *one* planet that has precious, ephemeral Life.
You are the most complex and interesting object in the universe. A rare, low-entropy fluctuation in a cosmos that trends toward equilibrium.
The universe may be indifferent to you, but I see you. A miracle of creation, crafted by 14 billion years of cosmic alchemy.
“In the grand scheme of things, I’m insignificant.”
That’s what it means to be human, isn’t it? But “apes together strong.” Look around—we built this world together.
You are a link in a chain of 100 billion humans who lived before you—one that has been forged since Prometheus first brought us fire. You didn’t ask for this torch, but it’s been handed to you regardless.
And it doesn’t end with you. No one will ever know the full extent of their actions on the cosmos. A careful phrase left with a stranger could change their life. We’re all just tiny butterflies flapping our wings—but even small vibrations can become hurricanes.
“But everything ends. Why bother?”
Life is a verb. A process. Not a static thing, but something lived.
Impermanence is what makes it precious. The Japanese call it "mono no aware"—the beauty of things that fade.
Buddhists believe suffering comes from rebelling against impermanence.
What if you embraced it?
dark little pit so easy to get trapped in
if i could travel back in time and plant a seed in a younger leopard's mind
it would go something like:
“Life has no objective meaning, so nothing matters.”
Meaning is emergent, like consciousness—it doesn’t exist until it does. You are the meaning-making creature, the only known being in the universe capable of asking the question of meaning.
Your *responsibility* as a thinking animal is to craft meaning from ambiguity. Your answer to this question defines who and what you are.
Do you believe you are nothing?
“But if meaning is subjective, then it’s not real.”
Is consciousness real? Is the color red real? These things don’t exist objectively—they exist because we experience them.
This is Descartes' Cogito in action: You *are*. The things you create *are*. The meaning you craft *is*.
If love is subjective, does that mean it's not real?
“But the universe is cold and indifferent.”
And beautiful! Vast galaxies, shimmering starlight, supernovae that seed new worlds.
Look at where you are: Trillions of galaxies, ~100 billion stars per galaxy, and *one* star with *one* planet that has precious, ephemeral Life.
You are the most complex and interesting object in the universe. A rare, low-entropy fluctuation in a cosmos that trends toward equilibrium.
The universe may be indifferent to you, but I see you. A miracle of creation, crafted by 14 billion years of cosmic alchemy.
“In the grand scheme of things, I’m insignificant.”
That’s what it means to be human, isn’t it? But “apes together strong.” Look around—we built this world together.
You are a link in a chain of 100 billion humans who lived before you—one that has been forged since Prometheus first brought us fire. You didn’t ask for this torch, but it’s been handed to you regardless.
And it doesn’t end with you. No one will ever know the full extent of their actions on the cosmos. A careful phrase left with a stranger could change their life. We’re all just tiny butterflies flapping our wings—but even small vibrations can become hurricanes.
“But everything ends. Why bother?”
Life is a verb. A process. Not a static thing, but something lived.
Impermanence is what makes it precious. The Japanese call it "mono no aware"—the beauty of things that fade.
Buddhists believe suffering comes from rebelling against impermanence.
What if you embraced it?
