Female bats can control when they get pregnant and give birth
Something human females could use!!To ensure external conditions are optimal for a newborn bat, mother bats are equipped with a variety of biological tactics that allow them to put off fertilization, implantation or development of the fetus.In some species, mating will occur in the fall, but females will store sperm in their reproductive tract before finally fertilizing their eggs when spring arrives. In other species, the egg is fertilized immediately after mating, but instead of implanting to the wall of the uterus, it floats around until favorable conditions arrive. Yet another adaptation exhibited in some bats is delayed fetus development, in which fertilization and implantation occurs as usual, but the fetus remains in a dormant state for a long period of time.These tactics, which contribute to the slow birth rate of bats, are timed to coincide with high production of fruit or insects in the environment.
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Fascinating, Delphyne! You find the most amazing photos and topics to post about; always illuminating. Nobody really knows how evolution and consciousness work (although there may be varieties of ways for times and seasons based on the anecdotal evidence) so I find it really significant for you to post alternatives for us to consider about bringing new lives into this always changing world. If we spend time thinking and collecting images of what might be possible, with your suggestions as springboard, maybe we can have a part in shaping the future of sentient beings for the better. Thank you for showing up to blog whenever you do. It's a challenge, I know, to stay current, hardly anybody posts on a regular basis unless their blog is monetized, so we all understand when your muse goes on holiday. Enjoy and bask in our gratitude.
ReplyDeleteFascinating, Delphyne! You find the most amazing photos and topics to post about; always illuminating. Nobody really knows how evolution and consciousness work (although there may be varieties of ways for times and seasons based on the anecdotal evidence) so I find it really significant for you to post alternatives for us to consider about bringing new lives into this always changing world. If we spend time thinking and collecting images of what might be possible, with your suggestions as springboard, maybe we can have a part in shaping the future of sentient beings for the better. Thank you for showing up to blog whenever you do. It's a challenge, I know, to stay current, hardly anybody posts on a regular basis unless their blog is monetized, so we all understand when your muse goes on holiday. Enjoy and bask in our gratitude.
ReplyDeleteDear Sally!
ReplyDeleteWhen I saw you comment over at FCM's place, I wondered if you were the same Sally that first posted on my blog and to which I haven't replied - although I am still mulling things over. I am so happy that my intuitive feeling was right and that this Sally and that "other" Sally are one in the same! So nice to meet you - and I am now a follower of your blog on WP.
The reason for my Muse disappearing is because I stumbled into radfem back in January of this year and it has changed so many things. I actually started a new blog with emphasis on radfem, but am still feeling my way around the entire subject. www.medusagaze.blogspot.com It's quite a shell with only a handful of posts.
I do think that the natural world has so much to teach us and that the Earth, herself, is where we must go to remember who we are as women, where we came from, where we are going. I have a lot of thoughts about this subject and want to concretize them into words. They're just sort of swirling and their shape when they coalesce is still vague to me.
It's time for my morning walk with Kylie - I am Delphyne49 in WP and have commented a few times at FCM's and over at GallusMag's place - both places are daily reads for me along with Witchwind and now you. I have lots of reading to catch up on!
Have a wonderful day!
Hi, there, Delphyne, thank you so much for the reply. Couldn't agree more that the Earth Herself is where we must go to remember, to spin in new directions, to evolve. (Same thought as your lovely words.) Our caring connections among women count, too. I am such a reluctant blogger; I've put up several (by pseudonym) over the years that get hack-attacked to come down so I always try to enjoy the process of playing with a new one. But my blogging attention span is short and keeping it up is something I don't really have a place for in my life (in that I'm tech-tired at day's end because I'm at a computer screen writing and planning most of every work day.) That is why I have so hugely appreciated your ruby reds blog --- love, love the gypsy motif, used to pull an Eggcamper on coastal travels --- and the beautiful photos you show and your tech savvy in being able to keep it up.
ReplyDeleteRe: the other blogs. I've really enjoyed reading the parts that fit (discarding what doesn't) at those blogs you mentioned. There's some powerful analysis going on, although the second-wavers who wrote books were really powerful, too. I'd been reluctant to post at FCM's until recently when something moved me to (maybe to connect to you and your blog) because sometimes the convo goes in directions that I believe need to be left to spiritual forces in that they start sounding like enacting oppression tangibly against men (and I'm totally of the non-violent persuasion when it comes to action).
Consciousness is another story. Even Jesus from my long overcome faith tradition did some cursing of hypocrites, and Mary Daly has many examples of using elemental spirituality and Nemesis to curse patriarchy into dust. I would welcome some collective cursing by womankind in spiritual self-defense against the predations of men! That to me is very different from women commenting as they have at Femonade about severely constraining (almost to the point of physically harming) males in a tit-for-tat tangible way that makes no spiritual sense to me to even contemplate. And tonight, with all of that in mind, I had reached my end point about Femonade commenting when FCM was really mean in print to yet another woman seeking a community on her blog. I posted a "no more commenting" comment underneath FCM's mean one, hoping that woman might see it and not think all rad-fems and their sympathizers are mean in turn.
And so, while I might read the better words at Femonade from time to time in the future, I won't be a long-term insider member of FCM's commentland cronydom, that is clear. Mary Daly meanwhile lives on and would love everything you picture on your blog.
Being a huge Daly fan, I haven't enjoyed the recent critiquing at Femonade of the second wave rad-fems (Daly and Dworkin especially) whose intellectual brilliance saved my life a few years ago. It is too easy to be a critic. In fact FCM might critically remove my comment, just as she didn't post one (I sent it twice, to make sure) over the weekend. (It touched on spirituality of women collectively, you see.)
Or you might remove my comment here, if trying to enter FCM's inner circle such as it is interests you. Oh well. I hope not, but there is so very much I do not control! I hope you will feel my caring and appreciation for the intelligent, creative Be-ing you are, Delphyne! And my thanks!
In sisterhood, cheers!
Hi, Sally - good morning!
ReplyDeleteJust a few thoughts before Kylie and I head out.
The other blogs are really for my learning the "language" of radfem to describe my politics - that is, I am not a reformist liberal Democrat because I don't think our system can be reformed. After the 2008 primaries and seeing what was done to Hillary and her supporters, I realized that reforming the party would never work - radical reformation within a patriarchal system is not allowed.
What I admire about FCM and GT is that they are fearless with their language and that intrigues me because I've used "soothing" language much of my life - telling it as I saw it without filters was sometimes too shocking for others in my sphere. So I like the intellect I see over there, but I have noticed what you mentioned: that there can be a meanness to some commenters that doesn't seem warranted. I've only commented a few times, mostly because I don't have much else to say that hasn't been articulated by the other commenters. I'm not a groupie of any sort - I truthfully don't think individuals have enough inner strength and flexibility to function creatively and fluidly in a group - egos tend to take over or shut down and that ruins it for me.
However, what actually brought me to feminism back in the late 80s was my quest for female spirituality - that is truly and primarily my interest. And that spirituality is rooted in Earth/Nature and Life - the big Life, Cosmic Life, the one that's the Sun, the Moon, the planets, the galaxies and whatever else exists. I have found that even women's spirituality groups are limiting for me, personally....whether it's the language rigidity or just not being able to "spin" (as you say) into deeper depths and weave more into the story - I'm not sure.
So I basically do my own thing, wander through the internet, touch down in some places, stay for awhile and then I'm off again - I guess like a "gypsy." It's really just intellectual wandering, perhaps finding some inspiration. It's nothing like wandering through and within Nature, though, where everything is waiting to be discovered.
My email is Delphyne49 at gmail dot com if you'd like to continue this conversation that way. I'm fine with it here, too.
Looking forward to talking with you later - have a great day! xo
Good Goddess, can I relate to what you're saying! All of it --- 110%. And yes, really, I am so grateful for the online presence of feminism because it can feel like a diaspora out there. Where I'm currently working/consulting onsite, there are so many conversations around me of women too loudly handling things by phone for teh menz in their lives (wastrel husbands and sons, brothers who don't seem to know how to book their own dental appointments, all the usual ways women live vicariously in enslavement through the men who enjoy sapping women's energy and being pampered that way.) I sense that these women's voices get louder when doing that sort of thing to enable men in general in their lives because by excess vocalization they hope to somehow feel that they're more alive than they really are, being vampire-drained or voluntary victims by and of men. This long explanation about work to say: What in this world or any other would I have in common with women who do that? Solitary confinement forever to a tree would be far preferable. Thus finding blogs like yours is a tonic. And your photos are gorgeous. You must be a professional photographer for a nature magazine? Are these just your extra shots? They are gorgeous, even the bat, amazing.
ReplyDeleteI'm reminded that Mary Daly used to say (as reported, I never met her) that even if she were the only one, she'd be a species of one (elemental radical spiritual feminist or whatever she might have been calling her philosophical leaning as she and it evolved). Can't take credit for the idea of women "spinning" --- that's all Daly and/or she may have gotten it from her women's only spinning groups of college students before Boston College (or was it University?) shut her down and out. Nowadays in pomo identity politics academentia, she would never have gotten the job in the first place. Some MAAB MtT would be teaching women's studies instead: groan. As if he ever had a clue what it was like to worry for three straight decades that this month he might be pregnant because the diaphragm didn't work. (Or to have to weigh the risks of oral contraceptives for thirty+ years against an IUD or diaphragm.) Or to worry about not only rape but getting pregnant by a rapist. Don't get me started. I do like Gallus Mag, FCM and those similar bloggers for confronting the un-PC issue of MtF (different from FtM because men do not = women or vice versa) transgenderism. I don't understand, however, why the "transphobic" PC knee-jerk label of MtTs is not countered by "wombphobic" and that abominable faux word, cissexism, is not countered with transsexism. The rad-fem movement seems to have missed some major opportunity not to address the very real issues of what it means for most of our (reproductive) lives for most of us women to be part of the rapable global female sex class who can (most of us) be impregnated by men. If I had time, I'd try to start a dialog about wombphobic and transsexism. We need a meme base to galvanize against this creeping MtT insanity. Today there was a very loud, very big, invasively space-taking dood in the women's restroom pretending to be a ladee and it creeped me out because the vibe was all wrong, rapey, ick. None of us in the global female sex class (the half of humanity that men as a sex class have cast as one-down to them) ought to have to put up with that from the womb-envying, transsexist few.
Quite a rant, eh?
It would be nice to continue conversing by email. Thanks for the address. See ya there!
I love your rant! Please don't stop!
ReplyDeleteOh, I have a bit to say about women's bodies. I wrote a short Haiku some months ago.
Cast of characters:
tree, apple, woman, a snake.
What tale would you tell?
http://apairofrubyreds.blogspot.com/2013/01/sunday-haiku.html
I remember reading about the "talking snake" of the bible - the one that steered Eve in the "wrong direction." And, more than a few years ago, I remember thinking, "What if that talking snake was really the umbilical cord - that which talks to the embryo and fetus from the Mother, passing on the knowledge from the Mother to the child, in the appropriate ways. What if what She said/passed on to the daughter was different from what She told/passed on to the son.
And what if we, Her daughters, remembered?
What if???
I'm heading off to bed now and wish you a pleasant slumber!
xo
~Kathy
Fascinating nexus between talking snake and umbilical cord. Every day I hope my own daughter, also Her daughter cosmically, re-members herself and Herself.
ReplyDeleteAs an aside, when Hillary didn't get the nomination, I like you gave up on politics in America. I've been waiting for Hillary at some point to give up on it all herself (and especially on Bill) but I sense she just has too much social clout and privilege within the system (plus money) to give it up. It can be such a lure and the rewards of True-Self actualization outside the patriarchy can seem so ephemeral, I don't really fault Hillary. There is so little available as supportive community for womankind in a meaningful way. We may be more naturally connected to Nature (and more holistically intelligent, and far less cruel) as womankind than manunkind (a Sonia Johnson word) is, but we are still only higher primates and flawed creatures. Perfectly imperfect. Ideas and rhetoric of rad-fem writings open our minds but are abstractions unlike the reality of a snake, an umbilical cord, a chicken and her chick, or even one woman being herself, resting in Herself, across the table having a genuinely connected moment with another woman face to face.
Got to scoot to work but thank you for the Haiku about women's bodies. I would tell a tale of evolution. Hang on for the journey, enjoy the parts we don't control, seek agency where we can.