(click on image above for link to larger JPG — thanks Adrian)

—Hafiz (14th-century Persian mystic and poet)

(Thanks to Sherry Ducharme for the quotable).

Zwolle, Netherlands

Redmer Hoekstra creates fanciful drawings of a strange world where nothing familiar is quite as it seems. See more of his morphed visions in pen and pencil here and here.

Winnipeg, Canada

At Geez headquarters they’re once again dusting off the people’s pulpit with a contest of Biblical proportions.

Five years ago Geez called on readers to step up to the soapbox and deliver a sermon you’d never hear in church. Atheists, anarchists, students and farmers filled the pulpit, and their sermons were defiant, dysfunctional, ambiguous and insightful.

Now Geez is looking for the same and more… hoping to hear from closet agnostics and Bible school dropouts, uncertain intellectuals and open-minded evangelists, incendiary pacifists, unapologetic atheists and good old-fashioned preachers who have been holding back all these years.

“The Social Gospel needs a new voice, and the sermon as we know it has become cliché. So let the rappers and the ranters take the stage. Let the poets and the storytellers preach. Share your apocalyptic visions or soothe our weary souls. Teach us what scripture is really about, or why it doesn’t really matter at all. Defy our expectations, make us squirm or tell us what has been left unsaid for far too long.”

“This is the pulpit of determined impropriety, so cast out your assumptions, get up from your pew (if you haven’t left already) and lead the Geez congregation with a sermon of holy mischief in an age of fast faith.”

Deadline: September 1, 2013 | More contest details here. (Full disclosure: I’ve been an Advisor to Geez since the magazine’s formation in 2005).

—Pablo Picasso

Rome & St. Petersburg

I love these conceptual illustration-compilations which strive to “investigate elements of mental disorder…” See more here.

Pyongyang, North Korea

“North Korean women are encouraged by the state to choose from one of the 18 officially sanctioned hairstyles, as shown in this display on the wall of a salon in the capital…”

(source, via Marian Bantjes)

Conservation

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. By land is meant all of the things on, over, or in the earth. Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism. Its parts, like our own parts, compete with each other and co-operate with each other. The competitions are as much a part of the inner workings as the co-operations. You can regulate them—cautiously—but not abolish them.

The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only those who know the most about it can appreciate how little we know about it. The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

Leopold, Aldo: Round River, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993 (Thanks to Derek Kornelson for introducing me to the works of Aldo Leopold—find more of his writings here.)

(source : Jee Eun Lee) 

—The Hausa of Nigeria