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Tag Archives: imagination
love your mother
For the last week, we excerpted ourselves, from our First Blush files. Why, you may well ask? Because we have so much to say about our home planet, and we love her too much to let her languish while we stand idly by. Read more here — and join the revolution.
There are sonnets and sonatas that our Mother has not written yet, complex plant life that She has not yet evolved to produce, future medicines found in the leaves of Her favorite plants that She has not yet decided to share. Should we wipe this all out before we see what She has in store for us? As we evolve, She evolves, not one without the other, but both in tandem for we are part of Nature and that is its essence, a lyrical dance where She and We constantly reveal ourselves to ourselves. Why would we ever want to stop the dance of so much possibility?
seedlings to saplings
As a writer, I don’t just like paper, I adore it. Yet, what if I had to pay the real cost for paper? It takes 3 gallons of water to make a sheet of paper. Then there’s the cost of the land and logs, the cost of the fuel to run the equipment to cut the tree down, the cost of getting the tree to the paper mill, of packaging and distributing the paper, of labor, and other costs I’m not thinking of, and the most hidden cost, the increased CO2 emissions because of the loss of the tree. If I had to pay, say $3 for a piece of paper, would I squander it or use every precious inch? (Hint: pay and conserve.) We have oversimplified many an environmental argument by hiding the true cost of bringing the product to market.
Perhaps if we stopped, took a breath and a pay check, i.e., tally our resources. We live in a time where denial has become de rigueur. It’s not effecting me today, so let tomorrow’s people deal with it. Yet our children are tomorrow’s people and what are we leaving them except a set of problems that have become near impossible to unravel, like the Gordian knot. If we have to whack it off and start fresh — given the intractability of some of these issues — it’s not likely that fresh is going to comport with easy-peasy. Somewhere in the muck of logging and deforestation is a solution, probably a more expensive one, yes, but one where people get to keep a job and the planet. It may not be the same job so flexibility is a bonus. However, without flexibility and thoughtful discussion, as opposed to the high octane verbal sparring you see on talk shows, there can be no consensus, and without consensus, how will the riddle of supplying ourselves with sufficient resources to fuel our modern lifestyle without overtaxing our very generous Mother ever be solved, but badly? Often it’s only in the absence of something that people finally recognize its brilliance. Unfortunately for us, there may be no one left to see the light.
There are healthy ways to harvest the planet’s resources while allowing Her to thrive. In the Pacific Northwest in the early1990s, clear-cutting was slowly being replaced with more sustainable harvesting techniques. That was because residents got a clear picture of what the future looked like with erosion and sedimentation runoff from the naked hillsides, extinction of both plant and animal species, and the degradation of watersheds and reduced water quality, to name a few, so they started speaking up, and more importantly, they voted — with their wallets. You think you are just one person, but you are wrong. You are a global force and what you think and say and intend matters. More than anything, it is the consumer that drives the marketplace and if consumers are clamoring for sustainably harvested forests, then that’s what they shall have. It takes a forest to house a complex community of macro and microorganisms sufficient to support not just life, but growth and it takes READ THE REST HERE.
out on a limb
We love our stories, don’t we? It’s how our small brains are wired. We love stores around a campfire, we love stories before bed. It’s no coincidence that our stories at this time of year are about Nature. Gaia. The seeming return of life from the slumbering earth. As it turns out, we have quite a bit to say about our namesake, Queen of the Dead, Mrs. Hellfire, Persephone Herself. As a collective culture, we haven’t treated her very well, and there may be repercussions. Aretha said it best: give the girl a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
THE WOOD FOR THE TREES
In 1995, while still a wide-eyed environmental attorney, I took a meandering road trip through the magnificence of the Pacific Northwest. One evening at a local bar in Forks, Washington (the filming locale of the Twilight series), I found myself embroiled in a discussion, regarding the vicissitudes of logging with one of the locals, a lumberman who was just as passionate about the need for harvesting timber as I was about the need for the preservation of forests, particularly old growth ones. He repeatedly asked me, as if therein lied the answer to the Gordian knot we were trying to unravel, whether I liked my toilet paper one-ply or two-ply.
“Until you’re ready to have that conversation,” he said, “there’s really nothing to say.”
I remember being incensed that I couldn’t get this guy to see that what he was defending could wipe out years, perhaps decades of potential human existence on this planet. He refused to consider the possibility that trees act as the planet’s lungs and their removal jeopardized our oxygen supply just for a few more rolls of toilet paper. So while I saw his point, I didn’t see the need to wipe out whole forests to make it.
There are few things that speak to you like the towering majesty of an old growth forest. The slant and dapple of the light through the leaves, the song of the birds as they alight and fly, the flash of movement caught in the periphery as nature rearranges Herself, the heady smell of peat moss, representing life and death rolled into one. The bottom of peat moss decays to form peat deposits even as the top continues to grow which is basically how Mama Nature rolls, using the nutrients of the dead and decaying to fuel Her rebirth and regeneration, resulting in, ta-da, Spring, or as a microcosm, every dawning day. Take Persephone, the newly crowned Queen of the Dead, sleeping this whole long, lonely winter underground with her uncle cum husband (gross), Hades. Hades stole Persephone from the earth topside on a technicality and Demeter, her sweet mama and the Goddess of Agriculture was so disconsolate, she refused to let another thing grow until Persephone was returned to her. Such is a mother’s love — fierce, unpretentious, unwavering — just like our collective Mother is with her children, that is until we disrespect her and she turns on us like the Titan Cronus, known to the Romans as Saturn, who ate each of his sons when they were born so none could fulfill the prophesy to overthrow him. Coincidence? I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.
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happy spring!
She’s here! Persephone has arrived in all her springtime finery. The dark nights are behind us, now: the celebration. Don’t be afraid, take my hand. Together, we’ll have an adventure watching the earth renew herself in joy and love. Namaste!
spring equinox (d)
The world is changing. . .so are we, as the gods are busy working behind the scenes. A shift of consciousness is having a significant effect on all of us. Our local source of solar light is radiating ever more energy, changing the magnetics of the earth, and as inhabitants, we too. We are made of minerals, and light, and water. We are the earth, and she is us. How amazing is that? Maybe that’s why digging in the garden is so soothing, why the shushing of a spring shower, so calming. Gentle spring is coaxing us to renew our vision of what is possible. What do you desire? Plant that seed now.
Persephone Rising
Spring Equinox is on the way, and we’re dedicating a week our delicious deity.
The sap is rising and Persephone is itching to make her escape from the underworld. As a husband, Hades has his faults but he lives in style and there isn’t a reservation that can’t be had as Mrs. Hades. Still, spring beckons. The daffodils are rising, and the bleeding hearts. Asparagus is in season and ewes are lambing. Besides, Hades is hot, but he is no George Stephanopolis. In the end, she reminds the poor old dear that a weekend away at Spa Equinox was part of the deal. Goddess bless separate vacations.
make a wish, baby
Quote
We’re all for diversity, including the natural and supernatural alike. Because sometimes, you know, a girl just feels like a golem, and that’s all there is to it.
“It is New York in 1899, and two strange immigrants have found one another. One is a Jinni, trapped in physical form by an evil wizard in ancient Syria and locked in a bottle for a thousand years. The Jinni is released by a hapless tinsmith as he attempts to repair the bottle in the slums of New York. The Golem is a made to order bride, a woman created of clay and sparked to life with an incantation known only by her creator and by the husband who, minutes after bringing her to life in the hold of the ship bound for New York from Danzig, dies of a burst appendix.
Now we have: two super-humans, lost and made vulnerable by their “otherness.” We also have two strangers longing for connection to something not-human, and yet forced by circumstance to rely on humans and their strange customs. Finally, we have two beings, perhaps the last of their kind, who want more than anything, to live.”
read::write::repeat
We love the offbeat and unusual. . .especially where it concerns first novels.
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music valentine 1.1
sometimes valentines are prose. sometimes they’re 80s music videos.
come a little bit closer.
persephone's step-sisters 