By Lucas Pezeta

in addition to the fact that people just have different natural rhythms, a big reason why we can’t seem to go to bed as early as we “should” is that nighttime is, for many of us, our safest and most fulfilling time of day. we don’t have to work, we won’t be contacted by bosses or insurance companies or collections agencies or other suffocating life business… we’re likely only to be contacted by our friends, or by no one at all. night time is release; it’s ours. we can rest or recreate. we can do things we actually want to do. who would choose to cut that short?? just to usher in the next morning when our lives are not our own again? nighttime is precious and nothing could be more normal than the desire to embrace this

So, I was studying for my finals and reading the bit in Snorri’s Edda about Ragnarok and at one point a wolf swallows the moon and it says “og gerir sá og mikið ógagn”. Now, I understand that the meaning of the words have changed a bit over time and all that, but to a modern Icelandic speaker, this just sounds like “one of the wolves took the moon, which was unhelpful”

I am learning to imagine the future:

My sycamore tree began life in the gravel at the edge of a parking lot. If trees can feel pain, that is a painful, unlucky death. I carefully dug it up and put it in a pot I made out of a disposable cup.

Hello small one. This world may be cruel, but I will not be.

I decided to take care of it, not expecting it to survive, and when my sycamore tree unfurled one tiny leaf and then another, it chiseled a tiny foothold in my terrified brain, the kind of brain that doesn't remember a world before the atomic bomb and before 9/11.

I googled the lifespans of trees. My neurons had to stretch and expand to accommodate what I learned: My sycamore tree may live five hundred years. It's hard to think something so big. In twenty years, my baby sycamore tree will be three stories tall, and the home of many creatures. In five years, my sycamore tree will be taller than I am. In one year, it will be summer.

There's this concept called sense of foreshortened future where people who have lived through trauma can't conceptualize a future for themselves because deep down they don't expect to survive, When I look forward, all I see is fire and death, melting ice and burning sky. We were raised Evangelical. All we see is Judgment Day, except there is no heaven.

But now there is a tiny gap in the wall, a crack in the door of my cell

and on the other side, I see a tree

There is, in the future, a great old sycamore tree, full of clean winds and the stir of a thousand wings. A hundred years from now. Fifty years from now. There will be forests in that world. There will be a world.

It takes courage, but we have to imagine it.

Most tree species can live in excess of three or four hundred years. I think I'm learning something. I think there are ancient voices saying hello small one, touch the dirt and the leaves, for now you are part of something that cannot die

in 2030 I will be thirty years old and the world will not have ended and there will still be hummingbirds, and we will have photos of the stars more beautiful than we can now imagine.

I planted an Eastern Redcedar; they may live nine hundred years. There will be nine hundred years. The people in that time will remember us. Maybe we will meet the aliens (hi aliens!).

I will blow out the candles on many birthday cakes in a world where there are wolves in dark forests far from home. I am learning to imagine the future. I learned recently that elk were reintroduced to the Appalachian Mountains after over a hundred years of extirpation, and that they are expanding their range.

That tiny crack I can see through now opens a tiny bit more:

Maybe elk will pass through my hometown, maybe there will be a forest where the pasture is on the high hill that I can see from my home

say it, say it, say it: ten years, thirty years, a hundred years from now

I am learning to imagine the future. There is a crack in the wall of this prison, of this machine, of this darkness, and through it, I see a tree.

a lot of pieces of media will show characters catching fireflies with just their bare hands. in some cases they will just land on the persons fingers. to gently be placed inside of a jar..

for people who live in areas who don’t have fireflies, i want you to know that is not made up or exaggerated for those scenes. fireflies are really like that. they are slow and not cautious at all. while camping i would just walk up to one flying in the air and grab it. and it would sit on my hands like “oh ok.” they are my friends.

by Tama66

Virtual Plein Air by Carolane Bruneau

Fairy Glen

mcburneyphotography

Mario V artstation.com

More golden willow leaves etched in chilly frost: Sylvan Lake Series

(c) riverwindphotography, September 2023