My grandparents are baffled when we just don’t care about certain things. The last time we did a socially distanced lunch they were complaining that our neighbor keeps really old broken cars that he likes to work on in his front yard and we were like “Yeah, and?” and they didn’t know how to respond to that.
Like the very idea that we would just mind our own business and tolerate mildly annoying behavior from other people is like rocket science to them. They just can’t comprehend it.
My mum never has anything nice to say about modern music. It’s always “this song is shallow nonsense”. Yeah maybe I want to listen to shallow nonsense. What about it
A regular conversation I keep having with my mom:
“Ugh, look at that girl. Tattoos everywhere.”
“So what?”
“….Well I think it looks ugly.”
“She didn’t get them for you.”
Mmmm other people do not perform for you is a lesson that needs to be learned massively these days.
Sunset light reflecting on the gate of Kremlin walls in Kazan, Tatarstan. Symbols of day and night, light and dark sides, warm and cold - all exists in the same moment, in one place, non possible to separate and changes
all the time by our own view onto it. This is the magic of light.
Martha Crump was a biologist who studied the elusive golden toad extensively. They lived only in a four kilometer range in the Costa Rican hills, and spent almost all of their lives underground. However, once a year at the start of the wet season, the male toads would emerge and begin to sing for the females. It was described by Crump as a forest floor full of jewels; hundreds upon thousands of toads in a chorus of sound.
The 1980s saw a sharp decline in population. Whether it was human or climate driven is still unknown, but the mating pairs dwindled drastically. In 1988, Crump witnessed a singular male toad exit a burrow, climb onto a nearby rock, and begin it’s song. When the night was over, the toad descended back underground, alone. In 1989, Crump returned to the area, and again found the singular male. Again it climbed, sang it’s tiny song to a vast and empty jungle, and vanished back underground. It was the last ever sighting of the golden toad. Crump believed it was the same male from the year before.
The golden toad was declared extinct in the early 2000s. The story of the lone male toad helped usher in the species as a hallmark of modern conservation. It is gone, but not forgotten. May we do better with those that are left.
as the night comes crawling over the horizon, painting the sky with acid washed colors before fading to black, bringing the fear that haunts my thoughts with it. my words and this aching heart, i let the cold settle in and the pain cover my body. this is what they meant when they said all poets know how to do is bleed out words that cut them open.
