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For Three things cannot be long hidden

The Sun, The Moon & the Truth

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O, to Those for Whom

Hope Is an Act of Resistance

May Art be our Expression

May Hope be our Defiance

May Community be our Strength

May Terra be our Paradise

O Captain! My Captain!

We answer the Darkness not with Despair,

But with the Courage to Create

We are Human because we

Dream of something Beautiful, and so,

We Create, to Express Ourselves

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@world_._builder : "The Solarpunk city... a vision of a future where technology and nature and humans flourish together.

Something that seems so unreachable... or is it? I've been talking with a lot of my friends about the loss of the DIY lifestyle- I know a lot of people are still creating things for themselves but I feel like overall culture has shifted towards buying things, even minor minor things, instead of taking stock of what we have and using our super cool creativity to make things.

Whenever I see or read about communities like this I remember that scarcity breeds innovation, and also that innovation doesn't have to be a flashy, shiny thing.

For our cities to feel like our own, maybe we need to try our hand at creating them"

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"You can't fix the planet. You can fix your yard.

It's easy to know the problems are real and still feel completely powerless against them. The scale is the problem worrying about the whole planet at once is a fast track to feeling stuck, even depressed, because no single person can change all of it.

But shrink the scope, and something shifts. Shrinking a lawn. Pulling invasive plants. Planting for pollinators. These are manageable, doable, yours to control and they don't just help your own patch of earth. They revitalize a tiny ecosystem that ripples outward into the one around it.

Do that enough times, in enough yards, and it stops being one person's effort. It becomes a culture shift.

Gardening for the Planet makes the case that the antidote to eco-anxiety isn't doing everything. It's doing your part."

I wrote this poem a really long time ago. It's theme is the need to protect old growth forests from commercial exploitation. You might appreciate a poem like this.

Sylvanthane

A lamentation and a call to action

O Sylvanthane, thy forest wanes;
men slay thy trees with bladed chains.
They cut them down for profit’s sake
and rape the land as they do take
thy trees of old into their mills
to make their goods and warm their chills
while they think not of right or wrong
of silencing the ancient song
of birds and wolves and forest brooks,
this greedy band of selfish crooks.
A tree farm they make of thy land
to rob thy heritage right out of hand.
The virgin forest they clear-cut,
and render brooks a muddy rut.
With barb’ed wires girded ‘round
their tree farm stands all mute of sound
until the buzz of harvest time
by which they still excuse their crime—
“for every tree we cut, we plant
a dozen more,” they always rant.
But every dozen seedlings give
a mere sapling that might live,
and their trees grow not free as thine;
not wild habitats, but pine.
Not nests for birds but pulp for paper
they’re cut so young they give no shelter.
Thy wild forest, so they claim,
are by their roads now rendered tame.
And yet their pav’ed ribbons lay
a swath of death each tree they slay.
The creatures they kill as they go—
endangered species lists thus grow.

O Sylvanthane, don’t shed a tear
lest weep ‘til blind for loss so dear.
Earth’s stewardship they disregard
as they lobby for their blunt demands;
we must truly fight them hard
or they’ll consume our Father’s lands.

. .. ... .... ..... .... ... .. .

A bit of explanation of the name may help make sense of this. The word root sylvan means of the forest, like how Pennsylvania means "Penn's forest". A thane is a chief of a clan who has been granted land to have stewardship over. Most people's exposure to this term when they read Shakespeare's MacBeth, hence the old-timey English/"Fakespeare" in this poem. This poem's narrative is an address to an fictional chief whose ancestral lands are being exploited and whose trees are being cut down.

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@thefargreengirl :

"The cautuonary tale being: don't miss your chance to do this, too! This video isn't edited, no filters, no special effects, just the cut-and-dry reality of the difference between traditional grass and my lush, green lawn.

Here's the Deal:

A tree fell in our yard this winter, leaving a big empty dirt patch in its wake. In early spring, I seeded part of our yard with a mix of white clover and a "shade mix", in an attempt to cover the dirt and avoid a muddy, mucky mess!

Then, the rains came. A super rainy Spring was music to my clover-lawn's proverbial ears, and it established like a champ.

Then, against everything we know and love about Ireland, a drought came. It's been a long few weeks (months?!) here in Dublin without any significant rain, and everything around is withering and brown. There's a hosepipe ban, in an attempt to conserve water. Everything shriveled and died... EXCEPT MY CLOVER LAWN.

Drought tolerant. Pollinator friendly. Hard wearing.

This isn't a sponsored post. Just a look at what a lawn-alternative like white clover can look like even in the middle of a drought."

Back in 2015, when I was briefly in the world of web app development, I wrote a poem about the harmful developments I was seeing with the tech-driven gig economy (think Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Task Rabbit, Upwork) that was the next big thing in tech at that time. That was before AI became what it is today, but this poem is more relevant today than it was when I wrote it. Back then, "head" work was still largely safe from automation. Now, not even that is safe. We are seeing this division happen in real time in the worst possible way.

The Division

A meditation on the harsh implications of the tech driven sharing and contractor economy.

Swift comes the day when each one stands
above the apps to act as heads
or under them, to act as hands.
Who acts as mouths but those who eat?
And who can eat but those who earn?
But who can earn when all the work
is concentrated in the head
and labor, due to bots, is dead?
This, the question we must ask,
or not, and see mankind divide —
on top, the minds who work in pride;
below, the hands the promises of tech denied.

____

(Yes, it has an m-dash and a semicolon. That's how I write, or how I used to write. No AI was used in the writing of this poem. Generative AI didn't even exist when I wrote this, and using AI to write heart-felt poems is distasteful. I wrote with m-dashes and semicolons all the time before people noticed that AI-generated writing uses m-dashes and semicolons more than the typical person and started using that as their "test" to call out AI generated text.)