At the Bottom of the Box was Hope

It looks like just pinpricks of lights flicking off and on. It's some of the hundreds to thousands of fireflies in my yard, after years of fostering their environment.

It's come a long way since I moved in. It used to be that I could stand in the yard during firefly season and count 30+ seconds before seeing a flash. It's still not at the level I remember seeing in local areas a couple decades ago, when fields would practically glow with how many fireflies lit the air above them. But it's not nothing. And maybe my yard doesn't make a huge difference on its own, but when you multiply it by hundreds, by thousands, by millions... it adds up.

Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars: Pre-prequels  

Before Order 66. Before the Clones. Before the Chosen One. Before Stark. Before Galidraan. Before Death Watch on Concord Dawn. Distant from everything except the Force. Jocasta Nu had a friend.

chapter 5 is up.

...

Pay attention. 

The last lesson.

She needed to speak to Sifo-Dyas.  In another age, he would have been a prophet. In this, his flashes of sight were shunned. Jocasta said that he rarely shared them any more. Ko herself had not seen Sifo-Dyas since Dooku had brought him back from that harrowing mission to Melas. But perhaps …

Ko stood again, as Oueyjo’s path curved slowly darkwards, pulling shadows like burnt honey along the ground. Time to go inside. There was much to prepare. Not only for her own meal and the advancing night, but also for the journey ahead. But first, she must change her robe. 

Ky Narec sees his padawan dance under the shade and light, her lightsaber moving with her as one. Balanced, as all things in the Force should be. Happiness comes too easy with her.

Prompt 2: thrive

sepia, 26 november 2022

Lene had a lot of good ideas, but she also had a lot of bad ones. Sifo-Dyas wasn’t yet sure which category their current adventure would fall into. Which was funny, he thought to himself, incredibly ill-humoredly. Wasn’t he supposed to see the future? After all, that was why they were here. His problem. The whole seeing-the-future deal.

Over the past few weeks, he’d been attacked with visions and nightmares at a frequency he’d never experienced before. Now, they were coming less often, but the headaches and exhaustion still lingered. He felt as though he didn’t exist in his body, but rather that he existed around it — a ghost floating through a void, a hyperspace channel opening around a ship. Hollow and painful and reality-twisting. Sifo-Dyas was a cranky teenager when at his best — lately, Lene hadn’t been able to convince him to eat anything or even leave his room. Naturally, as soon as he showed slightly fewer signs of displeasure at her suggestions, she’d dragged him out to a dead rock in the Outer Rim, with the goal of meditation. That was what she had told him. Meditation, peace, and quiet.

Quiet was all he’d gotten so far. All he could hear was the soft crunch of dust and dirt beneath two pairs of standard-issue Jedi boots and the occasional whispers of the breeze. They were approaching a mountain, or rather, a small mountain range. Stark and tall against the horizon, the mountains reminded Sifo-Dyas of Coruscanti skyscrapers — if all the life were drained from them and all the luster scraped off of them and all of their lightbulbs shattered. He pulled his cloak tighter around himself.

When they arrived at the base of the mountain, he saw no marked trail, no signs of settlement or past visitors. Gray and beige rocks littered the incline, along with pale brush and broken twigs. It did not seem to Sifo-Dyas that any disaster had occurred here. Only winter after a brutally hot summer, perhaps. He thought the Force might echo back at him if he spoke into it, with no creatures or sentient beings to receive his message. Even the plants and the ground they were growing from were muted.

When he looked back at Lene, he saw that she had already started making her way up the slope, nimbly climbing over the stones and avoiding the loose ones as if she did it every day. If he was feeling more like himself, he might have groaned at her agility, or made some comment. Today, he followed her in silence, picking up his feet one after the other and one after the other as if lifting them like anchors from the bottom of the sea — and yet totally and completely unattached.

He wasn’t sure how long their ascent took. He struggled to keep track of time, swallowed as he was by the months and years and decades in front of him. This particular inability of his had also worsened recently. That was no surprise.

“Here.” Lene stepped into the shadows underneath a slight overhang. Upon following, Sifo-Dyas realized that it wasn’t just an overhang, but the entrance to a cave. Once his eyes adjusted, he could see the path in, which Lene was already taking. It was narrow, and the walls smelled very old and very unwelcoming. The air was stale, but further ahead he felt that there was an opening. He hoped they would reach it soon. He didn’t want to be suffocated or entombed like a mummy between two stone walls on some desolate planet, where likely nobody knew his whereabouts.

Caring about his life again. Despite it all, that was a good sign, which he distantly recognized as he crossed the threshold into the cave.

The space was dark and wide-open. He glanced up, trying to gauge the height of the ceiling, but Lene was already sitting cross-legged on the ground. Ah. So this was the meditation aspect of her plan. That would lead to peace, he thought, with a small degree of sarcasm. He’d been struggling lately with his meditation. In the Temple, he was constantly surrounded by a swirling current of thoughts and emotions that didn’t belong to him. It made focusing on himself and the Force harder. He knew other Padawans struggled with this, for the most part the younger ones — but most of them didn’t have visions of a disastrous future constantly scratching at the edges of their consciousness, either.

He lowered himself onto the ground next to her, folding his legs beneath him and adjusting his robes. The rock underneath him was cold but not uncomfortable, and some of the tension in his shoulders began to unwind.

Master and Padawan sat for a while in silence. They were so far away from everything, Sifo-Dyas knew. They were in a pocket of the galaxy far from anger and violence and love and joy, far from any kind of war and or celebration. He almost felt guilty for how much he welcomed the emptiness. It gave him space to come back to himself.

He felt Lene’s eyes on him after a time, and turned to face her.

“When I was your age,” Lene began, a distant look in her eyes, “at the end of the frontier days, the older Jedi would take us to places like this. Places that are quiet and open, empty in a way Coruscant could never be, where the chaos of the galaxy seems to have passed by. There are no societies here, no hierarchies. No sunlight or moonlight ever reaches this cave — hasn’t for a thousand years. I am in no way resentful at the Republic, or at exploration, or at the ingenuity of life, Padawan, but I am old enough to remember that places like this still exist. Where the presence of billions of hearts and minds ceases to exert so much pressure.” She looked at him then, her violet eyes sharper than ever. “Where time is still, and the past does not matter, and the future cannot speak.”

Rarely did he hear her so poetic. He did not meet her knowing gaze, but he couldn’t ignore the swell in his chest, the first real connection to himself he’d felt in weeks, the emotion rising from being so deeply understood.

He didn’t speak of it anymore. Not when he woke from a dream, not into the silence where Dooku should have been, not even when asked by his fellow Jedi. The future was a storm, and he saw now that as a young adult, he had merely stood in its eye. With age had come pain and wisdom: he understood now what it was like to be torn limb from limb by the wind. He had become intimately acquainted with the screaming gusts and the roaring thunder. When he dreamt of the ocean, he dreamt of raging seas, their bloodred tint visible when lit by lightning.

There was no point in wondering, but he did anyway. What if he had been believed? What if, from the beginning, the healers, the masters, his friends — what if they had truly listened to the prophecies he’d spoken? The Jedi Order, before its numbers had been devastated by this abominable war, would have been able to prevent the disasters he’d foreseen. Now he was a madman, an outsider within the halls of his own home, and drowning in his own grief. The wind in his soul howled with the voices of 10,000 ghosts who were not yet to be; he did not know who they were, but he anticipated their deaths as if they were family.

is that just another way to say "carpe diem"? Probably!

But it had never been easier than with a prompt supplied by the wonderous @blueberry-ry, who gave us....

Fallen Star(s)

now get those creative juices flowing and show us and all of the miners what new and exciting ways to Put Our Blorbo Into Situations TM you have managed to cook up! We love to see artistic expression in any media!

There are hundreds of dead and thousands of missing and thousands more homeless and injured, there are cops sacking the abandoned stores and stealing anything of value from the ruins and the government lying about the numbers of victims, there are orphaned survivor children being kidnapped and sold to European customers.

And it feels like no one knows, or cares, unless they saw the FIFA World cup' minute of silence.

Bottom trawling has been banned in an area off the Sussex Coast supporting rare chalk reef and sandstone reef ecosystems. With this new law, nearly 30% of inshore waters around Sussex are protected from trawling.

In other positive UK ocean news, a recent study found Scottish seabed ecosystems can see a dramatic rebound after receiving trawling protections. After a decade of protection, these areas had three times as much marine live and twice as many species present. Intact and undisturbed seabed ecosystems can also function as carbon sinks.

#Repost @mattxiv

may the universe reward their bravery

Sometimes, time seems to move in a vicious cycle, repeating itself in a painfully astonishing manner, as if mocking humanity's ability to learn from its mistakes. Two images are separated by 79 years, yet they appear as though no time has passed, as if the gap between them is merely a few fleeting moments.