Now everything is New, Now everything is You

🖤 Goth Raver Boot Cuffs🖤

Did you know that there are dozens of species of fireflies, and some of them light up with a blue glow? Did you know about the moths? There are thousands of them, bright pink and raspberry orange and checkerboard and emerald. They are called things like Black-Etched Prominent, Purple Fairy, Pink-Legged Tiger, Small Mossy Glyph and Black-Bordered Lemon.

Did you know that there are moths that feed on lichens? Did you know about the blue and green bees? The rainbow-colored dogbane beetles? Your streams are supposed to teem with newts, salamanders, crawdads, frogs, and fishes. I want to take you by the hand and show you an animal you've never seen before, and say, "This exists! It's real! It's alive!"

There are secret wildflowers that no website will show you and that no list entitled "native species to attract butterflies!" will name. Every day I'm at work I see a new plant I didn't know existed.

The purple coneflowers and prairie blazing star are a tidepool, a puddle, and there is an ocean out there. There are wildflowers that only grow in a few specific counties in a single state in the United States, there are plants that are evolved specifically to live underneath the drip line of a dolomite cliff or on the border of a glade of exposed limestone bedrock. Did you know that different species of moss grow on the sides of a boulder vs. on top of it?

There are obscure trees you might have never seen—Sourwood, Yellowwood, Overcup Oak, Ninebark, Mountain Stewartia, Striped Maple, American Hophornbeam, Rusty Blackhaw, Kentucky Coffeetree. There are edible fruits you've never even heard of.

And it is so scary and sad that so many people live and work in environments where most of these wondrous living things have been locally extirpated.

There are vast tracts of suburb and town and city and barren pasture where a person could plausibly never learn of the existence of the vast majority of their native plants and animals, where a person might never imagine just how many there are, because they've only ever been exposed to the tiny handful of living things that can survive in a suburb and they have no reason to extrapolate that there are ten thousand more that no one is talking about.

It's like being a fish that has lived its whole life in a bucket, with no way of imagining the ocean. The insects in your field guide are a fraction of those that exist, of all the native plants to your area only a handful can be bought in a nursery.

Ovate False Fiddleleaf, Rosy Twisted-Stalk

Cross-Leaf Milkwort, Blue Flowered Coyote Thistle

Gaywings, Michaux's Bluet

Redtwig Doghobble, Brook Saxifrage

Swollen Bladderwort, Two-Leaf Miterwort

Agreeable Tiger Moth:

I'd say it's pretty agreeable

Black-Etched Prominent, Small Mossy Glyph

Raspberry Pyrausta, Black-Bordered Lemon

Marbled-Green Leuconyta, Bridgham's Brocade (OBSESSED with how he's just a guy wearing a cloak)

in their normal form, they look like this

alas i thought to myself, setting the small round circular tin down on the far side of the bedside table. none of this for me this tonight, i thought, applying my nightly coat of working hands hand cream

in its normal form it looks like this

i woke up at 4 am and went to the bathroom. had to wash my hands obviously. had to moisturize them afterwards, in the dark, too.

needless to say, the first thing I appreciated when it was, at last, bright enough to see this morning was an

absolute

fucking

food water gerard way image 🙏