wandering-aloneo-o

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 love that folk have tagged me in multiple times!

Just wanted to note two things:

I have at least five times as many species in my files as online, so if there’s something you need and don’t see, you’re always welcome to ask. I can’t guarantee if he’ll have it or I can get it online quickly, but I will if I can.

Hey man I think you can do both. Like I appreciate man tits and those are legal p much everywhere, but if I was ogling people or touching folks without permission or clutching my pearls whenever I saw a nip it'd be a different story

It's not so much "do I think boobs are hot and do I enjoy seeing them" so much as it is "do I think it's reasonable that what I personally find hot shouldn't get to dictate how others dress"

All u really got to be careful of is how u support- cause yeah,it may come off as skeevy if u get too excited about it.

But the drum we're beating here isn't "STOP EXPERIENCING FEELINGS", it's "YOUR FEELINGS AREN'T MORE IMPORTANT THAN MY BODY" and "THE HUMAN BODY IS NOT IN ITSELF OBSCENE" and "WOMEN'S BODIES BY THEMSELVES ARE NOT PORNOGRAPHIC"

Picture the LEAST attractive person with breasts you personally can imagine. If your knee-jerk reflex is, "I no longer support that person's right to be topless", that's a Gratification motive paired with a Disgust motive.

The key is to move AWAY from Self-Gratification and Disgust and TOWARDS "Equality".

Self-gratification is something we encourage in our view of women so strongly that it almost becomes invisible- to the point of detriment to BOTH sides, which is what bedrock stone-bottom Feminism exists to address.

Your grandmother should be just as commonplace being topless at the pool as your grandpa. Your sister should be able to take her shirt off when it's scorching out and still be as safe and blasé as your brother. Seeing a mom whip out a tit on the bus to feed her baby should be as commonplace as a milk bottle.

The foundational idea is, "the primary purpose of a woman's body is for women to live, not for others to pick apart for approval".