i’ve mentioned this here before, but it will remain one of the most ideologically influential experiences of my life: when i was in fifth grade i did a report on post traumatic stress as manifested in veterans of the vietnam war, and my father did me the huge favor of connecting me w/ a vietnam vet friend of his who was diagnosed with PTSD, assuring him that while i was only ten i was bright and curious and he should be as honest with me about his experience as possible.
i remember entering his office with my tape recorder, sitting in a chair that was too big, and asking him questions about war, and his life after war, while swinging my legs over the edge of the chair. i remember being very, very quiet as he spoke of pulling the car over on the highway for fear of crashing when his hands would shake uncontrollably in response to song on the radio or a smell that he couldn’t be sure was real or sense-memory. and of ruined relationships and anger and american hypocrisy.
and i also remember that was the day i learned what “valor” meant. he used “valor” in a sentence and i didn’t know that word, and when i asked him to explain “valor” he became very quiet. and i can’t remember precisely what he said, if he ever offered me the dictionary definition or not, but i do remember him looking very sad, and saying something about our country’s idea of “valor”, and also something about a broken promise. and there was an edge to his words that i couldn’t parse at the time that i would later come to understand was bitterness, that he sounded bitter.
to this day i can’t hear or read the word “valor” without seeing sunlight coming through his office window at a slant, close-to-sunset light, and feeling the kind of quiet, confused, completely internalized panic a child feels when they sense that a grown up is trying very hard not to weep in their presence.
fog is just a rlly big land ghost
In four billion years, there have been many continents that died.
You’ve heard of the famous ones–Pangaea, proud monolith; Laurasia, home of dinosaurs–but there were others, so many, many others. The grand march of time swallowed islands whole, scraped them up like residue from the baking pan of the world.
Everything has a soul. Everything remembers.
Gondwana floats gently over London now, remembering when the world was hot and green. She loves the lights. There were no lights, when she was alive. There were no lights when the world was so hot and green.
Rodinia settles onto the dry Atacama, bringing moisture from the sea. She moves much faster now, unhindered by gravity and friction, slipping through the walls of this new house. The walls are always moving, yet she stays, floating in and out, bringing moisture.
Vaalbara, eldest and most fire-born, sneaks in tendrils and wisps over her old haunting grounds. Her bones are buried in the outback, ancient cratons resting unrotted through all the fearsome gnawing of time. She likes the summers here. The heat reminds her, so faintly, of what it was like to be born. In the wildfires, she sees the magma oceans of her youth.
Everything has a soul. Everything remembers.
often a storm will have many faces and you’ll have to pick which one to focus on. the storms can be massive spanning hundreds of kilometres and will have violent pockets where beauty is rampant but hard to get to and out on the edges you’ll find miraculous cloud formations creeping in all directions. You can even follow the back of a storm where you’ll often find those cotton candy like mammatus clouds. Theres really no wrong way to be chased by a storm (ha, storm chasing).
now the canola are flowering we have seas of yellow bordering the brooding clouds and it’s about all i’d care to do.
The “catalyst,” the sage had called him. Catalyst of what? Catalyst of their defeat, the King’s death, the Bastard-Prince’s curse?
He was but the messenger: what would his mother think of him now, should she know her son’s great destiny was but to deliver news to the dead? He refused to believe this is how it would end!
If you follow my sketchblog you may recognize the thumbnail for this! A friend told me it had a Page of Wands tarot vibe, so I made up a melodramatic caption accordingly.
You’re a mystic who runs a shop full of mysterious artifacts and potions and you’re sick of uninformed middle-aged suburban moms asking for energy crystals and herbal weight-loss mixtures while throwing around made-up terms.
When a middle-aged woman rolled into my shop and told me she
was looking for ichor, I didn’t think much of it at first.You get all kinds in a shop like mine, and doubly so when
you put up the right signs on your door.
The signs that let certain kinds of people know they’re welcome, not
just the collectors or the curious or the new age mystics, looking for this
root or that crystal or wanting to gawk at a jar of old bones, but the less
innocuous individuals as well. The kind
who mean business when they come looking for their… less run-of-the-mill
specialities.
Inspiration Haven 