threads of my life braiding love, loss & politics by Adamante of the DeerStag
Everything dies. Fear gone In light of our inevitable defeat One fights only because one loves. * This is when it struck me, how bad it had become. When the first major study came out describing the collapse of insect populations worldwide. I’m no ecologist, but something in my bones knew this was one of the worst news possible. Insects are one of the basic building-blocks of life as we know it. In the summers before, I’d had this feeling that something was missing, a background noise to life itself. Again and again, when summer came, I kept being surprised by how little I was being bugged. Where was the buzzing? There was a wrong quietness in the air, like life was not being alive enough. My body could feel it. The study just helped my
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mind catch up. When I was a kid, in the eighties, walking on a summer day meant you would surely be crossing paths with a congregation of tiny little fruit flies, a dancing cloud playing with the wind, with the light. It was the simplest thing, but it had a magic to it. How it looked both chaotic and harmonious. How it reacted to your presence or not, depending on the speed and the type of your movement. And how glorious it was, in the summer evening light, a shimmering miracle made of the most humble creatures. I had been missing them. Missing how commonplace their miracle used to be. I cried. * As a teenager and a young adult I fought a lot. I fought for queer rights. I fought for social justice. I fought for the environment. There was always an urgency to the fight. It had to be won, it had to be won now. Queer rights now. Justice now. Save the planet now. In every fight, I put all of myself. All my hopes and pains, all my fears for
Photo by James St. John, via Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License
