Humanity

The Cicada Year
They have a polarizing effect, cicadas. I know the first time I saw one, seventeen years ago during the last emergence of Brood X, I wasn’t too keen. Something about their wild, ungainly flight, sending their big black bodies careening this way and that, was unsettling. I find it funny now—even charming—but I remember dodging them on the way to school back then, fending them off with an open umbrella and crying. In fact, most people I know are extremely unsettled by their presence, especially as concerns these periodical cicadas that crawl from the ground in hoards, coating tall trees with a vibrating, screaming layer of the clumsy, sex-crazed insects. No one who has experienced a periodical cicada year forgets it, that’s for sure.
By Jessica Whitehead 5 years ago in Earth
A Garden
My transformation began slowly. There were bits of seeds planted when we went camping as kids and told to police the grounds before we could leave a campsite. Trash bags were in our cars, and we picked up litter whenever we went on a hike. The seeds began to sprout when I read “Silent Spring” , suggested by my favorite librarian. And roots took hold as my class celebrated the first Earth Day, a day to show concern for the whole earth. The seeds and roots had turned into large plants as my college friends and I went hiking above and spelunking below the Appalachian Mountains. My love of nature was fully formed, and I wanted to take care of this earth, this planet we all live on.
By Judi Guralnick5 years ago in Earth
Rebuild
In the wake of the day, surrounded by an impoverished neighborhood which cried out from the cracks in the concrete. I realized something had to be done. And I for one couldn’t sit back and just do nothing. With tears in my eyes and a deep burning in my soul to uplift the community around me, it hit me like a dump truck full of old memories labeled as trash. I ran through the house waking up my seven children in a plea of excitement singing “today is the day, today we unit with humanity and pull together as one in an effort to Rebuild the land in which we were created”! As they wiped away the sleep from their eyes while looking at me as though I’d lost my mind, they jumped up with curiosity wanting to know where I was going with all of this!
By Jacresha Jones 5 years ago in Earth
Garden of Eve
“Just grab the scissors, Sianna.” I don’t understand though. Who’s voice and Why scissors? Why so demanding? “Again, just grab the scissors, Sianna.” I embrace uncertainty in her mysterious and familiar mother like sternness. “Ahh, it is Gaia.”
By Sianna Reigine5 years ago in Earth
Forever Remembered
Quick Facts on Uganda: Population - 46 Million people Capital city – Kampala Currency – The Uganda Shilling February 2017.
By Jamil Shamji5 years ago in Earth
Lose Your Self. Find the World.
It happens every year Calendars turn. Leaves crumble and rust. Summer’s silent hallways fill with footsteps and laughter. The clocks miss a stuttering step.
By Ryan Frawley5 years ago in Earth
Of Life, Nature and Promises
In 1994 I was born into an Air Force family, a lifestyle well known for its tendency to be semi-nomadic. As you can imagine, I grew up with a sense of wonder for the world and an extreme capacity for wanderlust. I have only left the country twice, a weekend trip to Vancouver, Canada when I was ten and a month-long study abroad in Costa Rica, but the list of places I want to go is endless. There are a multitude of reasons for my desire to visit each place: location, culture, festivals, architecture, and wildlife. With the climate changing as rapidly as it is, despite the best efforts of the naysayers to convince us otherwise, many of those places on my lists may be gone in the next few decades, some of them sooner. It is a sad reality when you must prioritize places you wish to see because you're afraid that if you wait too long, you may never see it at all; at least, not for the reason you wanted to go in the first place.
By Lexi 🌻5 years ago in Earth
In The Meantime, There Is Clafoutis
It's early for plums in South Carolina. It's early for plums anywhere, so to find them by the quart at the farmer's market, I was a little dubious. Truckloads of watermelon sat parked underneath the awnings, tons and tons of them. I watched as an assembly line formed, from truck to person to person to booth, piling the melons high.
By Hannah McQueen5 years ago in Earth
Changing Minds: ‘Just the Facts’ Ain’t Enough
FACTS DON’T WIN, it turns out: Ideas are more powerful than facts, especially ideas that conform to your world view. Deep down, I guess I’ve always known this. You cannot engage in debate with climate change contrarians, creationists or anti-vaccination proponents without encountering a dogged intransigence to logical arguments backed by overwhelming data.
By Wilson da Silva5 years ago in Earth
A Life-changing Lesson I Learned from Gardening
The coronavirus pandemic hit our lives in unexpected ways and brought our lives to a standstill. Frontline health workers took over to face the battle head-on while the rest of us were confined to our homes to stay put and quarantine ourselves. People lost jobs, schools and colleges were closed, factories were shut down and the manufacturing sector came to a halt. But it is said that with every challenge a new opportunity also arises with it.
By Ann Mary Alexander5 years ago in Earth
Nature and the Creative Life
Living in the country has been such a welcome surprise. I was raised in the city and loved living there. After marrying and 6 years of living in the city, we decided to try country life and have lived in the country in a home my husband and I designed for 24 years.
By Virginia McGuire5 years ago in Earth
What The Animals Give
Animals do give us a lot of things when I mean A Lot I mean ALOT ALOT. What do we give them? Only food and shelter (which they do not let them walk free and make them VEREY squeezed). All we do is cut down their forests and harm the birds, we make oil spills that harm the sea creatures, and worst of all we kill incontinent animals.
By Jason5 years ago in Earth