The Lesson of the Lorax and The Legacy of Madness

"Blogging Circle of Friends "
DAY 1586: March 20, 2017
Prompt: Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not. Dr. Seuss Use this quote to inspire today's entry. Write a story, a poem, or your opinion.

In the days before I embraced corporate life, I was a student of science. The love I had for exploration and investigation seemed imprinted on my DNA. My childhood heroes were Jacques Cousteau, Jane Goodall and the shark lady herself, Dr. Eugenie Clark. I was going to follow in their footsteps of research, discovery and conservation. Somewhere along the line, my other passion won out and I was compelled to follow in my father's footsteps. I traded in my wetsuits and regulators for a corporate office and airplanes. Though my career has me pursuing altitude rather than exploring fathoms, my love of science and nature still draws me to the importance of conservation and preservation.

Scientists predict that over the next 100 years, our planet will lose over 50% of our species. The oceans are being over-fished at alarming rates, entire ecosystems are experiencing degradation and ruin and some species are suffering unprecedented rates of die-off... all this while some politicians insist climate change is over-hyped or worse, merely a hoax perpetrated by liberals. The scientific community has offered irrefutable evidence that we are in the midst of a sixth period of mass extinction, fueled in part, by a host of human activities from ranging from deforestry to consumption of fossil fuels and carbon emissions. Certainly some climate effects and large scale changes to the global ecosystems are cyclical and part of the Earth's natural order and evolution, but that should not excuse or pardon the human factors that affect and in many cases, expedite radical and harmful environmental and climatic change. We all consume, therefore we mustn't we also all act to educate and conserve?

It sometimes seems overwhelming. It sometimes seems like a fight that can never be won but still, every minute of every day, there are scientists and engineering researching and designing ways to conserve and protect our national resources. There are activists and educators fighting on the front lines as well as lawmakers lobbying for legislation. There are filmmakers and artists bringing the messaging to the global community with films like Racing Extinction. There are so many movements designed to educate people on how to make conservation a part of our everyday existence.

Regardless of those striving to politicize protecting our oceans and ecosystems, the fact remains that it is our human responsibility to do what we can for our planet. Why wouldn't we want to save our coral reefs, protect our endangered species and national parks? If we could, wouldn't we all try to stop the slaughter of our ocean's apex predators? Slow the rate of melting or our polar ice caps? Save the black rhino, Hawksbill turtle, Asian elephant or any number of those species currently categorized as critically endangered? Where will our politics be in 100 years when 50% of life on our planet has disappeared? Unless...someone like me and you...#startwith1thing

http://worldwildlife.org
http://www.opsociety.org/
http://racingextinction.com/


"Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise"
DAY 1103 March 20, 2017
Prompt: Totally different from the scientific and cosmic black holes, imagine your very own, fictional black hole. What would it be like? Describe it or use it in a flash fiction story or poem if you wish.

The dark space in the earth was an open maw of inky blackness. It called to her, she felt an almost magnetic pull in her gut. The toes of her sneakers, protruding just over the edge, where like bright white triangles against the sea of black below her. If she took one small step, she would fall into it, she would fall forever. No single thought in her life had even been more wholly appealing and compelling.

Alexia fought the urge, the temptation to feed herself to the pit. The physical will it took to draw herself back and away for the edge, left her winded and her skin covered with a slick film of perspiration. Even now as she sat four feet away, leaning against big maple tree and feeling its rough back biting into her bare flesh, she wanted more than anything to hurl her body down that deep shaft. There was no world but the one that was a mystery to her. There was no future but the one that beckoned, dark and endless, from the broken earth. The black hole called her, as it had called her mother. How long could she live without answering?

The Summer Leap and the Looking Glass

"Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise"
Day 815 June 1, 2016
Prompt: "I knew who was when I got up when I got up this morning but I must have changed several times since then." Alice Through The Looking Glass Do you ever feel like this?

There was a time, during the darker times of my life, when I would have said I often felt like this. It wasn't uncommon for me to spend many a sleepless night making decisions and coming to reasonable conclusions only to wake up in the wee hours of morning, plagued by second thoughts and doubting my nocturnal convictions. It was a time when my heart was misaligned with my head. I wanted something so badly I was able to defer reality and sound reasoning...but only for so long. I remember feeling trapped in this impossible place, locked in love with an addict that was determined to find the bottom - with or without me. I was lost, looking for hope and promise in every corner of every sad, empty room in our broken house. I am thankful for that one horrible, heartbreaking day when I finally saw that it had become him or me. I chose me. I look back at the time now with some measure of pride. I ultimately did make the right decisions for my life and my wonderful little family is my reward for getting my heart and head on the same page.

"Blogging Circle of Friends "
Day 1295: June 1, 2016
June 1 is Dare Day. I dare you to take the challenge and write something using these words: dice, provoke, fluffy, wind, dare, purring, nuts, aid. Write a story or poem about something daring or challenging. Have fun.

It had been a stupid dare that brought him to precarious point. Tyson turned his face into the wind and tried not to look down.

They had called him chicken shit, each of them hurling the insult back over their shoulders as they launched their summer browned bodies over the edge. They had meant to provoke him but instead of stoking the fire of pride in his gut, their chiding had only serve to cement his fears. He heard their raucous laughter. He could see them splashing about in the dark, still waters below each time he dared to glance down from the lip of the quarry. Tyson knew, to the very core of his soul, that this would not end well. His knees began to knock as he felt the heat of the July afternoon bearing down on his bare shoulders.

All at once there was a soft voice at his ear, a sound like warm honey.

"You don't have to listen to them Tyson. I was scared to jump the first time too."

Tyson turned to stare at Myra Wilson. She was a vision. She had a smattering of cinnamon colored freckles on her smooth, pale shoulders. Her long red hair was pulled back and piled high on her head showing off her lovely, long neck. Her suit was bright yellow with white polka dots and had fluffy ruffles on both hips. She stood, looking at him kindly as she so often did.

Tyson swallowed. He hadn't even know she was there that day. Tyson felt the heat rise into his cheeks, felt a pleasant, purring vibration in his center. Now what? Could he really tempt fate? Should he risk his life or risk looking like a baby in front of the girl he'd been in love with since the first grade? On the other hand, he was only twelve...he had not lived nearly long enough and Tyson thought he only had a 50/50 chance of surviving the jump. He looked at Myra, then down at the water. He tossed the mental dice...and ended up with snake eyes. Tyson launched himself out into the atmosphere, instinctively cupping both hands around his delicate nuts as gravity claimed him and dragged him down toward the depths below.

Tyson prayed for only two things as he impacted the water's surface...first, that his joker friends would be quick to respond with the necessary first aid and second, that on the off chance he survived, he'd get to kiss Myra's beautiful face before the day was over.

A Legacy of Madness

Alexia peered down the dark shaft at her feet. It was an inky black chasm not much wider than the span of her thin hips. She strained her ears listening for the music that had seemed so prominent before. It was silent. A few moments ago the music had come floating across the yard, a chorus of voices, right through the window of her bedroom. It was so distinctive and rich in sound that her eyes could almost follow the notes as they floated in the air. It drew her out of her house and into the yard. Alexia had followed the sound all the way to the back of her yard, behind the big maple that marked the outer boundary of her family's property. There, just beyond the old tree, she'd found the hole. Alexia was fairly certain it had not been there before. As she stared down into the darkness, the toes of her keds resting at the edge of the hole, the music had abruptly stopped.

Alexia looked back over her shoulder at the house. She could hear her grandmother talking on the phone, animated and distracted. She quickly dropped to her knees and leaned into the shaft, trying to hear or see anything. A pungent odor filled her nostrils, something sweet and fermented, like the apple tobacco her grandfather sometimes smoked in his pipe. She debated running back to house to get her grandmother, to tell her about what she had found. Alexia dismissed the idea immediately. Her grandmother was a serious woman who did not traipse into the back yard to look at holes that spewed music and smoke. Alexia's grandmother did not subscribe to anything that did not involve church or school and was not a valid part of the mundane routines of life. She had lost a daughter, Alexia's mother, to madness and folly and had no tolerance for such things.

Alexia knew very little about her mother Alice. She had gone to live with her grandmother at eighteen months old when her mother had been institutionalized. Shortly after her daughter's birth, Alice began suffering from hallucinations and insomnia so severe that she would go without sleep for weeks at a time.  She became obsessed with keeping time, wearing watches on both her arms and constantly asking the orderlies if their clocks were set correctly. Alice had slowly deteriorated until she had dissolved almost entirely into a raving lunacy, screaming about the red queen and covering her room with charcoal drawings of terrible winged creatures and misshapen dwarfs.

Alexia had been sleeping peacefully in her grandmother's arms when her mother had, desperate to free herself of the madness griping her mind, barrelled through several sets of orderlies to throw herself off the balcony of the hospital mess hall. Seconds before her death plunge, witnesses had reported hearing her mother talking about the blue butterfly and being "out of time". Her grandmother had told Alexia more than once, that as a young girl her mother had let madness in, and it had never let her go. In her grief, Alexia's grandmother had crafted a safe and practical world for her granddaughter to grow up in. There would be no fairy tales, no princess, no red queens...and no holes that appeared as if by magic in the back yard.

Alexia thought she saw a sudden flicker of light in the darkness, something flashing bright in the depths. She craned her neck to peer down, leaned over the shaft just a little more. All at once, the ground under her knees gave way and she felt herself dragged forward into the hole. Her hands scrambled for purchase in the earth above but gravity took over and she fell, the hole eagerly swallowing her as she dropped.

To be continued...