Perennial Conventions: Spring Awakening
Branches with buds reach for the sky, Madrona Trail
The Evergreen Echo
Hello fellow creature,
Welcome to Spring! The season featuring wet earth, chatty birds, wardrobe uncertainty, and soon…babies, babies, babies. Both a season on its own as well as a transitionary period. Winter fitfully thawing into Summer as the frigid rot fertilizes the new growth.
Spring ‘26 has me contemplating the pursuit of happiness. A fickle concept codified into the Declaration of Independence, stitched into the identity of our nation. A right that all humans are entitled to—well, white, cismale humans anyways. I doubt the founding fathers in all their greatest dreams of evil could never have imagined the fate they were condemning us to.
The chase is an ever-moving goal post. Natural desires and human needs crushed between the palms of two shaking hands as marketing departments create problems to which they’ll sell us the solution. We can only attempt to paddle ourselves out of the sinking whirlpool of men’s power fantasies while they wield tradition and legacy as weapons against themselves and hold the rest of us hostage.
Humanity’s apparent crusade against (or for?) entropy has brought us to this era of coalescence. The megacorp of (American) society pulling off the most lucrative mergers of all time. Comedy and news, Hollywood and Capitol Hill, shareholder value and diplomacy, all melding together in a spiritually bereft virtual reality. Eyes shifting from small screen to big screen, I long for the days when the general public was respected enough for a well-crafted lie.
Madrona Trail or thereabouts
The Evergreen Echo
Happiness is a fleeting emotion, hard to catch and likely to be scared away by scrutiny. It is also deeply personal and likely different for everyone. It’s even hard to settle for security, but we are alive right now regardless. Bolster yourself with a generic allergy tablet of choice (if you partake) and attempt deep breaths of fresh air. If you have public access to green spaces, visit them. In Washington, the flowers and mushrooms are blooming—pollen and spores casting hope into the wind and soil.
For me the year is just beginning. I’m figuring out what to do in a round-about way that looks a lot like giving up. As one of the hundreds of thousands of unemployed Americans facing a hostile and degrading job market, I’ve given up. I can admit that I have no idea what I’m doing, what’s happening, or what the future will hold. I’m left with the only option of embracing the uncertainty and tumbling a few stories down to test the strength of my safety net (a.k.a. support system).
I imagine I’m not the only person who feels like they’ve done everything “right,” i.e. everything asked of them. Burnt out from trying to escape poverty, break generational curses, live up to expectations or potential in this rat’s maze we created for ourselves. Our centuries-long quest for faster homogeny being expedited by internet access seems to be (to this anxious artist) simultaneously dividing us from each other and uniting us in a shared dystopian fate. It’s demoralizing.
“Life, uhhh…finds a way.” ~Dr. Malcom, Jurassic Park
The Evergreen Echo
Optimistically, I don’t consider humans to be Earth’s main characters (numbers-wise it’s probably beetles). Impermanence will be our downfall and savior. Nothing lasts forever and that is both a threat and a promise that brings me comfort. It’s easy to let the overwhelm and fear stop us from noticing or celebrating the passage of time. I believe this to be by design. The cycles meant to ground us get lost in the noise…but the rain falls. The birds sing and everything changes, renews, recycles. Nature is always making plans and getting ready.
Steal some time back from the attention economy. Look up at the sky, listen to the sounds of nature, enjoy hard-won community spaces. Next time we’ll talk about more ways to take back our time by setting boundaries with the tech tools meant to capture us and integrate themselves further and further into our daily lives.
It’s increasingly difficult (and expensive) to live, so find free ways to snatch back agency and engage with people or at least the world around you sans trend, chat, or comment section. The omnipresent “They” want us all to be consumers, while they inhale the whole of the world from us. Resisting constant consumption is self-preservation.
What seeds of joy can you spread now? What blooms will you enjoy?
