Whenever I work with these old fake flowers, I think about death. I glean them from the ground around cemeteries, where they are doomed to never decay properly; blown about, fading in the sun, getting mowed over and shredded, slowly embedding into the soil. I gather them into a bag and hang it, open, on the backyard clothesline in the hopes that any hitchhiking bugs can escape. Eventually I wash them in a soapy bucket and lay them out to dry on a towel, mindful of the threads of persistent microplastics that could escape into the ground or water, then into the bellies of creatures and on up the food chain, with effects still unknown. When I incorporate them into an acrylic painting - yet another form of plastic - I consider what kind of message is important enough to persist in a similar fashion, long after I’ve gone to my own grave.
We all need to think honestly about death in order to live our best lives, but unfortunately, modern society has capitalized on our tendency to avoid it. Distractions and consumerism rule the day. It’s well past time to reclaim our most valuable asset - our attention - and focus on the most important questions of all: what do we want our legacy to be? What kind of world would we be proud to leave behind for our children and grandchildren, and how can we work towards getting there with the precious time we have left? What do we want to grow, and what can be discarded?
Unless you’re a member of the richest 1% of the population, I’m going to guess that this age of polycrisis - with issues ranging from genocide to microplastics - isn’t working out for the vast majority of folks. The good news is, we are all capable of doing what we can, where we are, with what we have available to us. Choose any issue that hits closest to home for you. Start picking up the threads within your reach and we could be unraveling the whole damn thing together.
Every day, our little actions add up and we’ll see how they’re all connected. As we put in the effort to address any chosen problem, we’ll uncover more and more of the bones propping up these problematic structures. We spread the word on what we’ve learned, join forces with others, and that’s how we can change the world.
“The world is splitting open.
Not the way a fruit splits open.
The way a secret splits open.”
- Jaiya Johns
Your quest - should you choose to accept it - is to leave this world a little better than how you inherited it. This is a time of transformation (like it or not) and the generations to come are counting on us.
