assorted writing

"Only after the last tree has been cut down. Only after the last river has been poisoned. Only after the last fish has been caught. Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten." -Cree Indian Prophecy

As mankind has grown older, there have been two colors that have taken precedent over all others: gold and green. In the olden days gold stood for wealth. It built economies, cities, bought exotic spices and fabrics for the rich. It provided a way for greed to get its filthy hands on every person’s soul that allowed it in. The green was the nature the people lived in. The bushes where berries were picked from, the trees where apples fell at the farmer's feet, the carrot tops sticking out of the ground, ready to be peeled and eaten. But as time went on, the gold faded into a different kind of green. And this kind of green sacrificed the green of the trees for it. Mankind took their greed for finer things and let it soil the soul of the most precious, innocent, part of their world. And while the green has always been able to grow through the toughest of dirt, like anything it can only be killed so many times before all its lives are wasted.
      So here I stand, one of the last of the true green on this earth. I would have told you this story earlier but I was naïve. Nature has a way of always finding a way to be reborn, sometimes with an endless amount of hope stored for that very reason. But that hope, like the rest of what has become of the world, has vanished into the two colors that now take precedent over all others - gray and brown.
      Even I, as I stand here in the gray dirt, am mostly brown now. The few green leaves that stand on my shoulders gasp for air in this world mankind has placed us in. I stand alone, not another brother or sister of mine to see for miles. The vast empty creates this illusion that there are not soaring towers covering the earth where so many of us first stood. But there are. There are mountains of sewage, of waste. Ginormous buildings of glass and cement, suffocating the earth where so many of us once grew through, our roots reaching for miles. The streams we stood by, the mountains we grew on: all reduced to ash.
      When I was young, I would not have imagined a world like this. The greed always was there but the ruin… the ruin came like a hurricane. Too quick to see what was coming until you had already been left with rubble surrounding you. They cut down my brothers and sisters. They tore their roots from their permanent homes to create temporary homes that they soon left empty, without even blinking an eye. I watched, as machines dug in and out of the soil. As they sawed mother earth to the ground. I felt every cut, every branch that fell and never grew back again.
      But here I stand. So, am I one of the lucky ones? Because I was spared the fate of so many others that fell early in the growth of mankind’s ruined soul? There are still picket signs that lay at my feet where the few of many fought for what was left of us. I had hope then, so many years ago. There were some of them that sat by me, that placed their hand on my soul and told me they would not let earth die. That they would fight against this madness, this greed, this carelessness of their people. But soon, like everything green, they vanished too.
      If my brothers and sisters did not get sawed down, the air killed them slowly. I felt their deaths through my roots, and yet here I stand in the gray and the brown. Through all the death and all the despair in my roots, I tell you this story now so that you will know. You will know as you grow through the thick and tough shell that this world has become. And as I stand here, I feel the cut in my bark. The machines have been sent again to make room for more of mankind’s greed. I feel the pain I have felt a thousand one times over through my own bark. So I tell you this story so that you may know mine. So that you, as my last offspring, buried far beneath the ground, will live with hope. With hope of a future, that the sun will shine again. I cannot promise you that it will. But I pray to mother earth with all my might that you will see green again.