gingerthemoonlark

[gingerthemoonlark]

I’ve been seeing a lot of anti-Nazi ones, which is great, but I felt like we needed one to show our support for the Jewish community.  

[gingerthemoonlark]

sophie 100% wrote fanfiction before the whole elf thing. there's literally no way i'm wrong on this.

we know from canon that she was a huge book worm and you can't tell me she wasn't into escapism as a coping method.

i can absolutely see her sitting in front of her lap top under a blanket at midnight pounding out a 150k word fic for ao3.

and then just imagine her refinding her old stories and laughing at how bad they are but being so glad she had them.

#kotlc #keeper of the lost cities #sophie foster #kotlc sophie #koltc headcanons

[gingerthemoonlark]

ohemgee its THE keeper of the lost cities!!

[gingerthemoonlark]

Happy Neil banging out the tunes day

[gingerthemoonlark]

ITS APRIL 13 YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS

FETCH ME NEIL

[gingerthemoonlark]

anyone else sick to death of that fucking elephant

#i literally scrolled right past this cause i thought it was just him

[gingerthemoonlark]

so many of us haven't seen it

we don't encounter it, we can't imagine it, we can't get out of the tomb of apathy because we haven't seen the wonders just beyond their line of sight

I talk about this all the time, but it's because I think about it all the time

There are likely thousands of plants native to the area you live in, and chances are you have never even seen most of them, in your entire life.

Not even rare orchids that only bloom at midnight on a blood moon or some shit—regular flowers. Weeds. They have been systematically eliminated from every single place you ever set foot in, and you have to have a special hobby or line of work to ever even rest your eyes upon the flowers that used to bloom for no one on every hill, or in every valley, or beside every stream

There are a few hundred birds that live where I live. I have never seen most of them before. I have never seen a Kentucky Warbler, and I have lived in Kentucky for what...twenty years?

I have never seen a rosy maple moth. When I saw one on the internet, I didn't even think it was real.

I've become a deeply weird person over the past couple years. Tasting even a little bit of the Wonders changes you. I wouldn't have thought blue bees were real, or the fantastically rainbow-colored dogbane beetles.

I have seen the world beyond the wasteland, and that glimpse makes you crazy.

You or I may have never seen a truly mature tree. A fraction of a percent of the old growth forest of the Eastern USA remains. Once there were tulip poplars over 6 feet in diameter and sycamores well over 10 feet in diameter. Only a few remain, in secret locations. Imagine walking through a forest where the tree trunks are over 3-4 feet wide.

The forest where I work is 100 years old. That's a baby forest.

Knowing that, being aware of that, it's maddening.

Central Kentucky has disproportionately few endemic plants. Almost none. Central Kentucky was the first area west of the Appalachians settled by European colonizers. The Bluegrass was once described as having the most peculiar plant life anywhere in the East, but now, there are no species known that are unique to that area.

Colonization destroyed the canebrakes. (Did you know that we had vast forests of bamboo full of carnivorous plants?) The bamboo is barely hanging on. It destroyed the sycamores so enormous you could use the hollow center of one as a stable for animals. It introduced invasive grasses to feed cattle and horses. It destroyed the rich lush topsoil. Most of the ancient oaks were cut down or died when housing developments were built on top of their roots.

What happened to the endemic species, never recorded in books of herbs, never sketched by a European naturalist.

Either gone forever...or hiding in a sinkhole on a backroad somewhere, not even yet discovered.

So much has been lost for eternity. So much still could be lost.

Some days it's hard not to wail and scream. There are herbicides in your drinking water. When you spread honey on toast, you likely also spread neonicotinoid pesticides, which testing has confirmed to be present in something like 45% of honey. In many areas, insects are immersed in the presence of chemicals designed to kill them in every drop of water, every leaf, every square inch of soil.

When games, animations, and illustrations envision the outdoors, they cover the ground with a short, uniform carpet of green, because that is what we see, no matter where we go: turfgrass cut by a lawn mower. Where I live, there are no natural environments that resemble this, remotely. The closest thing we have to turf-forming grass is our wealth of native sedges, most of which are rare or endangered.

I talked to a man who had devoted his life to studying the American bamboo, Arundinaria gigantea, and he had never seen a canebrake larger than 200x500 feet. Canebrakes once covered ten million acres, and now the bamboo exists in short, straggly clumps instead of dense bamboo forests up to 40 feet tall.

I want to cry and scream. The grief will tear me to pieces. I live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, surrounded by people who can't even grieve, because they have been so completely severed from everything that was lost that they don't even know it was real.

It hurts. It hurts, and we have to live with it. It hurts, and the grief is all-consuming.

There is the agony, and there are the Wonders. Both are true at the same time. It is because nothing around us is standing still; everything in nature is always moving, iterating, becoming. Something is pulling and nudging at our species, urging us to move, to iterate, to become.

So much has been lost. Even more is not lost.

The trees, the bamboo, the sedges, the Kentucky warblers and rosy maple moths.

They are not lost. We are lost.

This is the hard part. The grief is hard, but this is somehow harder for us. We are lost, and it is time to come home.

Not to a physical place, but to a way of living: interconnected, mutualistic, interdependent. Symbiosis. In the forest, no one is separate from anyone else, everyone is linked and dependent on the community. Trees help each other, they support each other, they protect and shelter and feed one another and all living things, and together they are a forest. I don't really consider myself religious, but I have to reserve something in my head for how it felt to realize what Forest was.

When I noticed the little plants popping up in the sidewalk cracks and gravel paths, the tough weeds holding on in the lawns and pavement, something in my brain began to change dramatically and permanently.

They're still here. The trees. Even in the pavement and lawns. The dandelions have come, adapting rapidly, helping the bees hold on. The wildflower seeds are still sprouting in this depleted ground. Waiting for us to recognize them. Life is everywhere. The Forest is everywhere. It felt like they were waiting. We're here. We have not abandoned you. We are resilience, persistence, survival, adaptation. This is not death. This is Chaos. Come home. Come home. Come home.

I saved little plants from the roadside and tended them in plastic cups. I didn't think it would work. I don't know why I tried. I was acting as something bigger than only myself, responding to a call that moves throughout all of nature. But they survived, and growing and tending to my little plants and trees, I—understood.

I don't know if I believe in God, but I believe in Something, whatever it was that seemed to whisper like a secret: Welcome home, Caretaker.

And honestly, truth shone through then from relics of religion I hadn't touched in ages; God put Adam in a garden, not a suburb, a mall, or a Walmart. This is who you are. Not a Consumer, but a Caretaker.

And when the threat of the Flood loomed, God told Noah to start building a fucking boat.

In ecology, the plants we know as "weeds" are pioneer species: the first species to return to an area after a natural disaster or mass extinction. They survive in the harshest conditions, and prepare the land for regeneration. This is who you must become.

Look to the Dandelion—in just a few hundred years on this continent, Dandelion has risen to the highest calling of a Weed: first survive where the others can't, and then help the others survive. If the human species is to survive, you must be a weed species. You must adapt relentlessly, resist eradication, and protect and nurture other life forms by your very nature. You must be tough as nails, and make the world a gentler place through your survival.

Have you heard the saying that grief is love with no place to go?

That's the hard part.

We must grieve, but it is not yet time to grieve. It is time to love.

[gingerthemoonlark]

reminder to:

straighten your back

go pee goddAMN IT STOP HOLDING IT

go take your meds if you need to

drink some water

go get a snack if you havent eaten in a while

maybe wander around the house/stretch a little if you’ve been sat at the computer a while (artists especially: sTRETCH THOSE WRISTS)

reply to that text/message from earlier you’d forgotten about

maybe send a nice lil message to someone having a bad day?

[gingerthemoonlark]

You, a completely ordinary middle-class teenager, are chilling in your room one day when your parents receive a phone call. It's from the government, and they want you to come to the White House the next day. So you dress nicely and travel to the White House. When you arrive, you are personally greeted by Joe Biden, who informs you that he has created a new government position and wants to appoint you to this position. But first, he tells you, you need a makeover. You expect to be sent to some sort of special White House stylist, but instead, Biden leads you to a mirror. He expertly styles your hair and does your makeup. It looks fantastic. You didn't know that your president was such a skilled makeup artist. Finally, he assigns you an official government-issued fursona, and you're escorted out through the front doors of the White House. People nod approvingly as they see you leave and talk about how glad they are to see that the government is finally doing something.

[gingerthemoonlark]

Actually I'm very proud of myself for making it to this birthday. There was a point in my life where I was convinced I had no chance in hell of making it this far, and I made it this far. I survived all the years I thought I couldn't survive.

#happy birthday!!!! #very proud of you

[gingerthemoonlark]

INK I DONT KNOW IF YOURE TAKING REQUESTS AND I WILL WAIT PATIENTLY FOR EONS FOR THIS BUT. biana in a salwar kameez and fitz in a kurta please i need this in my life im

them in a salwar kameez and kurta respectively.... unmatched chef's kiss etc

[gingerthemoonlark]

if young Sophie had any social media I think it might’ve been tumblr, but what would she post? destiel? Sophie fanfic author au, she logs on to ao3 like “hey sorry this chapter has taken like 3 years, turns out I’m not actually human and I had to leave my whole life behind and I keep getting hunted down by these pyromaniacs and I’ve been hospitalized over a dozen times. but I saw the Spanish dub and just had to get something out, sorry it took so long, enjoy xx”

#you're literally so correct

[gingerthemoonlark]

i, personally, love to straddle that fine line between “fandom blog” and “record of complete psychological breakdown”

[gingerthemoonlark]

i really wish the series addressed sophie's trauma, not just from past neverseen battles and stuff, but from her life before the lost cities. because yes, all of these life or death situations are deeply traumatizing and terrible and i'm glad shannon addresses that instead of sweeping it under the rug and moving on the the next adventure, but you know what else is emotionally scaring? being ostracized by your peers. being mocked on a regular basis. not having a single friend. sophie's only concern with leaving her home in book 1 was her family. this kid did not have a single friend. and i can personally tell you how much this messes you up, especially at that young.

when people are constantly making snarky comments on anything you do it makes you constantly paranoid about the tiniest acts. is getting up to throw out my napkin weird? is everyone going to think i'm crazy? will they all hate me if i throw this napkin out?

and it's even worse for her, because she could hear the things people thought too. can you freaking imagine???? having to hear even the nice people, the ones you thought you liked, make an off handed comment that they didn't really think about. in the beginning of the first book, she even briefly talks about hearing her parents wish she was normal.

i'm not saying that it needs to be a big plot point or anything, but it would be nice if this huge part of her was acknowledged. i haven't been bullied like i was for a very long time now, and i am generally really happy and have an incredible group of friends and an amazing girlfriend and my life is better than it's ever been, but i still waaaay overthink small things and wonder if people actually like me and constantly worry that they're mad at me. bullying messes you up. and it would be really interesting to see that manifest in sophie. there's no realistic way that she isn't seriously scarred from all of that.

and obviously shannon has a lot of other stuff to deal with and it would be weird for sophie to all of a sudden start showing these signs, but i wish it had been a part of the plan from the beginning.

maybe this is just self indulgent but i clung to these books when i first found them because book 1 sophie was in the same place i was. and i just think it would be cool if i got to see her like me now, as well as her slowly healing from all of it along with her other trauma.

#see this is what happens when we get a break from school #i think too hard about things that don't matter #and you guys have to hear about it #:) #love you! #kotlc #keeper of the lost cities #sophie foster #kotlc sophie #kotlc headcanons

[gingerthemoonlark]

i mean come on guys have you seen them????? have you seen them??????

hi yes hello i'd just like to point out that none of the kotlc kids are remotely neurotypical

#i'm so right about this #on another note it's spring break which means i get to be stuck in my house with my family for a week and will be on here a lot #gotta fill the gay quota somehow

[gingerthemoonlark]

hi yes hello i'd just like to point out that none of the kotlc kids are remotely neurotypical

#wait you mean ginger actually made a kotlc post???? #are you sure???? #kotlc #kotlc headcanons

[gingerthemoonlark]