Listen now (86 mins) | In Episode 136 Angela chats with Tim Claire and announces last week's Neurodivergent Narratives Contest winners and reveals your next prompt!
Thank you so much! I am humbled. Also, I was very motivated to write the prompt for this week and thought it is urgently relevant so I wanted to share:
Title: Summer Snow
The last white petals of the choke cherry blossoms mix in the air with the summer snow and drift onto my outstretched hands, covering my hair, my clothes. But I know if I offer my tongue, it would not melt. It would be the taste of burnt forest remains.
Yesterday was different. Yesterday, as I walked through the fresh, green woods, a large black bird with a red cap streaked across the path and called out in the cool morning air. I froze in delight - a rare sighting of a pileated woodpecker in my forest! A background chorus of passerines and corvids serenaded me as I pranced down the dappled path. I counted at least twenty species: violet swallows, blue swallows, and green sheen swallows, pink finches, brown sparrows, blue magpies, bluejays, a crossbeak, a warbler, a crow, and a particularly persistent robin!
But this morning, I choke in the silence, “If only I could ‘Help one fainting robin unto his nest again.’”
I squint through the haze towards the floating mountains on the western horizon. I can’t see the fire, but the mountain rock is naked - the snow packs already depleted. I collected 1000 litres of rainwater during the one week of spring rain we had this year - enough for a month of watering my vegetable garden. Nourished by that week, the drenched dirt spit out dancing green shoots, leaves, and flowers, but it didn’t last long. The green withered in the thirty-degree heat a week later and the crisp wildflowers are now buried in grey.
I lean down to brush ash off the first bloom of the year of purple fireweed and it feels more like a smoldering red flag than a coincidence. “Wildfires actively burning”. “Situation is dire”. “Fires out of control”. “State of emergency”. “Armed forces called in”. “The north burns”. We measure them in hundreds of thousands of hectares burning, how many people evacuated from their homes, and how many properties lost. Lives lost too.
You know, maybe elections should be held in the summer. If campaign rallies competed with climate catastrophes for news headlines, maybe we would remember. I think of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” dripping with tomato soup, and white coats chained to bank doors, and indigenous elders stopping trains in their tracks. Are we too distracted by tariffs, threats to national sovereignty, and the urgency to protect jobs by building pipelines to remember how much more we have to lose?
I’m curious. If you could only take one precious item, what would it be?
I smear the ash deeper into my skin as I fail to brush it off. I need to pack the grab-and-go bag.
Thank you so much! I am humbled. Also, I was very motivated to write the prompt for this week and thought it is urgently relevant so I wanted to share:
Title: Summer Snow
The last white petals of the choke cherry blossoms mix in the air with the summer snow and drift onto my outstretched hands, covering my hair, my clothes. But I know if I offer my tongue, it would not melt. It would be the taste of burnt forest remains.
Yesterday was different. Yesterday, as I walked through the fresh, green woods, a large black bird with a red cap streaked across the path and called out in the cool morning air. I froze in delight - a rare sighting of a pileated woodpecker in my forest! A background chorus of passerines and corvids serenaded me as I pranced down the dappled path. I counted at least twenty species: violet swallows, blue swallows, and green sheen swallows, pink finches, brown sparrows, blue magpies, bluejays, a crossbeak, a warbler, a crow, and a particularly persistent robin!
But this morning, I choke in the silence, “If only I could ‘Help one fainting robin unto his nest again.’”
I squint through the haze towards the floating mountains on the western horizon. I can’t see the fire, but the mountain rock is naked - the snow packs already depleted. I collected 1000 litres of rainwater during the one week of spring rain we had this year - enough for a month of watering my vegetable garden. Nourished by that week, the drenched dirt spit out dancing green shoots, leaves, and flowers, but it didn’t last long. The green withered in the thirty-degree heat a week later and the crisp wildflowers are now buried in grey.
I lean down to brush ash off the first bloom of the year of purple fireweed and it feels more like a smoldering red flag than a coincidence. “Wildfires actively burning”. “Situation is dire”. “Fires out of control”. “State of emergency”. “Armed forces called in”. “The north burns”. We measure them in hundreds of thousands of hectares burning, how many people evacuated from their homes, and how many properties lost. Lives lost too.
You know, maybe elections should be held in the summer. If campaign rallies competed with climate catastrophes for news headlines, maybe we would remember. I think of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” dripping with tomato soup, and white coats chained to bank doors, and indigenous elders stopping trains in their tracks. Are we too distracted by tariffs, threats to national sovereignty, and the urgency to protect jobs by building pipelines to remember how much more we have to lose?
I’m curious. If you could only take one precious item, what would it be?
I smear the ash deeper into my skin as I fail to brush it off. I need to pack the grab-and-go bag.
Not sure if posting disqualifies me, but I felt like conditions are changing rapidly so it was important to me to share :)
It doesn’t disqualify you as long as you also post through the correct link. You are a beautiful writer! So happy to have you in our writing circle.
Also, you spelled colour wrong! 😅
Ahhhhh oh no!!!
#stilllearning