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I get a lot of questions from  people who want to teach their kids environmental stewardship and my advice is to get them passionate about the nature around them. Distant wildlife is exciting and cool! It can teach them to appreciate, but I find it rarely teaches them to value.

Value and respect come from recognizing your place in nature and your ability to both help and hurt.

Go outside and just move some rocks and let them hold some worms. Let them get muddy. If they squash a bug, ask them why. Tell them the bugs live here too.

This sounds silly, but it’s tried and true. Each time I’ve seen a kid smash a bug, I say “why did you feel that bug wasn’t allowed to be alive?” Never in an accusing tone, never judgmental. Ask them gently, honestly. They might be dismissive and bashful at first, but if you ask them again, if you say “I like bugs, and I think it’s good that they are alive,” they start to think. You can see it happen. You can see them begin to consider life they’ve probably been told before doesn’t mater.

Tell them what you like about bugs. If you’re afraid of bugs, tell them that too. tell them “I find them a little scary, but this is why they’re still good.” Tell them they don’t have to like something for it to have value. Tell them even the things they don’t like have value.

Every time a child says they’re afraid of bugs, or dirt, we go outside, and I find a worm (most people react best to them because they don’t have a bunch of little legs), and I hold it and tell them some simple little facts. I ask them if they want to hold it. They almost always do. It’s okay if they don’t want to. Never force the interaction. It’s vital to form positive experiences and associations.

I wipe some mud on my hands. I ask them if they want some mud on their hands. If they do, I give them some mud. I tell them what worms are doing down their in the ground, which anyone can learn on google to share.

We move rocks and find beetles and spiders. They’re delicate, so we don’t pick them up. We watch them. I ask them what they imagine beetles think about all day, and they always make me laugh with their ideas. I tell them “maybe, maybe that’s what beetles think about.” Let them imagine.

Look up the birds where you live. Yes, even the “boring” ones like pigeons and sparrows. Talk about what the eat, where they go at night to sleep. Ask them where they think birds sleep. In beds like us? They’ll usually tell you no, in trees! Kids want to teach as much as they want to learn.

We talk about grass and trees. We talk about what makes the world alive. Their young minds change and make new decisions about how they want to exist in the world.

One day, if all goes well, value and respect grow into a sense of responsibility and obligation.

Do this again and again.

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Like sculpture

sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

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gay culture is sitting in a chair and immediately finding a way to get your feet off the floor

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Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005 - 2008)

While it is always best to believe in oneself, a little help from others can be a great blessing

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hey if you died right now whats your ghost outfit you cant change it be honest

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sometimes i think about gay people who lived centuries ago who thought they were all alone who imagined a world where they could live openly as themselves who met in secret spoke in code defied everything and everyone just to exist and i’m like..i gotta sit down. whew i gotta sit down

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Covid mood board

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*gives u a pretty rock* I love you

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if you’re a lesbian good job

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No but seriously as I’ve gotten older I realize more and more that although white gays do face certain levels of oppression they are still white people.....like does that make sense?

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relationship goals

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I love people with obscure knowledge or useless academic insights. I want to hear your analysis of lighting in Ratatouille. Tell me about the history of soda pop or the references to classical mythology in Macbeth. I want to know about the underlying homoerotic context of that 1930s sci-fi paperback. I think all knowledge is worthwhile knowledge. Explain to me the ecosystems that komodo dragons inhabit. Don’t be afraid to learn for the sake of learning.

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watched love simon in a fit of masochism a while back, shortly after watching the nightmare that was happiest season, and I’ve been having nascent thoughts ever since on the quality of gay space in these assimilationist films about the agonies of being closeted and the excruciating ordeal of having to endure the straight gaze at one of the most vulnerable periods of a gay person’s life.

because it doesn’t feel good, does it, being gay in these films. It’s tension. Being gay means feeling incredibly tense and incredibly constrained, shoulders high and hunched against some imaginary or real incoming blow. It means sneaking and scrabbling to conceal, characters are always slamming laptops closed and checking the doors and curtains and making use of spaces that straight characters temporarily aren’t utilizing to achieve furtive, fleeting moments of intimacy that all have the feeling of two prisoners passing notes or copping a quick desperate feel before the guard passes by again. It doesn’t feel good, it feels like sneaking and lying and hiding, and the inevitable de-closeting and de-masking is approached like the execution scene in braveheart.

and then I thought about how gender nonconformity was approached in both of these films, and how the visuals of effeminate gay men (and men alone) are used to establish a boundary line, an indication of this-far-and-no-further that the main characters set themselves well back from, as if reassuring viewers that there may very well be those sorts of gay people, the gender variant, the effeminate, the flamboyant, the queer, but our main characters just happen to love people of the same sex, and are visually indistinguishable from the straight people around them. they’re safe, palatable, relatable. Straight men can look at these lesbians and desire them and they can look at the gay men and still relate to them. Straight women can look at these gay men and desire them and can look at the lesbians and relate to them. They can imagine away the gayness, they can relate to them as their own selves. Men are still men, women are still women, and there might be some loud weirdos over there confusing the whole issue, but not these main characters, no, they fit seamlessly into the straight communities and family structures around them once the unpleasant and embarrassing business of their outing is concluded.

and there’s so many redemption arcs for the straight characters in the sidelines too. The presence of a (tense, terrified, constrained, ashamed) gay character forms a growth moment for straight characters, it feeds and strengthens and makes them better and wiser people. Straight characters have a benevolent, magnanimous role to play in these stories. They forgive and absolve and accept and empathize, no matter how difficult it is for them, and the harder it is for them the more heroic it seems when they finally come around.

and it doesn’t feel good to be gay in these films, but it does feel good to unlock the approval and acceptance of straight onlookers, it feels like an enormous relief after the overwhelming tension of having to hide and cringe and hunch for ninety minutes of screen time. The approval is the prize and the goal and filmmakers will play trick after trick after trick with the tension of whether or not you’ll actually get to experience it vicariously though the main characters, because of course this is something you also want. To be the right kind of gay, the kind of gay your straight friends and family still love and relate to and see as human, the kind of safe, nonthreatening, palatable gay that makes straight people better wiser people just by being around them.

no outlawry, no prison breaking, no sacred tricksterisms other than the sneaking and hiding and holding one’s breath for extended periods of time.