The CryptoNaturalist @CryptoNature Twitter profile

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

4 months

I've been looking forward to posting this for a very long time.

Jarod K. Anderson

@JarodAnderson

4 months

It's finally time! I've been excited to post about this FOREVER. Here is the cover for my new memoir about loving nature and struggling with depression. I'm very proud of this book and I adore this cover. (Visit the link in my bio for more info.)

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

If you write out the basic facts of trees, but framed as technology, it sounds like impossible sci-fi nonsense. Self-replicating, solar-powered machines that synthesize carbon dioxide and rainwater into oxygen and sturdy building materials on a planetary scale.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

At a wildlife rehab facility I met two crows that said, "caw" in a human accent. They said it like a human reading the word "caw" aloud. The tech shook her head and said, "they're making fun of us. People say 'caw' to them all day, so they've started impersonating us." I <3 crows

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

I bet octopuses think bones are horrific. I bet all their cosmic horror stories involve rigid-limbs and hinged joints.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

Bats can hear shapes. Plants can eat light. Bees can dance maps. We can hold all these ideas at once and feel both heavy and weightless with the absurd beauty of it all.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

Foxes look like dogs, but they can’t interbreed because they are separate, distinct species. The only real giveaway is that, unlike dogs, foxes have vertical, catlike pupils. I guess what I’m trying to say is... for dogs... elves are real.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

5 years

The fossil is not the animal. The fossil is not the bones of the animal. The fossil is the stone’s memory of the bones of the animal. And that’s a poetry older than words.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

The water in your body is just visiting. It was a thunderstorm a week ago. It will be the ocean soon enough. Most of your cells come and go like morning dew. We are more weather pattern than stone monument. Sunlight on mist. Summer lightning. Your choices outweigh your substance.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

Hummingbirds: I shall sip nectar from this flower in a silent ballet. Woodpeckers: I’MMA STAB THE BUGS OUTTA THIS TREE WITH MY FACE-KNIFE!!!

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

5 years

If you ever have the impulse to send a creator a message to tell them that their work is meaningful to you, please do it. I can't tell you how much I appreciate such messages, but the sender is often apologetic about "bothering me." It's not a bother. It's an incredible kindness.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

4 years

The universe is an ongoing explosion. That's where you live. In an explosion. We absolutely don't know what living is. Sometimes atoms just get very haunted. That's us. When an explosion explodes hard enough, dust wakes up and thinks about itself. And tweets about it.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

3 years

Mushrooms are the temporary reproductive structures of massive, seldom seen, subterranean creatures more closely related to you than to plants. Fungi. Some are miles wide. Some live thousands of years. Some help trees speak to one another. There’s magic beneath the forests.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

3 years

When you're a child, you hear things like, "electric eels exist" and you think, "sure, that's just as new and weird as everything else." As an adult, it's important to revisit such knowledge and think, "oh, wait, this world is absolutely bananas."

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

3 years

Vultures are holy creatures. Tending the dead. Bowing low. Bared head. Whispers to cold flesh, “Your old name is not your king. I rename you ‘Everything.’”

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

27 year old me is gone from the world, but echoes of him remain. The same is true for 17 year old me and 7 year old me. Those people no longer exist and yet I hear their footsteps in the attic. Humans are haunted houses. We are both the rooms and the ghosts in the corners.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

An ant crosses your carpet. A spider weaves a pattern older than mammals beneath your stairs. Just nod, breathe, and think, “Good. It’s all still here. The forest, the mountains, the desert. At home in my home.” The sterile white box is the stranger. Not the ant. Not the spider.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

5 years

Birds are dinosaurs who shrugged off a couple apocalypses. Some eat bone marrow. Some drink nectar. They outswim fish in the sea. They smile politely at gravity’s demands. I am grateful to see them. I am grateful to feed them. I am grateful to know them.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

2 years

We seldom admit the seductive comfort of hopelessness. It saves us from ambiguity. It has an answer for every question: "There's just no point." Hope, on the other hand, is messy. If it might all work out, then we have things to do. We must weather the possibility of happiness.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

Your blood is red because of the iron you inherited from the Earth. You need the iron to help bind the oxygen you receive from plants and trees. Our blood and breath are hand-me-downs. The landscape is not decoration. Not scenery. It’s family.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

2 years

Moss is 300m yrs old. Home on every continent. No roots. No towering trunks, yet it tasted the air before the first feather, before shrews stirred the leaf litter. When your mind hisses like a kettle, look to your elder, to the green lessons of soft, simple quiet beneath the sun.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

4 months

I bet octopuses think bones are horrific. I bet all their cosmic horror stories involve rigid-limbs and hinged joints.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

5 years

I’m not a religious person, but two places feel consistently holy to me. Forests and libraries.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

3 years

One day, your skull will be as empty as a conch shell on a fence post, full of wind and gentle quiet. Today, it’s a cauldron of ghosts. Flesh and electricity. Water and memory. A machine that makes reality. Now. Here. Your skull is the garden where fact flowers into meaning.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

We are here and can fill our lungs because our world is populated by towering, green giants with the arcane ability to drink energy from a colossal ball of cosmic fire 93 million miles away. It’s odd isn’t it? Fairytale creatures don’t often notice the magic of their own worlds.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

5 years

Things that are perfect are dead things. Empty things. A silence beyond change or challenge. An endpoint. A blank page. You are a wonderfully messy thing. An impossible thing made of iron and rainwater. Meat and electricity. A dream with teeth. You're too good for perfection.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

2 years

It's not a mistake to need rest. Or seek help. Or make secret pacts with household spiders. Or find friendship with a mossy log. Or to think "hello" into the leaf-litter and wait for a response. Or sink your fingers into the soil to see if they take root. Or to love this world.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

2 years

Mushrooms are the temporary reproductive structures of massive, seldom seen, subterranean creatures more closely related to you than to plants. Fungi. Some are miles wide. Some live thousands of years. Some help trees speak to one another. There’s magic beneath the forests.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

5 years

The earliest cephalopods date back to the Cambrian period. They predate trees and land plants. So, the Earth knew tentacles before it knew leaves. Anyway, sweet dreams.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

Octopuses are amazing mimics. At some point, an octopus is going to stroll out of the ocean wearing glasses and cargo shorts and we need to at least pretend to buy it. Be cool. Buy them a drink. Don’t embarrass us in front of the cephalopods.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

5 years

Somewhere, there are orcas. I’m in my little gray house in Ohio surrounded by the stale, staticky air of winter indoors, but somewhere there are orcas. It’s an easy fact to forget. It’s easy to shrink your world to what you can see. But thankfully, somewhere, there are orcas.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

5 years

Home security tip: If you are awoken by a strange sound, make a stranger sound. If there’s no response, congratulations. You are the monster now. Get out of bed. You don’t need to sleep anymore. Now, all you need are the shadows and the endless whispers of dark corners. #safety

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

I once sat perfectly still next to a tree in the deep woods and a deer walked up and stood next to me without noticing me. I reached up and tapped its shoulder. It screamed like a velociraptor. I screamed too. Deer do not enjoy surprises. (True Story)

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

I resisted trying therapy for a long time because I thought I was too smart for it. Here's the thing. You can't think your way out of depression any more than you can think your way out of drowning. Asking for a life-jacket is more important than knowing the physics of buoyancy.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

3 years

If you've ever grabbed a stick from the ground and thought, "oh, this is a good stick," then we're family.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

Your eye is a collection of cells that evolved to borrow the radiation from a fiery ball of superheated hydrogen and helium in order to gather information about objects outside your physical reach. Vision is a kind of divination shaped and fueled by a cosmic inferno.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

5 years

Spoilers: I just read ahead to the last page of your life and it turns out that you were always worthy of love and hope and surpassing kindness.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

Some vampires adopt common dog names so that people will accidentally call them inside.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

Iron in birds’ inner ears help them navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field. In other words, the birds carry within them a piece of the Earth, a talisman, which speaks to the Earth and whispers its knowledge back to the birds.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

This evening I saw a veterinarian get excited that an eagle was attempting to bite her because it meant “he was feeling better.” Veterinarians are amazing. They should be featured on trading cards and cereal boxes.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

3 years

The adults of most moth species don't have mouths, but you can help. Donate your mouth to a moth in need. Remember, the difference between moth and mouth is U.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

Today you did things that humans 50 years ago wouldn’t believe and 200 years ago would struggle to imagine. You know the names of planets and the shapes of the bones inside you. You comprehend death and make art. You are a surpassingly strange animal, worthy of study. I love you.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

As you read this, a squid longer than a school bus is prowling dark waters. It's not terribly far away from you in terms of distance or biology. This is nothing more than a simple fact that feels like outlandish fiction and in that tension we find the poetry of living on Earth.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

Not a single atom in your body is alive. Not a single chemical or compound. You’re a complex arrangement of the same non-living elements that make up your environment. You’re distinct from the landscape only in terms of pattern and proportion, not substance.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

2 years

Boycott clothing that doesn't have pockets. Every pocketless garment is an insult to a cool rock you haven't met yet.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

4 years

Hey. Your matter recalls cosmic explosions and you tasted oblivion before you learned your own name. Fear nothing.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

4 years

Imposter syndrome is a sign you respect your chosen endeavor so much that you fear your skills won’t honor it. So, it’s a pretty strong indicator you aren’t an imposter.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

3 years

It’s frankly ridiculous that we can’t find one species of moss that will live on my head and eat anxiety/depression. Stylish, functional symbiosis. Have we really looked everywhere?

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

3 years

Often, my mental health does not cooperate with my creative goals. Often, "does not cooperate" is a profound understatement. I frame this as "brain weather." Sudden snow may disrupt my gardening plans, but the snow is not being malicious. It's not my enemy. It's just the weather.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

3 years

I don't know why it feels so good to touch a tree. Maybe because our hands evolved to grasp them. Maybe because the life within is so different from ours and also exactly the same. Maybe because it's like touching time, touching soil and sun and seasons of rain. Maybe it's love.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

5 years

If you can make peace with the unlikely fact that squid the size of school buses patrol the dark oceans at a depth that would crush you to paste, then I have faith you can also make peace with the unlikely fact that you are worthy of all the happiness you have imagined.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

5 years

500k years ago, an elk was struck by lightening and lived. The ache of it stayed in her bones the rest of her life. There was no human there to see it or record it in words, yet it's just as much a part of earth's essential history as any song lingering in a billion human minds.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

3 years

An acorn is carried off to be eaten. Now or 10 million yrs ago. It's forgotten. It's bitten by winter. It sinks into spring. It stands and thrives shelterless on bare earth, rain, and starlight for 300 years. Don't tell me humans rule this place. We live off the sighs of giants.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

A firefly lives 2 months. There are bristlecone pines standing today that have lived 5,000 yrs. And? The vital dignity of each of these species is not measured in time. Both are perfection. Treat your time likewise. Your moments deserve the same careful attention as your years.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

4 years

When in doubt, let nature guide you. Specifically, cactuses. Stay hydrated. Shelter owls. Stab your predators.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

What you call darkness is not what a cat calls darkness, not what an owl calls darkness. Your reality is yours alone and only cousin to the reality of other creatures. Think of all the self-contained worlds and alien landscapes that prowl and glide just beyond your dark windows.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

4 years

I have to assume that in the fullness of time, at least once, a mouse has used a mushroom as an umbrella. That’s enough to keep me going.

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@CryptoNature

5 years

Potatoes existed for millions of years before French fries were invented, so don’t be discouraged if you feel like you haven’t found your best self yet.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

5 years

Words are potent magic. When I stopped calling my writing time “homework” and started calling it “my quest,” it became easier to sit down at the computer. When I reached my daily writing goal, I stopped putting a simple check mark on my calendar and started writing “victory!”

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

"Love is just chemicals." Yeah? So is the churning inferno of the sun. So is the bedrock of the earth. So is the living fountain of a blooming cherry tree. If you need to call upon the word "magic" to fully appreciate the awesome beauty of all that which is vivid and real, do so.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

In all fairness, swordfish existed long before swords, so I think we should rename long bladed weapons “fish snoots.”

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

4 years

Caring for nature isn’t an act of charity. Those mountains are the iron in our blood. Those seas are the water in our skin. Those cloud-strewn skies are the breath in our lungs. Caring for nature isn’t charity. It’s the wisdom to push the knife away from our own tender throats.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

Why do we associate skeletons with autumn and Halloween? It's simple. Some people, like trees, are deciduous, shedding all their flesh in the Fall only to regrow it again in the spring. A strong wind and suddenly you're bare bones standing in the pale, October sunlight.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

2 years

I love science. I also love the concept of magic. I don't find that these ideas conflict. Fact and magic go together like sound and song, like ink and poetry, like truth and metaphor. A good metaphor does not destroy the truth. It brings it home to a human context. (1/4)

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

2 years

We all consume so many purposefully crafted stories that it’s easy to forget life doesn’t follow conventional narrative structure. We can’t wait for our climax. We don’t have character arcs. We live and then we don’t. The plot is happening now. Today is the story of you and me.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

2 years

I wish raccoons could talk. Not because I think they would tell us hidden truths of the wilds, but because I suspect they would really enjoy creative cursing. And I want that for them.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

I can't understand the sky the way a vulture does. I can't know what a pond is the way a musk turtle knows. I will never comprehend a tree as a footpath like a squirrel can. But I will sense the presence of these unknowable perspectives like the sun on my face and I am grateful.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

11 months

Leaf litter on the forest floor, slowly becoming rich soil, does not represent the failure of past summers’ leaves. It is the process by which the past nourishes the present and future. The same is true for your old self, your bygone choices, last season’s interests.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

3 years

Lives aren’t completed. They’re concluded. You are, and forever will be, unfinished. This is nature. Cycles and spectrums. Moments and seasons. Do you ask when the weather will be complete? The spring whole? Your life won’t have one point or purpose. You’re lovelier than that.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

Our fingers are built more for feeling than fighting. Nerve endings prioritized over talons or claws. Our relatively modest strength. Our long, vulnerable road to adulthood. Our species’s success is the story of betting on understanding over brutality. It’s the wise, patient bet.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

You are a wilderness. The avg human body has more bacterial cells than human cells. Our DNA is secondhand, shaped by the flora and fauna that tasted the air before our eldest ancestors. Our blood remembers the sea, our hands the treetops. You are the outdoors. You are nature.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

5 years

Improvement is an admirable goal, but there is no "best version" of you. There is only this version, which stands head and shoulders above all the hypothetical versions you can imagine by virtue of being real and here in the face of everything you have already overcome.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

Your brain is almost 75% water and that water is already on its way to becoming something else. A snowflake. A hurricane. The wet gleam on a falcon's eye. How much of us is borrowed? How much of us is the snow, the storm, the falcon?

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

2 years

Acknowledge the monsters you defy, the storms you weather. There are those walking this earth to whom your life would seem an uninhabitable rock jutting from an angry sea. Yet, there you are, stringing together days like flowers in your crown. Respect your own vital splendor.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

2 years

Like 75% of squirrel calls translate to, "I want an explanation for why you are near this tree and also nothing you could say will satisfy me."

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

9 months

We know that crows are very intelligent. The fact that scarecrows frighten them suggests there's something we don't know about scarecrows.

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@CryptoNature

3 years

It's worth remembering that if ghosts are real, then you already are one. In 1,000 years you'll be dancing in churchyard rain on some shaggy hillside and you'll think of the body you once had as a strange, short phase. Like a bad haircut.

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@CryptoNature

3 years

Feeling deeply is dangerous. Doing anything else is tragic.

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@CryptoNature

4 years

Pro tip: draw two large eyes on your mask to confuse and intimidate your natural predators.

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@CryptoNature

6 years

Picture your blood as a single unified organ, vaguely tree-shaped, branching iron-infused limbs threading through your entire body. It pulses to a concussive beat, delivering oxygen, healing wounds, hunting hostile invaders. Consider the dark, crimson forest inside you right now.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

Writing is around 6,000 years old. So very young. Imagine being alive during its invention. Strange handmade markings that transfer meaning from my mind to yours. It’s so easy to forget that it’s a miracle of human technology and magic.

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@CryptoNature

2 years

I hurt today. Oh well. I'm going for a walk and if it doesn't help, oh well. I'm not going to panic-buy anything. I'm not going to harm myself in frantic flight toward distraction. I'm going to take pride in every moment I can hold my pain gentle and inert. My own quiet victory.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

5 years

It’s easy to look at the contours of a forest and feel a bone deep love for nature. It’s less easy to remember that the contours of your own mind and body represent the exact same nature and deserves the same love. 💚

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

3 months

You know that idealized version of yourself that haunts you with guilt about what you haven't yet become? They didn't show up. They don't deserve your praise. The you who is reading this made it here, despite everything. This you is the garden worthy of your love and effort.

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@CryptoNature

6 years

@darke_shard @pekingspring True, but some of the bugs are also talented web-developers...

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

3 years

In the center of the forest, there is an unlikely stone that remembers when the mountains were new. It waits in a circle of moss like the pupil of a green eye. You kneel and ask it a wordless question. It answers. "Cherish exactly who you are. For there will never be another."

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@CryptoNature

5 years

Every memory is a ghost and the house they haunt is you.

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@CryptoNature

6 years

The overwhelming majority of the sun’s light has never encountered an earthly object. Never warmed a chickadee. Never illuminated a dogwood leaf. Most of its light has been speeding out and away for billions of years. Sunlight is so common to us, but we are so rare to it.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

4 years

The old you buzzes around your skull like a bee in the kitchen window. Don’t swat it. Be kind. We must hope that our current selves will one day step aside to make room for better versions of us. Shuttle the old you outside in a mason jar. Let it climb onto the lilac in the sun.

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@CryptoNature

5 years

Most of you is water. The water of your body doesn’t care about history, but it has history. To fall alongside summer lightning. To sparkle in moonlit mountain snow. To roar with an ocean’s crashing voice. To lend shape and substance to you right now. Its history is your history.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

Press your hand to the soil. The water, the bacteria, the minerals there are so very similar to your own substance. A thing that sets you apart is your ability to appreciate these similarities and feel affection and camaraderie for that patch of soil. Don’t waste that ability.

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@CryptoNature

6 years

When you die, your component parts are already home. Your blood’s Iron goes back to the earth. Your water returns to the cycle of sea and sky. And your thoughts? Your kindnesses? Nature does not waste and the unknowable is as rich and sustaining as dark soil or autumn stargazing.

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@CryptoNature

5 years

In the end, you were a part of the sky on loan to a body. A part of the sea that awoke to thought. A part of the Earth who borrowed a name. The essential piece of you that lingers is the love and knowledge that you set in motion while you moved through the waking world.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

5 years

Over the course of your lifetime, most of the cells that have formed the mosaic of your body have returned to nature. Most of the water that has fueled your life has returned to nature. The substance of your form is not fixed. It flows like a river to and from the wilderness.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

2 years

Go enjoy birdwatching. It doesn't matter if you don't know the species names of the birds you see. Your ignorance is only rude if the birds you watch call out your species name first, but that almost never happens.

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

Our muscles are prompted to grow by failure, through healing from countless micro-injuries. Our minds, science, and technology are similarly nourished by initial defeat. We are creatures born to thrive on the borderlands of impossibility. Here we sow failure and harvest miracles.

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@CryptoNature

4 years

Our bodies have died many times. These aren't the cells you were born with. Not the teeth. Nor brain. We in the pilot's chairs are already ghosts. Here and not here. Built of memories the way a beach is built of sand. Shifting. Ships anchored to fog. To live is to haunt.

10

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

1 year

Butterfly wings and grizzly bear jaws are both successful pathways to survival on this planet. There is no single, correct way to thrive.

3

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

6 years

People make meaning like bees make honey. Gathering experiences and images like bits of pollen and synthesizing it into something new, rich, and uniquely ours. Respect the meaning you make. The family you choose. The wisdom you craft, sweet and golden on your tongue.

7

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

4 years

Long ago, a stone felt a tingle on its skin. Moss. A new feeling. A green feeling. The granite spoke of ages in the heat of deep Earth. The moss sang the taste of sunlight and the softness of salamander bellies. They named one another. And told those names to no one at all.

10

209

614

The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

3 years

There are two wolves inside of each of us. And those two wolves also have two wolves inside of them, each of which contain two wolves of their own and so on. The point is, we all contain an impossible, toothy nebula of infinite wolves. And that’s why life is confusing sometimes.

13

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The CryptoNaturalist

@CryptoNature

5 years

If you know empathy is a virtue, not a weakness. If you believe curiosity is more valuable than certainty. If you see nature is more than a resource. If you are brave enough to acknowledge your fragility. If your ignorance feels like an opportunity to grow. Then we are family.

15

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