BY A.C.
This is a re-purposed post from a student speech competition. Do you get the message hidden in the speech that also melds the themes of the Taichung World Floral Expo?
I saw it. Those movies that talk of dust bowls and windswept plains of devastation. This green Earth painted red and black. Forests turned over by the hourglass of time and only left to sift through the sands of tomorrow.
Today we must embrace our hope and rejoin the Earth. We must no longer live as factories of exploitation but farms of fertilization. Digging down to feel the soil beneath the concrete. Ohh that feeling, the richness of dirt between your toes, feeling the 100s, No! 1000s, No! Millions of years of history. The place from which you came, the history of all life, covered up….
I digress. Breathing in the air that is released from the magic of photosynthesis. Synthesize a new dawn of humanity, one that provides riches for those who give hope for the future, one that swims against a raging current to spring new life in a tranquil nesting pond, one that lives through all the souls of life on this planet, one that stops, listens and hears the sound of blooming.
Sounds you only hear from the living. The opening of petals into the warm embrace of the sun. A sound that is now DEAD. Dead among our islands of stone. Stone dug up from cities. Stoned beyond an imagination of prosperity. Stoned out of peace. Stone.
That’s what has made these lands that cover up the grasslands, no forests, no rain-forests of the sea. A sea teaming with life, unimaginable colors, not buried BUT lying dead below false promises and misdirections of security. Security we wish we had. Security we long to have. But alas, secure we do not feel.
And so I ask, that even on these lands of buried futures we plant. We plant the seeds of tomorrow. Grow the flowers and stop. Stop fighting our wars of words. Fighting our dreams of conquest. Stop shipping our goods to lands that we exploit. Just stop and listen. Listen to the sound of those flowers blooming.