Your softness matters so much right now
Your softness matters so much right now
Your softness matters so much right now. The soft quiet critters and creatures that forage and
breathe and swim and slither around this earth have been sustaining us for so long. And the soft,
the loving, the mad dreamers who kept insisting we have other ways of doing things — their
worlds are merging and melding and manifesting. The systems will fall and fail and flail. They
always do. And this does not discount that we will face great hardship as we build the world as it
needs us to, in soft and thoughtful reciprocity with all existence. In thoughtful connectivity that
brings us together and dismantles the last many centuries of wrongs.
But your softness, like little creatures burrowing down into the earth, hibernating, your quick
flash of silver minnow in a boreal lake. Your pine needles, your duck’s down, your red clover
dew. Your lake mist and moonlight, your skipping rocks and your ocean waves. Your deep sea
vent worms, your trilobite with stalk eyes, your horseshoe crab and kelp forests. Your cockatoos
and turtles. Damsel fish and snapping shrimp. Your orang utan, your nanuq, your ôhôsis, tree
frog, lion, thylacine, fungi and single celled algae. The fossil kin, the dinosaurs, the zooplankton.
All the beings manifesting worlds we are fortunate to criss cross and breathe and molder in. They
have been modelling all along how to respond to the touch of sky and stars.
So when you feel at such a loss, when the ruins and weapons of this great unjust world feel like
they are closing in, remember that you are made of the same stuff as the critters, the fossils, the
cells that found a way to manifest life here in sulphur and fire. And you, your perfect existence
reflecting all of space and time and matter, will shape a shift on par with oxygen and bacteria and
the Burgess Shale and other wonders too magical to be just Darwin’s map or Hobbes’ short or
Hardin’s tragedy. You have always had more roads to follow than those. Listen to the soft
critters guiding you to shore.
Zoe Todd
contents of issue 12
Mask
M. Carmen Lane
Zoe Todd Biography
Zoe Todd (Metís) is an artist, scholar, writer who studies all things fish, water, and fishy
refraction. They are a soft fish beamed down from another planet. #speculativefishction
