All colour-coded and catalogued in my brain

This is a full transcript of 1800 Seconds on Autism: “All colour-coded and catalogued in my brain”, as released on 9 April 2020 and presented by Robyn Steward and Jamie Knight.

[Jingle: BBC Sounds: music, radio, podcasts. 1800 Seconds on Autism, with Robyn Steward and Jamie Knight.]

DARA - I don’t really measure my energy. I hit the point where I drop off the cliff, but I never see the cliff coming.

JAMIE - I’ve just realised that I think the air conditioning vents on the wall actually spell out BBC if you get them from the right angle, and therefore I can’t remember what we’re talking about.

DARA - And then I went to secondary school and people seemed to hate me because you couldn’t shut me up about how, because of the amount of gravitational pressure around the neutron star, all of the electrons fused with the protons to turn them into a neutron, which then means that you have the entire neutron star is basically like a single atom core with billions of neutrons inside it and then…

JAMIE - Do you know about the conservation of angular momentum and that’s why they spin?

DARA - Yes.

[Music]

ROBYN - Hello. This is 1800 Seconds on Autism, a podcast with two autistic presenters and an intense interest in, well, autism. I’m Robyn Steward.

JAMIE - And I’m Jamie Knight. This introduction was recorded remotely due to the coronavirus restrictions so it might sound a bit different to the rest of the episode. Our guest this time is Dara McAnulty. He’s 15 years old and has intense interests in birds and black holes and writes and speaks about nature and the environment.

ROBYN - Before we get to our checklist designed by our new producer, Emma, to figure out how we’re doing, let’s listen to Jamie getting distracted by the patterns on the studio wall.

[Music]

JAMIE - I’ve just realised that all of the wall cladding is symmetrical apart from one. It’s really annoying. They’ve got a lovely pattern going apart from the left-hand corner. Hey Dara.

DARA - Hi.

ROBYN - So, Dara’s down the line, which means that he’s sat in a studio that isn’t this one. You the audience you’re listening from wherever you are. So, let’s describe who’s in the studio with us: there’s Lion.

JAMIE - Roar!

ROBYN - And Henry, the support bat, and I’m in a play at the moment and Henry’s become quite a key person or key bat within this production, and so we decided that he’d need a stunt bat. But Harry is here to do on-the-job training, so he’s shadowing Henry to learn what being a support bat is. And we’ve got Emma, our producer.

EMMA - Hello.

JAMIE - For some reason all of our producers have been blind. I’m not sure why; maybe it’s something we said.

EMMA - It’s something to do with eye contact, right?

JAMIE - Oh yeah, that’s brilliant.

DARA - Oh-ho.

JAMIE - Yeah, we can’t do eye contact if you can’t see us.

ROBYN - And then Jamie’s support person, Ed.

ED - Hello.

JAMIE - And he’s here to make sure I don’t catch fire basically, and make sure I get here and home safely without getting too run over. Dara, is there anybody at your end?

DARA - I have the muted invisible mother who shall not speak. [Laughter]

ROBYN - That’s your mum?

JAMIE - She can giggle, by the sounds of things.

DARA - Yeah.

ROBYN - At the start of every recording from now on we’ll be taking stock – that’s the producer’s words, not mine. What it means is we’ll talk about how we’re doing. And we’ve got a checklist, so I’m going to go through the checklist all the way through and then we’ll talk about each item. So here are the things: there are spoons, which is a measurement of energy; stims, which are repetitive movements; and intense interests, things that we think about a lot.

JAMIE - The script then says that I need to say how I am today in spoons. I’m pretty good. I collapsed the other day and hurt my arm, and I’m currently on codeine and caffeine, which is brilliant. I’m high as a kite, which is really quite fun and bouncy. The next question was I need to ask Robyn how her spoons are today. How are your spoons today, Robyn?

ROBYN - Well, I don’t always measure my energy in spoons so I don’t really know. But I’ve got Henry and Harry so I’m happy.

JAMIE - Awesome. Dara, do you use spoons? How do you measure your energy?

DARA - I don’t really measure my energy. I kind of like hit the point where I kind of like drop off the cliff, but I, like, never see the cliff coming, so.

JAMIE - I used to be like that. The way that it worked for me was I kind of had to make my days really repeatable, and then I could start predicting where that little energy cliff would be. And then I started slowly adding more variation back into my life, but then I could always use my routine as almost like a metronome.

DARA - Ah okay.

JAMIE - And then I could add a bit more or take a bit away, depending on how it’s going. I sometimes call it pacing, which is working out how I get to the end of the day.

ROBYN - How about stims? My current stims are that I’ve got all of my fingers, and then one moving my feet backwards and forwards, shifting my weight between my feet. Jamie, have you got any stims?

JAMIE - My normal rocking, bouncing. I’m currently fiddling with this little jack from one of the headphones because it’s made of plastic on one end, which is like really soft and grippy, and really smooth metal on the other end, and it’s kind of really nice to run your fingers across the little transition between the two. I keep wanting to lick it, but I think I’ll get told off for doing that, so I’ll wait till everyone’s distracted and then I’ll lick it. [Laughter]

EMMA - Don’t lick it!

JAMIE - Oh, the more you tell me not to lick it the more it’s going to get licked. It’s like a button that says do not press this button, you know, it’s just oh god, I need to press the button now.

ROBYN - Do lick it, but make sure that you give it a bit of a wash afterwards.

JAMIE - Will do. I’ll just wipe it on my t-shirt. Also it’s not plugged into anything; I did check. Have we got distracted, Emma?

EMMA - Yes.

ROBYN - Dara, do you have any stims?

DARA - Well, I like fiddling around with cards, but at the moment I don’t have any cards, which is a bit annoying, so I’m just fiddling around with a pen.

EMMA - And will you be okay without them?

DARA - I’ll be fine. I’ve got a pen.

JAMIE - What sort of pen?

DARA - I’m not entirely sure. It was the only one in the office. It’s kind of like a biro, ballpoint.

ROBYN - It doesn’t even have a clicky bit.

DARA - I know. Really annoying. It’s got a lid though.

ROBYN - Well, what about some Blu Tack, would that be good? I bet they have Blu Tack at the BBC, right Emma?

EMMA - Yes. If you need further items to fidget with you just let us know and we will sort it out.

ROBYN - It’s really not a problem.

JAMIE - No. You know we’ve got like a stationery cupboard full of pens and stuff; we should have a fidget cupboard full of Blu Tack and cool things.

ROBYN - That’s a good idea for Robyn’s Rocket.

JAMIE - Another one for your event.

ROBYN - Yeah.

JAMIE - Robyn’s Rocket. Oh, we were about to talk about intense interests, weren’t we? Hey Robyn, what are you up to at the moment?

ROBYN - Well, so I have a few. One is about self-employment for autistic people. Another is this thing called Robyn’s Rocket. And in our production meeting when we were talking with Emma, Emma was like, “Well that’s just putting on an event”. But then she realised, oh no, the level of detail I go to. And then we started having a conversation about ear defenders.

JAMIE - Oh, I do love a good set of ear defenders.

ROBYN - Yeah. So, we were talking and I asked you what’s the biggest reduction, and you said, 90 decibels.

JAMIE - 90 to 60.

ROBYN - 90 to 60.

JAMIE - Which is 30 decibels.

EMMA- Hang on, we’re going to deal with that in another show that you’re doing.

JAMIE - Oh. So, Robyn, tell us about Robyn’s Rocket. It sounds really cool.

ROBYN - Well so, Robyn’s Rocket is an inclusive conscious series of gigs, and by inclusive conscious I mean we think about inclusivity, but I appreciate that, like it’s experimental left-field music, so definitely it’s not going to be for everybody. But also that we don’t turn the volume down, I mean we don’t turn it up an extra amount either, and we have a sort of psychedelic live drawing light show on the walls and the ceiling. But we do lend out ear defenders, we have earplugs, and you can wear earplugs and ear defenders at the same time. And we also have a range of sunglasses that people can borrow while they’re there. I wanted people to be able to understand what was going on without needing spoken or written English, and so every act has a shape and colour: there’s a red rectangle, a blue square, a orange triangle and a green circle. Those are in the right order on the timetable, and then they’re in the right order on the stage, and then they’re also on the merchandise table. How about you, Dara, what’s your current intense interest?

DARA - This one has been going on for quite a while, like a year or two. So I set up this campaign to satellite tag birds of prey. Sadly we could not sat tag hen harriers because they’re a bit delicate and we didn’t want to cause the extinction of a species, which would be the exact opposite. So, we settled with red kites and buzzards, and it’s been absolutely amazing. I get to see a big map, and then on the map it’s got all the dots where each of the birds are, and then I get to watch as all the birds move across the map.

JAMIE - Wow.

ROBYN - This might be a good time to explain what monologuing is.

DARA - Yeah.

JAMIE - Oh, that’s when Jamie goes on about something for ages. He’s really good at that.

ROBYN - Well, not just Jamie, anybody.

DARA - I was in the Isle of Man once and I got to have the most fun of my life because I had the chance to just monologue for a solid 40 minutes. So..

JAMIE - That’s basically what I do. When I do presentations I write some slides so I monologue in roughly the right direction.

DARA - Yeah.

JAMIE - And then I just go for a monologue, and people seem to like it. I’m like, “This feels lovely. Do I have to stop?”

ROBYN - Monologuing is when a person talks about something without really pausing or asking questions. So, it’s not really a conversation; it’s more that they’re talking at you about something. Autistic people often talk at you about things they’re very positive about and interested in.

JAMIE - Yeah.

ROBYN - Or it might be, actually that’s wrong, because sometimes actually people do monologue about things that really upset them. So, I guess for some people I think it might be a way of processing information, like if you can talk a long time about something that’s worrying you it helps you to process it. Because sometimes I just ring my mum and I’m just like, “no, I don’t need you to actually do anything other than just listen. You don’t have to solve the problem.”

JAMIE - Do you know there’s a name for that in software development: it’s called rubber-ducking, which is when you take a rubber duck and you literally say “I’ve got this bug in my software, every time I do blah”. And then halfway through you go, “yes rubber duck, I know exactly what the problem is.” And then you put the rubber duck away and then fix it.

ROBYN - No, it’s slightly different to that because I really need my mum to let me know she’s listening. And sometimes she might have something useful, but it’s more that I haven’t rung up because I want an answer; I need to tell her because she’s my mum and she cares about me. And I might need to go in a lot of detail and nobody else really wants to listen to that apart from my mum.

JAMIE - Oh, that’s a shame. I’ve just realised that I think the air conditioning vents on the wall actually spell out BBC if you get them from the right angle, and therefore I can’t remember what we’re talking about.

[Jingle: Send any questions or thoughts to [email protected]]

ROBYN - So, Dara, could you tell us a bit about yourself, like maybe a bit about your family or how you found out you were autistic, that kind of thing?

DARA - I am the eldest sibling, so I’ve got a younger brother and a younger sister. All of us are autistic.

JAMIE - Woo hoo.

DARA - So, they saw I was autistic, then we were looking for it. So, I’ve got my mum who’s also autistic, and then I’ve got my dad who isn’t autistic, so he’s kind of the odd one out.

JAMIE - I’m sure we can get him some sort of therapy to help him you know cope. Neurotypical people, they need all of our support and love in order to help them have awareness of their condition.

DARA - Yes. [Laughter]

ROBYN - And how old were you when you first knew you were autistic?

DARA - I knew I was kind of different because I kind of got really, really excited about black holes and nobody really wanted to listen. I must have been five; I guess that’s quite early.

ROBYN - Did your mum ever sit you down? Because my mum, when I was 12, she sat me down on her bed and she told me that I was autistic. So, did anyone ever tell you that you were autistic?

DARA - That’s a funny thing, I can’t remember any important conversations, but I can remember throwing snowballs at my brother in 2010, so.

JAMIE - I can’t remember a lot of the most important things in my life either, but I can remember weird things that sound insignificant for others.

DARA - Yeah.

JAMIE - I tend to remember stuff around strong positive emotions a lot better than strong negative ones.

DARA - Yeah.

JAMIE - So, I can remember my last bike ride; I can’t remember getting dressed this morning or what I’ve eaten today. But things that really interest me will stick in my head and everything else just seems to fall out of my ears when I’m not paying attention.

DARA - Yeah.

JAMIE - Do you know what, I think it’s okay. This is one of the questions that the producer asked us, so I think we can move on to a more interesting one. 

DARA - Oh yeah.

JAMIE - I say a more interesting one, but this question is going to…oh I know what my answer to this would be so I hope it’s not too bad. The question that the producer has written is: how has school been for you?

DARA - Oh god.

JAMIE - Please do not swear.

DARA - [Laughter] So, in primary school I was bullied-ish. It wasn’t too bad. Then I went to secondary school and people seemed to hate me because you couldn’t shut me up about birds or black holes, or I went to secondary school and people seemed to hate me because you couldn’t shut me up about how, because of the amount of gravitational pressure around the neutron star, all of the electrons fused with the protons to turn them into a neutron, which then means that you have the entire neutron star is basically like a single atom core with billions of neutrons inside it and then…

JAMIE - Do you know about the conservation of angular momentum and that’s why they spin?

DARA - Yes.

JAMIE - Okay, that’s really cool. If you have something spinning and you make it smaller there has to be the same amount of spin in it. It’s like magic.

DARA - Yeah, so therefore it must spin faster, yeah.

JAMIE - Do you know about little green man one, LGM1?

ROBYN - Hang on, though, Jamie.

JAMIE - Sorry, I’m getting distracted.

ROBYN - We’re supposed to be talking about…

JAMIE - Sorry, autism stuff, sorry.

DARA - Oh yeah.

ROBYN - But the question we were asking was…

JAMIE - How’s school?

ROBYN - …about school, and then Dara was saying when you went to high school that people didn’t want to hear about neutron stars and birds.

DARA - I was quite heavily bullied at that school, and I was starting to get really, really down and things were not going well. It was pretty horrible; I didn't have very many friends. But what really helped me was going out into nature and just sitting down in the middle of a forest and then I was going over all the things that had happened that day in my mind, all the things that the bullies had said, and when I was sitting in the forest I came up to this magnificent revelation. And it was: I care about nature and I don’t care about the bullies, and I think nature’s amazing but they don’t. So therefore what they say is irrelevant to me because I don’t care about them but I care about nature. So, therefore nature is amazing and they are idiots, I guess.

JAMIE - It’s sometimes very nice that when I’m around other autistic people I’ve got a friend who’s an autistic engineer and we can spend hours talking about the intricacies of gearboxes because we both appreciate the amazing engineering behind it, how they’re built, how they work. Most people wouldn’t be interested. But I think that’s other people’s loss that they don’t see the wonder of the world around them because they’re so busy being neurotypicals and focused on social things like the status they get from wearing a certain type of watch.

ROBYN - I got bullied a lot too, Dara, at school and what I can tell you is the rest of life is not like school.

JAMIE - Yeah.

ROBYN - I know that you’ve got a few more years to go, but I got kicked out of school when I was 15 and I don’t have any GCSEs or anything, but life is much better for me and I have friends and people that care about me.

JAMIE - Same.

ROBYN - And sometimes the people that are doing the bullying, well as you know, sometimes it’s because they feel insecure. But also sometimes it’s that they – my mum is also autistic, like your mum, and I grew up knowing that there was nothing wrong with being autistic, I wasn’t ill or broken, I was different and that was totally fine.

DARA - Yeah.

ROBYN - And not everybody would understand. But I think because the bullies had never really had any education about disability or difference; when people don’t know something that sometimes when they’re a kid they’re very unkind. And those people they grow into adults, like I met somebody a few years ago who I bumped into him, well I didn’t actually literally bump into him, I saw him and he saw me at a train station and he apologised for bullying me when we were children. He said he did it because he was bored; so it had nothing to do with me whatsoever.

JAMIE - One of the things I’ve also learnt is when I was a kid people thought my peers were people who were the same age as me, and that’s just not the case. So, I have almost no friends who are my age; all of my friends are 10 or 12 years older than me. But they’re all at the same point in their careers or interests. I’ve been a software engineer developer sort of person since I was nine, and all of my friends are that technical background, and weirdly they don’t care that I’m auti. In fact a lot of the things that make me.. make it hard for most people my age to understand me they understand from their younger brothers, younger sisters. They’re almost like grown-ups and I’m not. And actually we’ve embraced that and gone, look I’m going to need help getting from A to B, but when your car breaks down you’re going to be really glad that I’m here because I can read the wiring diagram in the manual – stuff like that. So, they see my value in a different way and I don’t have to try and fit in; in fact I think I’ve learnt that the more I embrace being me the better it goes for everybody. 

EMMA - What you’ve said is incredible and I’m almost crying here.

ROBYN - Emma, why are you crying?

EMMA - Because it’s so…

JAMIE - She’s become emotionally dysregulated.

DARA - Yeah. [Laughter]

EMMA- It’s because it’s so unusual to hear two autistic adults talking to an autistic teenager and telling him something immensely useful about what life might be like for them in the future, when life is not that easy just now. For me that’s exactly why we do this podcast. I don’t know if Dara feels like it, but it feels so helpful and important to hear those words. And that’s why I’m emotional because I feel like it’s something that I feel like it’s maybe something Dara needed to hear, or if Dara didn’t need to hear it other people listening will really, really, really appreciate it and need to hear that. Was that useful for you, Dara?

DARA - Yeah, it was very useful for me. But at the moment I’m in a school where they’re all about as nerdy as me.

JAMIE - Woo hoo!

ROBYN - That’s good.

DARA - So, for the first time ever I’ve been put into the geek class.

JAMIE - Yay!

DARA - And now I can chat to them about how a computer works.

JAMIE - It’s great, isn’t it?

DARA - It’s amazing.

[Jingle: Email [email protected]]

ROBYN - One of the things that we have in our questions that Emma wrote for us is some people have called you the Irish Greta Thunberg. How do you feel about that?

DARA - Well, it’s this sort of comparing that annoys me, because I was there two years before Greta Thunberg. I’m not Greta Thunberg in any which way possible. I experience the world a lot different to her. I express my message very differently. Her message is: the world is in danger, we all need to fight it; my message is more like: the world is beautiful so we need to protect it.

JAMIE - There’s a really good distinction there by the way. So, you’re kind of doing education where she’s doing is kind of advocacy.

ROBYN - But carry on, Dara, because what you’re saying is really interesting.

JAMIE - Sorry.

DARA - Okay, I just need to get my stride back up again.

EMMA - It’s fine.

DARA - Okay, I’m back.

JAMIE - Sorry.

DARA - I’ve also had this big old philosophy of mine: I don’t really want to have someone to almost role model, because if I’m role modelling someone that means being someone else, and that is absolutely my biggest hate and biggest fear in the world is to be tied down to a certain area. I want to be like liquid and fluid, just running from one thing to the next with nobody ever being able to tell me what to do. And people can really see how that I could be really, really passionate about both physics and biology, and sometimes chemistry. I guess chemistry is cool as well.

JAMIE - Chemistry is just like physics but with practice.

DARA - Yeah, and sometimes biology as well.

JAMIE - Yeah, biology is just chemistry with practice.

DARA - Yeah.

JAMIE - It’s all really just mathematics with practice.

ROBYN - Could I just make a suggestion? And Jamie, if this isn’t helpful it’s totally okay to say it’s not helpful. But I think maybe it’s hard for you to know when Dara has finished, and maybe Emma might be able to like put your hand up when Dara is finished, that way you know.

EMMA - Well actually, to be fair I don’t exactly know when Dara’s finished either, and I would not like to say that I know.

ROBYN - But what you said was the rule was when Dara is being quiet for one to two seconds. That’s what you said.

EMMA - If we’re going to do this as fair as possible how about if Dara says, I’m finished?

ROBYN - Okay yeah.

EMMA - How about that?

ROBYN - That way Jamie he knows.

EMMA - And we all know.

ROBYN - Then we all know.

EMMA - And Dara can say as much as he wants.

ROBYN - Yeah.

JAMIE - Isn’t this lovely, everyone else has decided a strategy to impose on me without asking me?

ROBYN - No.

EMMA - No, it’s not on you.

ROBYN - No, we are asking you. What I said was if it’s okay with you, but it was just a suggestion.

EMMA - Well we’re almost finished anyway.

JAMIE - Can I make a different suggestion?

EMMA - Yes.

JAMIE - Dara, if I interrupt you just say, “Not now Jamie” and continue with your train of thought and I’ll shut up.

DARA - Okay.

JAMIE - It’s all gone to one of them awkward silences.

EMMA - No, I’m just looking at my script to see where we are.

JAMIE - What’s your favourite joke?

ROBYN - So, Emma was saying you do a field diary every day. So how does writing things down help you?

DARA - So, when I’m outside and I’m experiencing something I don’t exactly experience it fully; it’s kind of all a bit muted because my brain is trying to say, oh my god, got all these masses amount of colours, and it doesn’t want me to process it all at once. If I did my brain would explode. So, then when I go home, instead of forgetting about it, I write it down and that allows me to almost relive the memories and then reprocess it. And it’s been catalogued, given its colour-coding and put into a certain folder, and that is that day’s memory. So, in that sense writing is really, really important to me because if I couldn’t write about what was happening to me and let’s say that Robyn came really, really close to me and it was an amazing experience, if I didn’t have that chance of writing something down then I wouldn’t process it properly and the entire experience would be lost. And I don’t want to lose experiences because I value generally nothing more than having an experience. Finished.

ROBYN - And when you said about folders do you mean folders in your head or physical folders or folders on your computer?

DARA - I guess I put my field diaries into folders, but I also folder it away in my brain. So I’ve got a certain area of my brain is for nature, a certain area of my brain is for physics. And I need a sort of trigger: let’s say I might have like the triggers of a certain thing being a certain word, and then I hear this certain word, and then it opens up this whole memory in my brain and I’ll go, oh my god I’m remembering all of this stuff that I’ve completely forgotten about, but it’s still in there.

JAMIE - If you could change one thing in your life at a click of your fingers what it would be and why?

DARA - I would click my fingers and climate change would stop, and all of the biodiversity that was here, say let’s go back about 500 years, those were pretty good days – not socially of course, but from biodiversity terms they were amazing. We still had wolves in Ireland so that’s always a good sign.

JAMIE - The sheep weren’t so happy about that. Sorry, I’m making a joke, ignore me.

DARA - And I’d like everything to just come to a natural balance where all the ecosystems are working carefully and don’t have to take human management into them, which generally always goes wrong. Us humans don’t have the sort of mental capability to perceive how the natural world works because every single little string that connects up the entire world is so connected that removing one it can have completely unforeseen reactions throughout the entirety of the world. So, for example in Yellowstone they reintroduced wolves there and the entire landscape changed. The amount of deer went down which meant that more trees came up. And I think this just shows that us humans could only see, I’d say we see about four steps ahead, but nature has about 500. We’ve got no real way of saying how that would have turned out, but I’m saying it would be definitely a lot better than the polar caps melting and wildfires going out across France and generally utter disaster. Finished.

ROBYN - I want to say thank you so much, Dara, for coming to talk to us. We really appreciate it. And also to Jamie, I’m sorry if I offended you; I was just trying to help.

JAMIE - I’m not offended at all. I’m just trying to keep the momentum going.

DARA - Okay.

JAMIE - And I know that I talk too much, but I can’t stop it. And when other people try and stop it it actually gets even harder for me because then I need to not stop the stopping. So, the best thing for me to normally do is if I am talking too much, rather than other people try and stop it, I’ll make an agreement with the person that I’m interrupting that they are completely within their thing to go, “Not now Jamie” because that tends to disrupt the flow less.

ROBYN - Thank you so much, Dara, it’s been a pleasure to talk to you. Best of luck with your book coming out and keep up the excellent work. And if you ever get bullied in the future, as my mum says, don’t let the bullies get you down.

JAMIE - You’re epic. Keep being epic.

ROBYN - We loved talking with Dara. He’s so clever and passionate, but also a typical teenager. Hopefully he found chatting with us autistic adults of some use.

JAMIE - Dara’s book, Diary of a Lone Naturalist, is scheduled to be BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week in May 2020 and will be available on BBC Sounds too.

ROBYN - Please share this show with anybody you think might enjoy it. Subscribe to us on BBC Sounds or say to your smart speaker, “ask the BBC for 1800 Seconds on Autism”, and it’ll play the most recent edition. The email address to get in touch is [email protected], that’s s-t-i-m.

JAMIE - We’ll continue to record special short podcasts about how we’re coping with the coronavirus situation, so please let us know what you’d like to hear on those. We are sandwiching them between our regular podcasts so look out for them.

ROBYN - I hope they’re jam sandwiches!

JAMIE - Ooh, it’s a podcast sandwich, num, num, num.

ROBYN - Dara is also a poet and before we leave you today we’re going to hear Dara to read out one of his poems. It’s interesting, it’s clearly about how we’ve all destroyed the world and the nature he loves so much. Cheerio and here’s Dara.

DARA - The Holocene Extinction?

When we began our feet trod lightly

Bare upon the earth we were weightless.

Travelling, allowing resurgence and regrowth, leaving enough.

Reverence.

Forging through millennia, we kept on adding endless weight, leadening

Heaviness, leaving deep and lasting indentations, sending shockwaves.

Eliminating.

Cruelty, cavernous greed, no impediment,

Hands and feet becoming industrial. Monsters, spewing toxicity, sickening

Deafening, echoing arrows.

Piercing.

Now, thundering, trampling boundlessly.

Decimating pathways once bountiful.

We watch helplessly, numb, aching

Hollow haunting cries to empty spaces.

Waiting.

Stop. I hear hope, purposefully striding.

Footsteps pleading, necessary action.

Great minds whirring, channelling change

Demanding respectfully our weight to lessen.

We want birdsong, abundant fluttering, humming, no more poison, destruction.

Growing for growth, it has to end.

Will my generation see the rightful rising?

[Jingle: That was 1800 Seconds on Autism.