The Orchid Journal

"What'chya doin'?" -a goat in New Jersey, 2011 (photo y Laelia Watt) Standing at a bus stop recently, I absentmindedly checked my Facebook page for the fifth time that day, when it hit me. It has been a while since I could remember what it is like to not be aware of what 30 friends were thinking at any given time. I like Facebook. It is a great tool which has helped me categorize all my photos, keep in touch with family members scattered all over the world, and has sparked many fun conversations with my friends over the years, but I suddenly missed having my brain filled with only my own thoughts during the day. As a person who has moved frequently throughout my life, the oddest thing about social media is that the thoughts, activities, photos, and political leanings of the friends I would normally leave behind and slowly drift from, are suddenly displayed daily for me to peruse. Don't get me wrong, I like keeping in touch with old friends, and as I said, I...

A family throwing rocks into the Mississippi, St. Louis, MO. (photo by Laelia Watt) Writers often wax poetic about the brevity of life. For me, there are moments in the stillness of my day where the concept of time and my space in it seem as vastly incongruent as a flea trying to hitch a ride on a blue whale. I worry about significance, worth, and the gum that gets stuck to my shoe while walking to the library. Fireworks on the 4th of July are brief, but send millions of people into raptures. Butterflies , from beginning to end, span the vast time of a month or a year, and yet they're the subject of countless photos, poems, and metaphors. We build structures a thousand times bigger than ourselves and throw rocks into a river a thousand times older than ourselves. We exist in a time frame ineffably longer than ourselves. "I learned a long time ago... that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing....