Hold My Hand

Long before pills came in bottles and cures had names, the earth was our healer. Willow trees eased the pain long before aspirin. Moldy bread held the secret of penicillin. The venom of a serpent, deadly in one breath, became the antidote in another.

For every wound, there was a leaf. For every fever, there was a root. For every sickness, a remedy. Waiting to be found. The modern world repackages what nature has always known. But the prescription has never changed—look down

Machines Don’t Listen

Yet we are ripping our natural apothecaries apart. Rainforests, vanish acre by acre; their cures silenced by the noise of chainsaws and fallen trees before they are even spoken.
The remedies we seek may lie in the roots we rip apart, the leaves we burn, and the fungi we step on. But as the forest burns, so too do the answers, our precious answers, because our machines cannot listen to them.

Nature’s Pharmacy is Closing

And so the medicines disappear before we even know their names.
The bark of the cinchona tree, once a gift against malaria, is now dust. The rosy periwinkle, a delicate bloom holding the cure for childhood leukemia, withers before its full story is told. The Pacific yew, whose bark holds the power to fight cancer, is felled without a second thought.

We rip apart the vines that could soothe pain, torch the fungi that might hold the key to neurodegenerative diseases, and crush the leaves that could save a failing heart. 

Progress is Louder, But Not Wiser

But nature does not bargain. It does not shout over the noise. It only fades, taking its secrets with it. Just because it is not making noise doesn't mean that there won't be any sound. When the last tree falls, when the last cure is lost to the smoke, we will search for answers in the silence, crowded by our talking heads. There will be so much sound in the silence.
But no answer.

The Science of Silence

We will search in sterile laboratories in glass vials and synthetic compounds, hoping to recreate what we once destroyed. We will scan the remains of what was, looking for a cure that no longer exists.

The fungi, the leaves, the barks—they will remain only in the stories of those who remember, the story of an apothecary we chose to burn. And when the fevers rise, when the diseases grow stronger than the our medicines, we will finally understand.

The cure was never ours to own.
It was only ever borrowed.

And now, it is gone.