Last month I launched a newsletter, a monthly missive recapping past blog posts and compiling some of my favorite articles/posts/images from the vast, bottomless web.

Among the political muck, endless digital advertisements, and sponsored posts, there remain a few people who choose to garden, to observe the natural world around them and share their perspectives online. My newsletter features their stories as well as my own, putting writers and artists from vastly different areas and backgrounds in conversation with each other. This is the green internet; a growing, fluid place where we can share and plan and think about nature during the times when, for whatever reason, we’re not able to just go be in it. Here’s a glimpse of last month’s inaugural memo.

If you like what happens here on Darker than Green, then you may very well enjoy this bonus slice of internet I’ve been working on. A new newsletter goes out this week. And I promise it will be filled with plants, poetry, activism, awareness, and all the other things that keep us going.

Sign up here.

(Another, slightly more fleshed out version of this essay is on Medium. The thoughts below were written in a frenzy after watching Lemonade the weekend it was released.)

Mother dearest, let me inherit the Earth.

The first few frames of Lemonade show weeds and reeds rustling in the wind, growing out of literal ruins. The framing device — a giant, mature live oak tree, dripping with Spanish moss — is the constant, the ever-present protection and watcher, growing still despite its painful Southern history. A cluster of powerful, creative, assertive black women adorn its branches, gazing firmly into the camera. Later, those same women will till the fertile earth and pull from it food and sustenance, coaxing life from the land, coated in color and sunlight.

Continue…