It is fitting to begin this journal during a spring that has set records for the highest pollen count ever seen in the United States, where the jury is still out on whether or not our increasingly chaotic weather patterns are indebted to the coming climate catastrophe. But the trees are turning greener than I’ve ever seen them.

As the pollen settles on the ground, coating parking lots and automobiles in thick yellow, a mild disruption to those afflicted with strong allergies, we meet an opportunity to reconsider something of ourselves. The pollen counts might be an omen of increasing ecological instability, but they also suggest the presence of a rampant fertility, one that only a time marked by decay can produce. 

As our media diets become fragmented between markets that have less and less contact with each other and our hunger for content grows to a calamitous din, we must search with that same desperation for the moments in between: when your phone dies in the middle of a scroll, or when Netflix asks if you’re still watching and you see your face – obscured – reflected in the dimmed screen.

Your ability to learn new things and encounter new ideas is limited only by your ability to think and to imagine. Meaning itself is more decentralized than ever. Nobody is in charge of your interpretation. You are pollen; everything is seed.