We live in perpetual motion. Every step stirs the ground beneath us; every word sends ripples into lives we may never encounter. We like to believe we move cleanly through the world, that progress lifts us, and time absolves us, but behind us lies a wake: heavy, undeniable, and usually far from harmonious.

We carve through time on borrowed ground,
our footsteps echo with thunderous sound;
Each choice a ripple, each breath a tide
that stains the shores we leave behind.

Echoes in the Earth

The planet remembers us. Even as glaciers retreat, forests fall, and oceans warm, the earth responds. Every time we take without providing, there is a shift, a loss, the Earth rebalancing. We may not see it immediately, but the world records our every action.
We silenced rivers beneath asphalt and ripped up roots to lay our wires. In the name of convenience, we bartered away balance — and called it progress. We’ve traded the rhythm of rain for the hum of machines, forgetting that not all progress nourishes. In our hunger to light the world, we’ve dimmed the spectral resonance of our cosmic connection.

The water holds what we forget
the cries, the oil, the drifting nets.
The stars look down in luminous pain,
as we rewrite Eden’s sweet name.

Human Tides

The wake we leave is not limited to soil and sky. It moves through people, across borders, into histories, and beneath skin. It’s the supremist assumption of colonization, the machinery of exploitation, the weight of privilege. Our comforts have costs and our silence has echoes.
The cost of colonization is not only written in borders and blood, but in the disappearance of languages, songs, and stories. Entire cultures have been silenced: ways of seeing the world that honored relationship over ownership. When we conquer lands, we demolish memory, rewrite histories and burn what we don’t understand in the name of market value.
We’ve learned to extract rather than unify. To mine what we want from the earth, from people, from cultures, and discard the rest. Human beings have become resources. Land is merely inventory and spirit has not only been ignored, but entirely dismissed.
Instead of cultivating relationships, we create laws to contain and outlaw. Instead of nurturing what sustains us, we devour it for profit and force it into unnatural servitude. When we reduce harm to indifference, we don’t escape responsibility; we become its willing heirs.

Yet in the wreck, a seed may grow.
From ruins, rivers learn to flow.
And if we listen, if we feel,
We’ll learn to nurture and to heal.

Turning Intention Into Action

Fortunately, we’re not doomed to repeat the past. We have a choice. Each day we’re invited to restore the present and reshape the future. What has been broken can still be tended.
Healing begins with recognition, the courage and humility to acknowledge what has been lost, and the integrity to act responsibly for what remains. The restoration of space for silenced voices to speak; a shift from dominion to stewardship and from appropriation to reverence.
We cannot rewrite the past, but we can shape the present with deeper respect and choices that honor individual and cultural lineage. The tide we leave behind doesn’t have to be a destructive flood. It can become a current that carries us — together — toward restoration and harmony.
It begins with one step.

🌱 What Will You Leave Behind?

We are all authors of impact. The question, therefore, isn’t whether we will leave a wake but what kind of wake we will leave.

• Questions to Begin Reshaping:
• What am I building that outlives me?
• Who is affected by my comfort?
• Who bears the burden of my choices?
• What will the earth remember me for?
• How can I shift from consumption to contribution?

Then: act. Small steps. Real ones. Repeated often. Because the weight of our wake is not just measured in damage but in the beauty we choose to leave behind.

~ Morgan C. Morgan
Writer of light, shadow, and the stories between.