One-Woman Kabuki

June 8, 2026 ~ melaniereynolds ~ 7 Comments

Hello Nature-led Friends!

If you were wondering where I went, I’ve been a bit everywhere and nowhere at once, but between those two spaces I also went to Japan! It’s been 20 years since I last had the opportunity to return to a country that I love! I’m so grateful to have had the chance to take my teenage son there for his first big international trip*. The last couple of years have been rough and during a particularly emotional night the thought of never seeing my friend Keiko again became unacceptable to me. The next day I proposed a trip to Japan. It was my spouse’s second trip, and he was happy to go back again too. We all had a fabulous trip! Please enjoy the pictures throughout this post! -Melanie Reynolds

_{Demon Hunter with the Divine Sword to make evil doers repent. Miyajima, Japan. Spring 2026 Melanie Reynolds.}

One-Woman Kabuki

When I was in high school, Japanese was the most exotic language offered. German, Spanish, and French felt pedestrian by comparison. Since the age of nine I had wanted to leave my conservative medium-sized American city and explore the world abroad. Not only did Japan seem like a truly unique experience but I already felt some small sense of kinship for all people that live on the ring of fire volcanic chain around the Pacific Ocean. When I stand on the beaches of Washington state, I know Japan is across the way. In fact, after the March 11, 2011, Tohoku earthquake debris floated to our shores for years.

_{Boat on the Water, Shukkeien Garden, Hiroshima Japan. Spring 2026 By Melanie Reynolds}

During high school I also took a Creative Writing class. The teacher picked her favorite students early on and the rest of us were warm bodies occupying chairs for the semester. I wish I hadn’t been so sensitive when I was younger. I took it personally that I wasn’t one of her favorites. I stopped writing for ten years, even though I had been writing and telling stories to anyone with ears since I was eight years old. The only noteworthy academic achievement I’ve ever possessed is that I might one day save the world with my impeccably high reading comprehension.

At the end of semester our Creative Writing teacher invited the class to a dinner and a One-Woman Kabuki play sponsored by a local college. I wasn’t expecting the play to be very interesting. I was a surly hormonal teen that couldn’t see how one woman could be so interesting for two hours straight, but I made myself go. I was enthralled! It wasn’t so much the folktales themselves, although I do love folktales; it was the minute character transitions and physical scene setting. Hair up was one character speaking, shawl and cane is another character. The act of stroking a beard and using a deeper tone is a third character. It was fascinating to see the physical manifestation of storytelling by a talented artist. As described in the Encyclopedia Britannica, “Kabuki… [is a vehicle] for actors to demonstrate their enormous range of skills in visual and vocal performance.”

I’m surprised by how often the experience travels through my thoughts. I’m glad I made myself go. So often I’m quick to talk myself out of things unless I can convince myself of the possibility to become one with the wallpaper. In Japanese class, I’d already come to appreciate the division that the Japanese keep between public and private spaces/public and private faces. We all where masks to varying degrees. Having a public face/mask isn’t bad or disingenuous. It can save you from burnout. A healthy form of compartmentalization to move throughout the day if needed. Not dealing with emotional pain and masking it from people who would help you if they could, isn’t healthy. If you don’t want to indulge other people in your tales of woe; “Tell it to the birds.” I say this to myself when I feel pent up. It means to go do something outside and process my thoughts.

_{Hiroshima River during Sakura, Hiroshima, Japan Spring 2026 By Melanie Reynolds.}

When multicultural societies started moving onto the internet it created a new global internet society. Many of us still brought a version of our authentic selves with wonky color combinations, flash GIFs and bad spelling, but it was fun! Despite being the new wild frontier, it was nowhere nearly as dangerous as what it has become now; a funhouse of mirrors and clowns with ne’er do well intent. Tracking and surveillance, the breadcrumbs for bread and the attention economy in lieu of circuses to enrich the global elite. Google whose name became a verb for internet searches now wants to become the entirety of the internet itself. No “internet” just Google ecosystem with Google products do all and be all. The company would also like to convince us that we would rather prefer to talk to ads than people on the internet. Even I, purveyor of fine wallpaper paste, would rather make small talk with a man obsessed with [insert insanely boring topic here.]

_{Tanuki Statue; the Trickster God known for his playful and mischievous nature in Japanese Mythology. Miyajima Island. Spring 2026 By Melanie Reynolds.}

I may have a low threshold for being around a lot of people often, but I would rather be around other people over whatever crazy dystopian AI internet tech companies are trying to force upon us now. It is not to our benefit. It is to convince their shareholders that they did not in fact blow billions of dollars of investment out of their ass while promising a golden egg.

_{Hiroshima Dome, Hiroshima Japan, Spring 2026. Melanie Reynolds}

Keiko and I were college roommates. On the first night we sat on the balcony watching the sunset over the Olympic mountains. We talked about racism in the US and in Japan. We talked about our families. Then we talked about the bombs. “Little Boy” was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945. Plutonium was enriched here in Washington State at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The majority of the workers didn’t know what they were working on. The workers were siloed, parts of a chain, parts of a process. They only knew they were working on something for the war effort. The production of that material poisoned the ground water and was released into the air. Keiko and I have lost a lot to a war that wasn’t ours. We are sisters in friendship, forever glowing in radioactive dust.

This website will remain authentically fireside for as long as I maintain it. We (you and I) shall strive to keep our little section of the internet people oriented for as long as we can keep the blogosphere alive. If the whole internet becomes too much for you, it’s okay to leave. Whenever I get overwhelmed, I circle back to what matters most. The people I care about, the land I care about, the relationships I make with no pretense. If you’re feeling lost be sure to reconnect with your communities on or offline. I’ve been reconnecting with friends and neighbors, reading and writing, and sticking my hands in the dirt where they belong. I get a lot of spam messages that want to “maximize the SEO potential of The Nature-Led Life” for money, but I don’t want that. I just want to connect with other humans through conversation. There is still a lot I’m trying to figure out while not dying from dysentery on the Oregon trail. 😉

How are you feeling about the internet and technology these days?

*Canada, doesn’t count as a foreign country. We’re kissing cousins! British Columbia and Washington state share the same splendor of sword ferns, ferries, and cedars. We’re not foreign, we’re the PNW!

Links:

Kabuki | History, Meaning, Costumes, & Facts | Britannica

Google Is Slopping Up Search and It Wants You to Talk to the Ads

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

Hanford Downwinders’ Struggle for Justice – Nuclear Museum

Someone Else’s Reality: Nature-led Thoughts on AI

March 23, 2026 ~ melaniereynolds ~ 23 Comments

Hello Nature-led Friends!

Human to human, I sincerely hope you are doing well wherever you are! Let’s be feral for a moment because I’ve got some crunchy thoughts.

I will not support Artificial Intelligence (AI) and I will not defend its use. It was corrupted at the moment of its inception to become a profit-driven machine. Spare me your stories of what AI could do for humanity when what it has done to society and the environment cannot be forgiven These insufferable arrogant rich technology bros and their companies built a learning machine and taught it how to steal from other people so they could throw up their hands and declare themselves free of any wrongdoing. The gun killed your child; not the person that aimed and pointed it, not the company that designed it for maximum velocity and stopping force upon the human body. The tool, offering you thoughts and prayers.

Napster was shut down in 2001 for its file sharing database due to copyright infringement. It was back to burning CDs that we owned to make mixed tapes/CDs for friends, family and love interests. Then somewhere around 2010 Google has the idea to copy every book ever written to put into a big searchable database, aka a for-profit library. People could search it for free and download the text for a fee paid only to them for their “service.” They initially hammered out the details and profitability of it by starting with “orphan works” and public domain; texts that had no known copyright holders. Concerns among writers and publishers started to be murmured.

Neither you nor I have the time to go into the accounting, line item by line item, of how capitalism came to dominate the internet and conquer American society. It’s not even a new story! Special interest groups have been puppeteering from behind the scenes of governance for as long as human civilization has existed. What’s different now is that technology gave us digital wings and with these wings a group of “Just trust me, Bro.” asshats with money and influence want to fly us all too close to the proverbial sun.

As an individual you might support causes you believe in by donating, volunteering, writing letters, buying goods and services from people and companies you respect and sharing your experience with others. All of these efforts have been “built to scale”, maximized, and incentivized by companies and organizations to get what they want. All of it for money, all of it for the greedy few who want to be kings of make-believe people and make-believe lands at the cost of real people and real land.

I had to put up with guys like this in high school. The ones that showed up to art class wearing “business casual.” The one’s that would ask me a question “as a woman” and then proceed to tell me what my opinion should be. Every time I scoffed, they took it as a challenge. I was categorized in their shrimp-sized brains as a wild creature to be tamed, or a land to be conquered. To them, no didn’t mean no, it meant try harder or find another way. Tenacity can be a good thing when you’re trying to improve yourself, it’s tyrannical when you apply it to others.

Artificial Intelligence, as in Large Language Models (LLMs), could have been something magical, but it’s corrupted by its human creators. It drinks from a hose of toxic filth while polluting and depriving both real and figurative bodies of water, and of knowledge for all other users. I don’t see how I can willingly use any LLM to put good things out into the world when it’s designed to extract resources from nature (even more) for the fleecing of everyone else (yet again) so that a handful of multibillionaires can bolster their private empires.

Generative AI is what you commonly hear referred to as “AI Slop” because it was trained on the works of real people; artists, creators, and working professionals in a variety of fields without their permission, recognition or compensation. Actual humans who need jobs and money to meet their basic needs of survival for themselves and their families. There are few things I despise more than insincerity. I can’t think of anything more insincere or dishonest than being expected to pay for an AI-written story about what it means to be human so that some feckless crash-test dummy of a genius can make money. No one will benefit more from AI then scammers and corporations pretending they aren’t a trenchcoat full of scammers.

Opt-Out! Support real artists & crafters, real local businesses and members of your online and offline community. If we aren’t the stakeholders, why are we supporting people who don’t care about us or the places we live and love? If corporations are ungovernable, then we should be too!

I’d like to know your thoughts!

What kind of reality do you want for the future?

Relevant Links:

A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 1004 (9th Cir. 2001) – Copyright infringement is bad.

Authors Guild v Google ( 2015 Decision)
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca2/13-4829/13-4829-2015-10-16.html – Copyright infringement is cool for Tech companies if they share some of that sweet, sweet revenue.

Citizens United v FEC: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/ – Corporations are people now; we’re not concerned about the lack of morality when they donate millions into presidential campaigns.

US Telecom Assoc, v FCC: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/15-1063/15-1063-2016-06-14.html – The internet is not a utility with government oversight. Telecomm companies can charge what they want.

Past, Present, & Future

January 4, 2026January 4, 2026 ~ melaniereynolds ~ 8 Comments

_{Fall Leaves Taken on Nov 3, 2025 By Melanie Reynolds}

Hello Nature-led friends!

It’s January 2026 already and there’s a lot going on in the world! While I have many concerns about the fate of humanity and the fate of the planet itself, I’m still hopeful and excited about the year to come! There will always be opposing forces at work because of physics, but also because ideologically there is no one-sizes-fits-all utopia. A dog’s heaven is a squirrel’s hell. I will always be a voice for nature and the unseen. I hope you will too! Only 1/8 of my thoughts and ideas ever make it to this space but if it ignites even a fraction of passion in you to be part of the living world and lead with empathy beyond yourself. That’s good enough for me. We should all strive to remain slightly feral.

In 2024, I didn’t know how to tell you I had cancer or that I was fighting to get my mom out of a terrible rehabilitation center that she was involuntarily sent to by the hospital mafia in my hometown. So, I’m telling you now. Those things happened and I fought like hell and I’m missing a few spare parts, but I’m still here and I’m cancer-free and my mom is still here and in a much better place. I couldn’t have made it through either of those things without the support of my friends and family and the community at large. I’ve never been the kind of person who likes to do things by phone, but I called and called anyone and everyone that could help me. I wore out the pavement on a four-hour drive to and from my hometown and my home. I made new friends and allies. I was forced to learn, grow, adapt and innovate when all I wanted to do was sleep.

In 2025, I had to continue strengthening my body and mind to new realities. No one wants to talk about how long recovery because it’s boring and it can sound a lot like whining. It’s hard to give our bodies time to adjust to the slow process of healing when our brains are living in societies that offer next day delivery and 24-hour conveniences. In short, I messed up my feet trying to do a lot of walking for exercise and then I had that to also recover from. Sigh.

_{Autumn Alder Tree Taken on Nov 3, 2025 By Melanie Reynolds}

All these pictures of fall tree colors I took in November. It had been raining a lot like it always does this time of year, but then it started raining harder for longer. By the second week of December, we got hit with two back-to-back and one smaller atmospheric river hit that caused multiple rivers to surpass flood stage in Western Washington. Several valleys flooded including the Skagit valley, Snoqualmie valley, and the Fraser River valley in southern British Columbia. Levees failed and over 100,000 people had to evacuate throughout the region. One person died after driving into flood waters in Snohomish and around 1,000 water rescues were performed.

We experienced flooding in the region before, so people are really good at coming together for those in need. When the Everett Animal shelter was in threat of being flooded people were quick to show up and take all 120 animals to their homes to be safe. I’d like to hope that a few adoptions happened as a result of the awareness that so many animals are available for adoption at just one shelter.

Below are pictures of the Snoqualmie Valley flooding that cutoff the city of Duvall from Redmond and Woodinville.

Flooded Farm in Snoqualmie Valley Dec 11, 2025. Mike Jagla

Flooded Wood-Duvall Rd Dec 11, 2025. Mike Jagla

Morning Mist Snoqualmie Valley Dec 11, 2025 Mike Jagla

I’m thankful that the casualty number for this disaster as it currently stands is one person as far as we know. My heart goes out to the people who have lost their homes and cherished possessions to the flood waters. Some of the people recently flooded were flooded back in 2021 and the lack of funding and affordable housing means that people cannot “just move” out of harm’s way. No one can predict that a 100-year flood event is going to happen twice in five years while the government argues what they will and won’t pay for and when.

One of the things that bothered me most is the amount of AI videos and pictures I saw that quickly popped up on Facebook and other social media sites that callously exploited the disaster for peoples’ own amusement and greedy dopamine hits that had nothing to do with what was actually going on. Really people and animals were affected and when other people start to question what’s true and what’s not true, it can impact disaster response and the amount of aid and donations that people and organizations could receive for recovery.

I’m currently volunteering four hours a week at a youth shelter and advocacy organization because I believe that when you don’t know what else to do with yourself and you want to help others, you should start with the people closest to you. Show up for your community in a way that works for you. It can be one-time, it can be once a month, or it can be once or twice a week. The level of commitment is up to you. Just reach out to organizations that support causes you care about and see how you can help. I find it fun and rewarding because I know I’m doing something that matters. It’s cathartic to help others even when I feel like a walking disaster on the inside.

Now, go play outside and/or go read a book to shelter animals!

Stay Tuned….

Next Sunday January 11th I’ll be posting the resulting taste test of the Dandelion wine I bottled back on Jan 10, 2022! (See post: https://nature-led.org/2021/04/22/happy-earth-day-2021-may-hope-persist-like-dandelions/ )