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Green Patience Will Win the Stars

 It’s a bit of a contradiction, trees on spaceships. Big, clunky, vacuum-hardened tin cans grey and cold outside suddenly made vivid, surreal even, with splashes of green. A contradiction, yes, but that’s humanity— something in our nature lusts for familiar flora and tenacious leaves and curling roots, even with all the backbreaking tending added on to the workload of keeping damn starships running. So, greenery. Communal walls draped with softly waving moss dancing under omnipresent air recycling. Blossom islands bearing prim pinkish petals beneath huge fusion stacks or tucked above room-temperature superconductors, turning the sea of gunmetal colorful. Potted creepers, climbers, and stragglers spreading clinging tendrils over thick radiation proof glass, into pipe stuffed rafters. 


The spacefolk are hardy people. Contradiction is in their nature. Only the space people have mastered clean-messes and orderly disorder, knowing where everything is (even if it’s moving in a slowly spiraling cloud of orbiting junk), or perfectly willing to cozy up near less-than-stellar fusion coils (but untrusting of a person who isn’t hyper keen on his fellows suit checks). And so, leave it to the spacefolk to encourage their runaway growth. Carefully manicured patches, ergonomic and efficient right down to singular wavering leaves slowly, methodically, persistent in a way only plants can be, growing. Flowers sprouting between hardened consoles, across cupola domes. Sapling pines and birches and oaks drinking huge, gulping sunlight draws beneath sprawling atrium windows. Unrestrained by gravity. Untouched by plagued beetles and zealous harvesters that all speak the same language of *cut-slash-chew*. The ancient redwoods, real leviathans so ancient that they carry names bestowed by awed naturalists, brought aboard titanic haulers on slow crawls across the galaxy growing big, bigger, biggest. Patience has always been key for things that grow. 


The cold stately Galaxy knows only void, only silence. Worlds with life are miracles, stretched across impossible distance. Island blessing bearing priceless treasures. Man has started his slow sailing voyage into the dark, across an endless black ocean. And everywhere, growing and growing, big and small— are patient passengers of green.

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