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The Wilderness Has Always Been Queer
A Pride Month Benediction from the Cascades
The wilderness has always been queer—
not just in its wild defiance,
but in its sacred refusal
to be anything other
than wholly, fully,
itself.
Out here,
where the wind threads through hemlock limbs
and snowmelt hums beneath the earth,
nothing asks permission to belong.
Everything just is.
The lichen does not apologize
for being neither one thing nor the other—
it survives by being many,
by being both.
The trees do not worry
that their limbs grow twisted.
They lean toward what gives them life
and call it holy.
There are no closets in the Cascade range.
Only caves that echo your name back
in a thousand dialects of thunder and birdsong.
Only trails that ask nothing of you
but your truth.
The marmot sings shrill and unfiltered.
The fireweed dares to bloom
long after the burn.
The forest floor makes no distinction
between seed and spore,
between root and resurrection.
-Scout Vaughn (he/him), Staffing Lead
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