A 1963 Paris puppet show at the moment the dragon is slain.
Belief
Somewhere, a dragon falls, its cry swallowed by the roar of young voices, wild with certainty.
This is how the world begins— in the fevered trust of youth, where everything is possible, and wooden swords can cleave the sky.
What grace to live like this: hearts flung wide against the borders of doubt, every shadow a villain, every moment a battle worth winning.
And when monster is gone— smoke unraveling into nothing— the wonder remains, as if it always knew what they know now: that joy is a thing made real only by belief.
Slowdance Mercury, swift as a hummingbird, flickers about sun, barely touching the edges of its edges. It whispers: what is the point of lingering? Venus, warm and slow, glides in a silk of golden light, its cycle a sigh stretched across time. Do you feel the heat of longing? Earth, steady mother, turns with the grace of familiar rhythm, each orbit a promise kept. Do you see the beauty in her repetition? Mars walks farther, its steps dragging through dust and shadow, its passage long, deliberate, as though time itself were a burden worth carrying. Jupiter spins with thunder and pride, storms blooming endlessly in its wake. It booms: what can contain me? And who would dare try? Saturn moves like an elder through the sky, draped in rings of memory, its turn stitched together with quiet reverence. What is time but a crown of patience? Uranus tilts as it dances, a rebel against the predictable spin. Its circuit asks only this: is there not beauty in breaking patterns? Neptune drifts, its stretch dissolving like waves into the ocean of the sky. It calls from afar: can you feel the pull of my distance? And Pluto, the wanderer, fades into the dark, its path unfurling like a forgotten tale. It murmurs: does it matter, if I am seen or not? If time is the measure of a heart, then what of ours? If stars move so freely, who tells them where to go? Perhaps planets do not ask— perhaps they know— that the dance itself is enough.
Angelenos Smoke twists like forgotten dreams caught in the ribs of a gutted skyline, the bones of yesterday aching in the light. But from the blackened ground, a seed stirs—a quiet defiance. Not all stories end in cinders; some begin there. The air hums with a new kind of music, a beat stitched together by hands that refuse to stop building, by voices that crackle but do not break. Where fire ran, there is now a pulse, a heartbeat louder than ruin. Steel will rise where it once melted, and shadows, no longer feared, become merely the space where light has yet to bloom. The city, like its people, finds its power not in what it lost, but in what it dares to imagine. This is how we are. Not survivors, but sculptors of what remains.
