Maternal leanings and acquaintances in a way instills a sense of importance and value on a person. Paternity gives one an identity regardless of anything, your father’s name covers you. Foundations have over the centuries of civilization proven to be an addition to success and societal value to a person. Their name instills a sense of pride and sometimes even shame and disgrace on the lineage and their identity as a person. When a person is valued and loved, it is always evident in their demeanor and outlook. A mother’s love is always unconditional hence the Nigerian pidgin parlance “monkey no fine, but him mama like em”. Mother’s tend to love their children regardless of whatever, the very connection of umbilical cord outweighs any other yardstick the society might place on individuals with regards to success and failure. Sometimes, female children suffer a deprivation if that feminine presence is not present in their life and this causes them to exhibit strange behaviors which are most times seen as anomalies. Research has shown that a daughter’s intelligence is the direct replica of the mother, she contributes almost all percentage in terms of brain power as well as emotional intelligence so that her status in the society places a shade on not just the daughter, but also on the whole family.
The experience that comes with interacting with people have taught me a lot of things concerning daughters and the aura they exhibit in their environment . Teens and early adults are the perfect examples, at that stage, one’s hormones are raging, some direct it into something productive while some outrightly exhibit stubbornness and hard headedness. Intelligent mothers are a fortification of some sort, an umbrella to protect and cover. It is often said that if your mother loves you, then by extension the world loves you and anything that is otherwise to that love could provoke a negative image on the son or daughter. The complexities of human nature is somewhat unexplainable, but as mammals , the nature of our specie have caused us to be protective and guard our offspring. Sometimes, mother’s might loose every sense of sanity and their emotions might become overwhelming because of an offspring, this is applicable to animals as well.
Let’s discuss how an unintelligent mother, not in the sense of formal education, but in the sense of maternal deprivation, an absence of a feminine figure can affect the life of an offspring:
Offsprings are often connected to their mother, it is deeply believed that the umbilical cord connects the offspring and it’s mother in ways that nature never would, if the mother doesn’t eat, the offspring doesn’t eat as well, so it’s dependence rests on its mother. When the offspring is finally disconnected from it’s mother (birth), it’s connection with the mother become the very fabric of existence so that it is always drawn to its carrier. The absence of that carrier in their life after the disconnection could spark a sort of rebellion.
Conclusion
Intelligent mothers complement their offspring in almost in an impeccable way, a professor who sees beyond just the offspring but also its potential tend to improve its life span and thereby reduce its mortality rate. It is in the hands of the carrier to improve its offspring.
Our regular contributor Rui Carvalho invites readers and contributors to submit poetry to the next annual Nature Writing Contest.
Our contest, Nature 2025-2026, is a new opportunity that we, as organizers, create to reach the rest of the world. Every Contest is a challenge for authors participating and to people that make it happen. This year we invite all authors to write poetry about: (i) Flowers; (ii) Trees and wind; (iii) Water; (iv) Nature Conservation; (v) Turtles; (vi) Love for people and nature; (vii) Hope and Happiness.
Synchronized Chaos’ new issue, Questing for Renewal, explores how people navigate a world marked by impermanence, injustice, loss, and change while continuing to seek meaning, compassion, and growth. Across poetry, fiction, essays, and criticism, the contributors examine life, always asking how individuals can respond with courage, creativity, and hope.
Christopher Bernard’s fourth installment of Otherwise argues that even in times when evil appears triumphant, humanity must continue imagining and building a better future. David and Emile Sapp offer complementary poetic and prose reflections on a natural scene with egrets and herons, while Elmaya Jabbarova envisions a fairer society grounded in ethics and spirituality. Sumana Bhattacharjee calls on individuals to improve the world through personal action, and Nidia Garcia presents a peaceful meadow that reminds readers of nature’s restorative power.
Many contributors confront mortality and the passage of time. Mahbub Alam reflects on life’s transience and the need for gentleness; Kumushbibi Hamidova surveys contemporary longevity research; Alan Hardy meditates on aging, creativity, humility, and nature; Nurbek Norchayev examines impermanence and human experience; and Nad Raf offers visceral poems on grief, aging, and mortality. Royal Rhodes’ three poems deepen these concerns through explorations of vision, madness, embodiment, spiritual longing, and the tension between earthly existence and transcendence.
Several works address social realities and cultural history. Kahlil Crawford depicts cultural and ecological regeneration amid disruption while Shlok Pandey reveals the suffering war inflicts on ordinary lives. Alan Catlin’s work explores the ways writers, photographers, and other artists have borne witness to war, loss, and suffering and refused to abandon even the lives they could not save to oblivion. Joseph C. Ogbonna’s work is a politically charged, spiritually framed lament that draws on William Blake’s “Jerusalem” to reinterpret Nigeria’s national crisis through religious longing and moral urgency. Stephen Jarrell Williams’ work contains a spiritual element as well, urging readers to help make the present-day world more humane and just while holding to an eternal hope through faith. Bill Tope’s story recalls the discrimination faced by LGBTQ communities and Jacques Fleury’s darkly comic narrative uncovers the lingering struggles of abuse survivors. Hassan Musa Dakasku advocates fearless self-expression, Alex S. Johnson profiles artist and activist Nina Hartley, who advocated body autonomy, Patricia Doyne satirizes federal monuments mismanagement, and Dr. Jernail Anand Singh reflects on how societies create heroes and what heroism means today. Dr. Kathleen Bryson’s poetry recollects the U.S. 1969 moon landing and how it captured people’s imagination even as reality descended. Thi Lan Anh Tran and Musharraf Hussain examine the US-Iran conflict through the metaphor of a troubled relationship as Sardor Raximov outlines potential solutions to modern-day challenges to effective United Nations global leadership.
Spiritual, ecological, and existential questions weave throughout the issue. Lan Xin calls for a global awakening from ignorance into higher consciousness. Shermamatova Dilnura Shavkat qizi describes personal reflections on what kind of person she wishes to become. Duane Vorhees combines myth, humor, tenderness, and everyday experience to show how people sustain one another through life. Mykyta Ryzhykh’s surreal and unsettling work explores homelessness, trauma, alienation, and fractured identity. J.J. Campbell’s poetry evokes disappointment, bodily exhaustion, failed idealism, and the slow erosion of meaning in everyday life, as Patrick Sweeney sketches out everyday life tipping into absurdity. Taryn Allan speaks to existential crisis, melancholy, and the human condition. Zunaira Rehman captures the ordinary heartbreak of life’s many farewells, while Elaine Murray finds resilience in rivers, mist, and starlight even as she mourns environmental degradation. Charos Ismoilova urges the ecological restoration of the Aral Sea as Ananya S. Guha suggests that continuing to love a natural place that has been degraded over time is itself an act of hopeful rebellion. Christina Chin celebrates peaceful moments with birds as Su Yun’s middle grade students revel in the mysteries and beauty of their environment. Brian Barbeito offers up a nostalgic and introspective reflection on his childhood and adolescence as Mark Young collaborates with nature on a fresh and vibrant set of his altered geographies. Sayani Mukherjee journeys through memory, history, and consciousness toward an affirmation of identity and selfhood. Finally, in his new collection tombboy, reviewed by Cristina Deptula, poet Mykyta Ryzhykh reaches out in an alienating, violent world for a fragile affirmation of love.
Together, these works form a rich tapestry of voices united by a common conviction: that despite loss, conflict, mortality, and uncertainty, human beings continue to seek understanding, preserve memory, nurture connection, and imagine renewal.
His friends from college told stories that made them laugh to convulsions about the moments, stoned or sober, when he pulled some classic stunt with an innocent face or could not remember and asked them to tell what he had done. When he lived in a distant city, they heard about the curious time police were called as he walked the edge of his high-rise apartment’s flat roof. He was there, he said, to catch the stars falling in August, as each one spoke a word he would set in a complex grid about the disasters timed to happen. We thought that drinking or doses of drugs had made him wild with wide eyes, calling us to babble at midnight and weeping until the first light. I saw him once on the ninth floor of a new facility opened nearby. The staff enjoyed him and listened to the music he played for hours on end. “I am the guitar of God,” he said. “The pills they feed me make me confess.” He told about walking one day naked in the park he reclaimed and made into Eden, where liquid colors dripped from the trees and the dead bees returned to life. He was the vessel of hid divinity, sent to heal the division of nations. The very last time I saw him, he stood as silent as death, against the wire dividing the milling inmates from guests. His hand, like fire, brushed mine and passed along the deathless virus. _________________________________________________
Figure Study
A catalog of used books described a half-price portfolio — photographs of figures — sepia compositions or shimmering monochromatic watercolors of natural beauty in bare rooms, and “softly edged outdoor portraits with the merest hint of color,” as if it described a dish of some culinary enterprise. Here are richly grained figures of saturated colors, capturing reflective moods, “simply the play of light caressing a body’s curves, charged with a landscape’s environmental meaning.” The figure is stripped bare of any transgressive dimension as a sign of enlightened love, a spare and geometric scaffold. If so, then the hell with it. These pieces are as innocuous as flocked wallpaper hanging in a hidden hallway. Here the camera’s alchemy has turned the body’s heft and weight into pure, non-perishing spirit. It turned totally Platonic, leaving the body husk behind. But the figure in clear light should remind us that beauty comes and goes, and flesh withers as soon as grass. We love what can not last. ________________________________________
NOTHING HAPPENED
Nothing happened. Nothing could. You slept, with sudden starts, as though to catch yourself from falling or pulling back from any close body stretched along your sprawling length, while you dreamed of dolphins in tumbling pods pushing against each other, pushing to shore and beached, as you broke the surface of sleep to gulp, vibrating with sound, breaths in sudden succession, the pumps of a starving heart. Inside this night, within your tussled bed, you looked — if anyone watched — collapsed on your back like Adam fallen from the ceiling, pushed by that digit extending from God, rigid and floating above this mortal world, on the backs of sensual angels, while he wore a night-shirt. Your skin — chalky like gesso, dried by desert exposure or shelterless days lived at sea straining to hear the “ping” of sonar echoes or the “click” of porpoise speech — contracted when drafts of night air raised like a ghost or a kiss the soft down at your hip, as your testicles shrank back in primordial fear inside the sack tingling within the bone vault of your thighs, unguarded as midnight passed. Nothing happened. Your sealed eyelids fluttered, as if they trapped a luna moth in a purse — and once opened the captive creature would fly with its wings fanned and reaching to feel freedom, but into a world of frost or predator birds. From my bed my lustral soul rose and followed, miles away, as I watched the shuffle of lights from occasional cars bend through panes of glass to reach and recede across the empty ceiling as I pictured you beside me, while nothing happened.
Royal Rhodes is a poet who lives in a small village, near a nature conservancy, a green cemetery, and Amish farms.
“Multiply. Be fruitful.” And God gave man a tool. But Eve, she conceived and brought forth the slide rule. Before ever we knew what old Galle saw, we arranged us our love life by Bode’s own law. It really did pain us to get past Uranus and let Neptune discover us our flaw.
A sexy realtor from Nice quoted me her terms for a piece. When I found out her price I told her, “Au regretment, no dice.” (I wasn’t looking to buy, just lease.) I met a pedantic old whore from Bombay who quibbled over being labeled that way. She said, “While it’s true I get paid by the screw, I work in Mumbai not Bombay.” Dish washers from Amarillo had pubes the texture of Brillo. Though they made quite a scene, she got the plates really clean and gave the waiter a thrill. Oh! Smilingly, Sue said over minces, “The feeling of packing ten inches must be like squeezing your feet into a pair of cute shoes that don’t fit — so tight that it pinches!” Said I, “Oh, size tens! Rather a bore if compared to my wee four.” Sue smiled (no pleasure in it, till she learned I’m measuring it “from the tip” I told her “to the floor”). A prison scholar was subtly candid as his fellows he Homerically branded; one boomerang con he dubbed Rosy-fingered Don ’cause he was caught so often red-handed. A persistent narcissist from Tacoma would diddle himself into comas. Though warned he’d go blind, he had it in mind to stop when he got to glaucoma. One disgruntled lover of Venus rubbed down to a nubbin his penis. The goddess said, “Friend! We’ve come to the end of the source of the friction between us.”
KINGSTON
8 DAYS! 7 NIGHTS!
Son, dey
moan
day to day
when dey
thirsty.
Fried, dey
sat ern de sun.
Deh!
FISHERS AT HOME
you’re
the sinker,
and you’re
the bobber,
and I’m the other, the provider of the worm and the
