Drip, Drip...Drop

     To say that these times feel disjointed might be a bit of an understatement, at least for me. The seemingly too long Homeland series (the first 3 seasons didn't prepare us for the faltering remaining seasons) makes one wonder just how much of what is happening --the wars, the destruction, the lives lost-- is political theatre at the expense of "the cost of doing business."  The decades long struggle now repeating itself between Palestine and Israel was somewhat summed up in the London Review blog, breaking down the problems that occur when empires, governments, and leaders, come and go and borders are drawn, and enforced or violated by whatever "ruling" party takes over.  It tends to all be a small part of history, one repeated over and over as Smithsonian's blog noted when Japanese citizens of the U.S. were once placed in internment camps and also witnessed their homes and farms being looted, burned and then taken over by everyone from police to neighbors (a book about that history is ironically titled, Jewel of the Desert).

     All of that is so said from my comfortable bubble surrounded by a fog from my lack of understanding.  I know that all of that is happening there, over there, somewhere.  Take India and its fight for oxygen and vaccines (graphically displayed in a photo-essay in National Geographic)?  How can that be happening when India makes so much of the world's vaccines (albeit primarily for export); and why not use the smaller more portable oxygen concentrators?  Said Bloomberg Prognosis: To be sure, oxygen concentrators are useful only to those who don’t require intensive care.  The machines deliver about five to 10 liters (2.6 gallons) of the gas per minute, typically at about 93% purity, whereas those fighting Covid in hospitals may need as much as 60 liters per minute, which can be met only by liquid-oxygen tanks.

     And what about nearby Nepal?  Here was a somewhat blunt report from the London Review blog: Low oxygen levels in the bloodstream cause cells to leak fluid into the lungs and brain.  What starts as ‘Khumbu cough’, with its pink, foamy sputum and rib-breaking convulsions, can progress to a drowning sensation and eventual death.  Fluid on the brain impairs decision-making in a place where a wrong step can mean falling hundreds of metres to your death.  Retinal haemorrhage can strike without warning, causing instant blindness, which can mean being left to die.  Edmund Hillary warned against the commercialisation of Everest: ‘The people just want to get to the top. They don’t give a damn for anybody else who may be in distress ... On my expedition there was no way you would have left a man under a rock to die.’  The data confirm his suspicion: those on commercial trips are twice as likely to carry on after the death of a team member as those who are part of non-commercial expeditions.  Nepal is now reporting around nine thousand new cases of Covid-19 a day, and only 7 per cent of the population has received a vaccine dose.  The health system is weak, with just 0.7 doctors to every thousand people (in India the number is 0.9), and only six hundred ventilators.  While mountaineers who’ve paid their way to recreational breathlessness are up in the clouds chugging on oxygen canisters, tended to by Sherpa guides who can’t afford to stop working, people are fighting for their lives down at ground level.  This is more than just symbolism; 3500 bottles of oxygen are on the mountain right now, and Nepal’s hospitals are 25,000 cylinders short.

     Ah well, but that's still all happening "over there, somewhere."   Back in the days of go-anywhere travel, I remember the mystery that surrounded sites such as Mesa Verde and much of the southwest, even that of Sedona which was rife with pictographs and petroglyphs of thriving cultures that suddenly (and inexplicably) vanished.  Entire civilizations.  So what happened to the Anasazi of Chaco Canyon, the Sinagua of Sedona, and the Pueblo of Mesa Verde, not to mention all the many other native American cultures that once had elaborate societies not so different from ours and yet  just...disappeared?  The leading theory is that severe droughts hit, as in an extended drought severe enough to cause entire populations to move or to perish (drought is also a theory of the rapid decline of some South American cultures such as the Inca).  And now some ten centuries later, there is news from a study in Science that such civilization-changing drought has returned and it may prove even worse than those earlier time periods.  Wait, worse?

Photo of Lake Powell: Rick Wilking/Reuters

     An iceberg larger than the island of Mallorca just broke away from its ice shelf and is now floating adrift.  All this while the U.S. Drought Monitor has pegged much of the West as "extreme" or "exceptional."  Lake Mead is down 130 feet which could mean 166 billion less gallons of water for Arizona.  Said a piece in National Geographic: Hotter air is thirstier than dry, capable of holding 7 percent more moisture for each degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer it gets.  Climate change has bumped average air temperatures up 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit in the region since the early 1900s.  The increase means the atmosphere more readily pulls water from streams and rivers, lakes and reservoirs, and plants and soils...In the face of continued climate change, some scientists and others have suggested that using the word “drought” for what’s happening now might no longer be appropriate, because it implies that the water shortages may end.  Instead, we might be seeing a fundamental, long-term shift in water availability all over the West.*  And it's not just the West; Taiwan (in the news because of the world's dependence on their semiconductor chip manufacturing) is in it's 18th month of drought, reports the BBC.  And then there's the cost of crypto coins (here we go again)...said an article in The New Yorker: According to the Web site Digiconomist, a single bitcoin transaction uses the same amount of power that the average American household consumes in a month, and is responsible for roughly a million times more carbon emissions than a single Visa transaction.  Cooling those building-sized banks of processors requires a city's worth of water.

     Suddenly, that "over there" is now here facing all of us.  A piece in ELLE was titled Your Brain On...Reality (print version): “Brain circuitry comes to reflect what you can do; what you spend your time on changes your brain,” says Stanford University neuroscientist David Eagleman, PhD, author of Livewired.  “You’re more than what you eat; you become the information you digest.  We can never go back to being the person we were before"...Pike (Kathleen Pike, PhD, director of the Columbia-WHO Center for Global Mental Health) explains one way our brains may have actually changed for the better: post-traumatic growth. “It’s the hero’s journey when we live through extremely challenging and difficult times, and come out stronger than we were before,” she says.  We develop a sense that new opportunities emerge from struggle—renewed relationships, deepened spiritual lives, a greater appreciation for life in general.

     Ask Jill Wheatley.  In an interview in Red Bulletin, her life was described this way: It was 2014, and she was teaching sports science at a school just outside Munich when, during a lesson, she was hit on the head by a baseball.  Her skull fractured, her brain suffered swelling and bleeding, and damage to her optic nerves left her with just 30 percent vision – her right eye would never open again.  In an instant, Wheatley, still in her early 30s, was transformed from an independent “adventurous spirit” to the survivor of a traumatic brain injury (TBI), which also triggered a rare eating disorder that saw her weight plummet dangerously.  It would be more than two years before Ontario-born Wheatley left hospital to find that her life –her job, home, and German residency– no longer existed.  Before “serendipity” intervened, Wheatley had spent every minute outdoors, so, despite her injuries and with nothing more to lose, she set off to ice-climb, ski and mountain-run her way around the world’s most spectacular massifs, from the Eiger Ultra Trail in the Alps to Nepal’s Annapurna.  She has documented her journey in a blog, Mountains of My Mind.  When asked what helps her deal with difficult moments she answered: Impermanence.  I was introduced to Vipassana, a type of meditation that starts with 10 days of silence.  The root of it is basically that everything is constantly changing.  I allowed myself to think deeper into that, shift my perspective, and recognise that actually I’m a very good example of impermanence.  I don’t even like the word ‘recovery’, because to me that means going back to something, and I don’t want to go back to the person I was before.  I feel like the lessons I’ve learned from my TBI are more than I ever would without it.  The power of perspective is the most significant lesson; that shift from what I’ve lost to what I’ve gained.  Adversity doesn’t look the same to everyone.  It might not be a TBI or vision loss, but every human can connect to adversity, to vulnerability, to being open and authentic.  Honestly, I feel gratitude.

    It's humbling to change perspectives, especially our own perspectives.  The centuries long search for the source of the Nile (the longest river in the world) initially led to finding that it split into the Blue Nile and White Nile, rivers which split even further (think Stanley and Livingston, although the real credit should go to John Hanning Speke said a piece in Discover).  But the article added: The legacies of characters like Speke and Stanley are tainted with the horrors of colonial rule that followed close on the heels of these initial discoveries.  Stanley went on to claim the Congo as Belgian territory for Belgian King Leopold II, leading to countless atrocities under the Congo Free State.  Speke, on the other hand, was instrumental in beginning a racist line of thinking that considered the Tutsis racially superior to the Hutus in Rwanda.  This so-called Hamitic Myth would be later used as justification in racist colonial policies, as well as in the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s.  David Livingston was "an abolitionist missionary," added the piece.  Considering that the search for the source of the Nile has taken over 300 years (the most recent theory is that it originates in the Congo, now facing its own troubles as an erupting volcano drives out hundreds of thousands), the Palestine/Israel issue grows only more complicated...

    As with the Nile and rivers splitting, I am drawn to the uniqueness of our veins.  Along with arteries and nerves, our individual paths prove the source of our life, as well as the reminder of our impermanence.   Our world (and we) will end, said Discover, of that there is no doubt.  The article went on to list all the things that could end it, noting that "...while humanity might be surprisingly fragile, it’s not easy to sterilize an entire planet."  It begins its piece with: Life is resilient.  The piece did not mention drought.  Water, unlike us and other life, doesn't go anywhere.  It re-forms and moves and shifts across the planet, be it locking itself in ice or moving as rain and fog and snow.  We humans may indeed be resilient but we continue to have trouble uniting on that recognition of "we" as a species.  

    A new exhibition of the Torlonia Marbles is being hosted in one of Rome's museums, a collection of statues rich in detail and both collected and damaged throughout the centuries.  Said a review in the New York Review of Books: Few statues manage to survive for millennia in perfect condition. Collectors, and museums, face the eternal problem of whether or not, and how, to repair the damage...The sculptors of early modern and modern Rome, including Michelangelo, Pietro and Gianlorenzo Bernini, Antonio Canova, and the Danish expatriate Bertel Thorwaldsen, saw the task of restoring the work of their ancient predecessors as an opportunity to learn, hands on, the secrets of ancient technique, and an excellent way to refine their own practice.  Like us, they could see the marks of rasps, chisels, and drills; examine ancient experiments with differing degrees of surface polish and applied color; and judge the varying textures of stone with their hands as well as their eyes.  Where these great artists have left their own marks, moderns are left with the dilemma of whether to give Laocoön back his original arm or leave him with the marble arm he got in the Renaissance, perhaps from Michelangelo himself, or the eighteenth-century plaster arm that let viewers know where antiquity left off and restoration began.  There are no easy solutions to the problems posed by objects with a long history.  When hundreds of pairs of hands, ancient, modern, and contemporary, have left their touches on these venerable stones, how do we judge which touches have been more or less loving, more or less skillful, more or less valid?

     When the water dries or freezes or has somehow moved well out of our reach, we too will shrivel and perhaps become little more than many of the same thoughts as those early sculptors, "what touches have been more or less loving...more or less valid."  Perhaps after watching our species over eons, nature is awakening from a prolonged slumber and making a few adjustments.  Viruses frozen in the tundra are being released, water is shifting to distant lands, fires are lighting up the night.  Perhaps it is all a signal that we as a species should also wake up and make our own adjustments.  We are life, but just a minimal part of it.  And it seems that we've yet to fully learn how fragile life is for all of us.  

    Rick Bragg once wrote about all the things he could no longer do, the dreams he would no longer realize, the limitations that now burdened him as he aged.  But he could return to his days of first asking his dad what he was doing when he saw him flying a kite and his dad answered, "fishing...fishing for the moon."  Jill Wheatley starts her blog with this tagline: Lost Sight But Gaining Vision.  We can do that, we can keep dreaming and we can keep learning.  We just may need to learn that there is more to that cliché of "we're all in this together," for we may soon come to realize that we all hold the Nile in the veins of our hands; and we are all still searching for its origin.

Addendum: An overview of what may become familiar around the world is captured in a diary entry in the London Review of Books; the article writes about the Aswan Dam in Egypt, now heavily guarded by the military, and capturing water used by 93% of the country's people.  But the source of that river (as noted above) is far distant in Ethiopia where another dam is under construction and will substantially reduce the flow into Egypt...how far will both countries go to protect (or possibly destroy) the project?  It's an interesting piece and could reflect the rising tensions when it comes to the modern version of our fight for fresh water...

*An encapsulation of our warming planet is shown in a satellite montage from NASA; the quick 30-second time lapse is worth watching...really!