Recovery

     After any vacation of a week or two, the urge to get right back into one's routine can be both tempting and deceptive.  There are bills to be paid, food to be restocked, plants to be watered, and pets to be attended to; and there's also the few pounds that may have decided to now become part of your "new" look.  For me (with my annual physical coming up just a week later) I decided to return early to my rec center, doing 2/3 of my normal exercise routine, then diving into the full routine the next day...which proved a mistake.  It was a lesson for me, one that clobbered me in a sense for not only was I not ready physically but it seemed that I had failed to learn the mental and spiritual side of our trip...wait, what the heck am I talking about?

     A few "routines" did return easily, one of them being a visit to my library where a book titled The Power of Awareness caught my eye.  Written by Dan Schilling, basically a 30-year veteran of Special Ops, his book basically noted how little time we spend being aware of our surroundings.  We stare at computers or phones or TVs and fall into routines of complacency (quick test: what was your spouse wearing today before leaving for work?).  And while his book is mainly about how to help increase your personal safety, his main premise made me think about how quickly I had bounced back into my own same-old, same-old routine of not "noticing."  While on vacation, we had watched about 2 minute of TV (we wanted to see the weather ahead but soon shrugged that off, deciding that what would be would be); we also never picked up a paper or book (okay, I did read one article of the 30 I had brought); and basically we returned home finding that we didn't miss any of it.  Instead, as with most people exploring a new place (even a simple hike or a new restaurant), we were absorbed in seeing and hearing and experiencing something new, and little else mattered,  We noticed the ocean and the smells, felt the cold and the wild, appreciated the food and the workers who still smiled even with double the workload; we also noticed the humbling enormity of nature which somehow still welcomingly embraced us.  When placed against experiencing that, or reading a book or turning on the tube or checking my laptop, the choice was obvious (for us, anyway).*

     I mentioned that feeling of surprise at the welcoming part of nature because we were quite aware that forests were burning a few hundred miles away, even as we drove through hours and hours of ancient trees.  Ben Jackson wrote in The London Review of Books: In Siberia, people were fighting fires that dwarfed anything in North America.  Italy, Greece, Turkey, Algeria, California, Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia were all on fire...high heat and humidity created the conditions for thunderstorms.  Enormous pyrocumulonimbus clouds formed above the fires, causing lightning and high winds.  In the night of 30 June, B.C. and western Alberta experienced more than 710,000 lightning strikes (about 112,000 of them hit the ground).  To put that in perspective, the UK records on average fewer than 60,000 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes per year (emphasis mine)...There are feedback loops to worry about too: more heat means more fires, which mean more emissions, which mean more heat.  The wildfires in 2017 and 2018 released more CO₂ than all other sources in B.C. combined.  In the long run, a large proportion of the emissions from forest fires are absorbed by regrowth.  But it isn't clear we have a long run...This year is not the new normal; if anything, we will never have it so good again.

     Of course, we weren't thinking about any of that when we watched the ocean crash against the rocks, or jumped back into our rental car, or sat down to eat at a local cafe.  It wasn't that we were not aware, but rather that we had decided to put everything on hold and shift our focus to what was in front of us.  Our friends in Seattle mentioned a story from a book from the 1990s, Think A Second Time, and how sometimes focusing on a missing tile on a wall can stop you from seeing the rest of the wall.  This was made more clear when we visited a local co-op
pottery shop on an island, its collection of plates and garden ornaments carrying all the unique imperfections of its hand formation.  Said a sign inside the shop: Earth, Air, Water & Fire -- These are the ingredients of pots and human beings alike and each formula contains also the element of chance...do not seek perfection in pots or people, for your search will go unrewarded and you will miss knowing many good pots and many good people.

  

     The recent report that another 23 species became extinct last year, gone from this planet forever, was perhaps my personal missing, and disheartening, tile; that brings the total to 902 globally, said Smithsonian.  Another million species are threatened with the same fate in the coming decades.  On the plus side, 50 species have rebounded enough to be removed from the "threatened" list, including the humpback whale and the bal eagle.  It harkens one's thoughts back to the day of the passenger pigeon, a bird which once accounted for 40% of our entire continent's bird population.  In a piece in the New York Review of Books, one explorer said this in 1806: The most fervid imagination cannot conceive their numbers.  Their noise in the wood was like the continued roaring of the wind.  Another hunter described their sound this way: A roar, compared with which all previous noises ever heard are but lullabies...(a sound of) condensed terror.  The passenger pigeon went extinct in 1914.

     Ages ago, Olivia Newton John sang a song that said: Don't worry about my recovery...you won't recover me.  And while our time scales are vastly different, I often wonder how often the Earth, like me, can keep recovering.  In Madagascar, the drought is the worst in 40 years (our own state's drought was mentioned in a story on Lake Powell by Elizabeth Kolbert).  The oceans are still growing more acidic (a massive effort is underway to try and save coral reefs, ecosystems which are quite sensitive to such changes in acidity).  And volcanos, even in Hawaii, are re-erupting as if spurting out a healing ooze to warn us about what may await us if we continue in this direction.  But our planet is resilient, as evidence by the early colors of fall (in heavy drought years, our fall tends to arrive weeks earlier as the deciduous trees close off to preserve precious water and prepare for the cold).  

     I was also struck by an review in the New York Review of Books about sheepherder and farmer, James Rebanks.  For generations, he and his ancestors have argued for a return to pastoral farming, and a resulting move away from factory and industrial agriculture; whether this is possible with such a growing human population is a subject tossed back and forth, even among scientists.  But writer Caroline Fraser has him saying: "We have to farm to eat, and we have to kill (or displace life, which amounts to the same thing) to farm."  It is a "cultural disaster," he argues, that shoppers are continually worrying "about what they should eat" while missing the whole picture: how their local landscape should be farmed."  Consumers, he argues, must become fluent in what it takes to produce food: they should know what it costs in every sense.  In listening to a book on Life Between Lives (a product of The Newton Institute which uses hypnotherapy to explore past lives), there is sometimes a discussion of souls whose main job is simply to heal our planet and/or to heal human consciousness.  Whether one believes in this or not, it seemed to parallel the thoughts of shepherd/farmer Rebanks, that we may need to step back --especially now-- and take a look at the whole picture, to be more aware of our surroundings.  Like the fall leaves revealing all that has been hidden underneath, we too may need to be willing to shed a bit of our protective layers (even to ourselves) and find out what lays underneath...for the souls healing our planet, they mention that their job is one of healing Earth, with or without us.  Now may be a time for us to decide if we want to help...

*Rather than sound somewhat monk-like, I did open my laptop to jot down thoughts and pictures while they were "fresh" in my head, a few of which made it into several of these posts.