Wally’s Great Adventures #72. (VOLUME UP – AC DC) hello friends, wally here. a few days ago dad shared my inventory of ‘dont likes.’ now its time to share the first in the series of My Likes. my bestest like ever is to drag my bones under the kitchen table where dad is eating and then keep jamming them into his giant feet until he gets the message – he then grips onto the bone with his feet while i gnaw and gnaw and gnaw at them. mom said that this is one of the few things that dad is really good at. i didn’t think that was nice of mom to say that, but we both snickered…good one mom. have a great hump day!
Month: June 2023
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
The first day in early June when my 5-year-old and I camped in Minnesota’s lake country was the usual heaven — perfect calm for canoeing, an osprey overhead as we braved a swim in the cold spring water and a clear blue sky.
But the second day the sky was smoke, the sun a ruby disc. I yearned for the blue and wondered how long the smoke would stay. The winds eventually shifted, but the smoke returned last week and the Twin Cities’ air quality index on Wednesday climbed high into the Environmental Protection Agency’s “very unhealthy” level. I worry about how often it will return this summer and fall…
New research suggests that wind patterns and cloud formation are growing increasingly erratic. In some places, we have too much rain, in others too little. Huge wildfire smoke events are becoming more common. The list of changes occurring above us, spurred on in part by burning fossil fuels, is long and getting longer. It means we must now contemplate the more frequent loss of our blue skies.
When the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term “solastalgia” about two decades ago to describe a form of grief he later defined as the “lived experience of the desolation of a much-loved landscape,” he wasn’t thinking specifically about the sky, but he might as well have been. Already many of us are experiencing something previously unimaginable: We are homesick for the sky…
About three decades ago, the environmental activist and author Joanna Macy argued that until the late 20th century, parents lived with “the tacit certainty” of something every previous generation had enjoyed. The certainty was that their “children and children’s children would walk the same Earth, under the same sky.” That certainty was now lost, she wrote, and that loss was “the pivotal psychological reality of our time.” …
It is yet another retrenchment of our experience on Earth, another instance of “it didn’t used to be this way.”
Are we supposed to just get used to more smoke in the sky? With so much climate change baked into the future, the answer is probably yes. But this new reality feels overwhelming, especially as I imagine the rest of my child’s life…
I hate this smoke for what it does to our present and what it says about her future… But I also have to find another way to feel. I have to find ways to hold joy alongside anger, hope alongside grief…
Maybe on mornings like this, rising to find the sky full of smoke, just enough people will decide: This burning world is not the world I have known, and it’s not the world I want my children to know.
Maybe losing our blue skies more often will be just what we need.
— Paul Bogard, from “I Am Homesick for the Sky” (NY Times, June 20, 2023). Bogard is author of The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light
DK Photo: June 8, 2023. Smoke from Canadian wild fires. More photos here.
Less heaven, less hell, more luminous reality
Make sustained contact with something undomestic, sacred, and tremendously powerful. Something for the good. Something filled with bone. Fall in love with it. This first covenant supplies energy, rapture, joy… Less heaven, less hell, more luminous reality.”
— Martin Shaw, ‘The Age of Bear and Raven. It’s time to rework our relationship with nature.” (Orion Magazine, Summer 2022, July 6, 2022)
Notes:
- See more photos from today’s daybreak walk at Cove Island Park: Sunrise + here and White-tailed Deer here.
- Quote: Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels
Wally’s Great Adventures (71)
Wally’s Great Adventures #71. (VOLUME UP: BABY YOU’RE NO GOOD). hello friends, wally here. i’m sorry for being away so long, it’s almost been a whole entire month. i’d tell you why but dad said i would be in massive trouble. anyhoo, i’ll get you all caught up. it was my 10th month birthday last week (and i got no cake). i’m up to 18 lbs now, and dad just shakes his head. he said maybe he should start calling me Willy Wally, or Chubby, Chunky, Stubby or Stumpy. i told him I prefer my birth name, or Stout or Husky. he said I ain’t no Husky, and Stout won’t work either for a giant baked potato. That wasn’t very nice at all. I’ve been going on walks with Mom. I don’t like walks, they are so boring. I’d rather stay home and snack with Dad. this week dad decided to take inventory of my likes and don’t likes. and he said the list of dont likes is very long. here we go: 1) i don’t like walks, 2) I dont like to chase the stoopid ball, 3) I won’t (WILL NOT) go down the stairs, they are so scary, but I can scooch up the stairs no problemo. I’ll sit on top of the stairs quietly until someone notices I’m missing, and then they come and get me. 4) I don’t like hot weather. 5) I don’t like rain 6) I’m so scared of thunder and lightening and fireworks and loud noises. 7) I don’t like to walk on the wet grass because my belly drags along the bottom and i get all wet and Dad says I look like a pregnant baby hippo. 8) I don’t like staying in my crate, i will howl at the injustice until dad says he can’t take the madness anymore and he let’s me out – this works every single time. dad says he’s positive there is another 10-15 ‘don’t likes’ but it will have to wait until next time along with my list of 3 ‘likes.’ so that’s it for now. have a great long weekend! Wally.