I can't sleep…
Insist on believing that good will prevail; that the work will get done; that there will again be love. We have to want to get up in the morning for the good mornings to arrive.
– Tennessee Williams, in Follies of God, June 29, 2023
Notes:
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.
I wanted to know:
Was it enough to sing small songs that rose to the surface for a moment, shared then gone?
What about everlasting glory?
Didn’t he want a smidge of that?
~ Kyo Maclear, Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation
What’s the significance of words strung together like gleaming pearls lassoed around your neck.
…a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
I roll them around my head like a handful of marbles in my right hand, glassy, smooth, and manufactured in absolute perfection. My Marbles. Mine.
As Firth read Thomas Wolfe’s passage, it was lightning, an electric current, the body shivering from a forced seizure.
I grabbed the remote control to pause the streaming. There was Firth, in the frozen frame, holding the pages of the manuscript, waiting patiently for me to catch my breath, to digest the words.
Yet there’s been no digestion. I float down a slow moving river that loops, bathing in the beauty of the words, the rhythm of the passage and the mystery of their meaning.
…a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
What unfound door?
What forgotten faces?
Notes:
Thomas Wolfe: Who better to talk to than the man who created something immortal. More and more I trouble myself with that. ‘The Legacy.’ Will anyone care about Thomas Wolfe in 100 years? Ten years?
F. Scott Fitzgerald: When I was young I asked myself that question every day. Now, I ask myself, “Can I write one good sentence?”