[L, diary, ephēmeris] 1) BLOG

 Saturday, September 28, 2019

This was the dawn sight at five a.m., a beautiful profile with tide still rising, but stress not relieved:

Scary, No?

PILAR will need more rollers under the cradle to lower her further into the water, more chain added to the chain-fall :

...but with a crew of eight Gung Ho Filipinos and 'Johnny On The Spot' cruising friend, David to help...

...PILAR floats free from her cradle!

Celebration will happen later...the work of hauling every weighty piece of green coconut lumber from the beach to storage at the house continues all day long...

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil, 
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used. 
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real. 

From Nautilus: "In 2003, Glenn Albrecht, then an environmental philosopher at the School of Environmental and Life Sciences at the University of Newcastle in Australia, coined the term 'solastalgia'.

Much like nostalgia, solastalgia is difficult to define with precision, but is nonetheless instantly recognizable: “Solastalgia,” Albrecht wrote, “is the pain or sickness caused by the loss of, or inability to derive solace from, the present state of one’s home environment. Solastalgia exists when there is recognition that the beloved place in which one resides is under assault.”

The type of assault may vary. The force of the assault may vary. The loss and unease that follows in the wake of the assault do not.

Glenn Albrecht chose “solasta” as a new root word for two reasons. “Solasta” contains the sense both of “solace” and “desolation.” Where nostalgia describes a longing for another place and another time, solastalgia is a longing for the now as it should be, for nature when there’s no nature there."

From NY Times Magazine: "This condition is well-known among Indigenous communities that have been displaced from their lands."

From Wikipedia: Solastalgia, like other anxiety disorders, takes different forms in different societies. A paper published by Albrecht et al. in 2005 focused on two contexts: the experiences of persistent drought in rural New South Wales and the impact of large-scale open-cut coal mining on individuals in the Upper Hunter Valley of NSW. In both cases, people exposed to environmental change had negative reactions brought about by a sense of powerlessness over the unfolding environmental changes. A community's loss of certainty in a once predictable environment is common among groups that express solastalgia. Societies whose livelihoods are not closely tied to their environment are not as likely to express solastalgia and, in turn, societies that are closely tied to their environments are more susceptible.

Groups that depend heavily upon agroecosystems are considered particularly vulnerable. There are many examples of this across Africa, where agrarian communities have lost vital resources due to environmental changes. This has resulted in an increase in the number of environmental refugees throughout Africa in recent years. Solastalgia tends to affect wealthier populations less. A study conducted in the western United States showed that higher-income families experienced the effects of solastalgia significantly less than their lower-income neighbors following a destructive wildfire. This is due to the flexibility wealth can provide. In this case, wealthy families were able to move from or rebuild their homes, reducing the uncertainty caused by the wildfire. Other studies have supported the existence of solastalgia in Appalachian communities affected by mountain-top removal coal mining practices. Communities located in close proximity to coal mining sites experienced significantly higher depression rates than those located farther from the sites.

*Sent by a friend without preface, simply something to give thought to, it seems to be a collage of history and definitions from Search links, rather than an essay or treatise.  Worth sharing, though--isn't it? 

Recently I came across this forgotten photograph of two local boys. Delighted with the captured secret moment between them (wish I had even an inkling of what they were doing that obviously pleased them both so much) I moved it to my desktop to...ah, do something with it...

Two days ago, wanting to balance a heartfelt lament in a reply to an erudite friend who'd just introduced the word and definition of 'Solastalgia' to me, the photo of the two boys leapt up as a truer portrait of how my days are usually filled, rather than what I'd been bemoaning. So I wrote back to her: "...almost every day I see and love sights that are priceless moments I cannot often capture with my camera, as I did with this one."

To which my dear friend responded with, "Love this!  You’re describing my number one approach to life, “the small dailies” I call them – the precious beautiful moments that remind us life is beautiful and so much more than we “think.”  A sweet conversation with a woman in the grocery store.  Smile and wave to neighbor walking by.  Watching the toddler across the street as she navigates the world, barefoot, determined with a big smile.  Kindness of Michael to get out his ladder to wash the garden window so the sprouting orchid shows off.  On and on.  Every day is full of them…"

Yes, Maura, you are so very right.  I am going to be posting more of these 'every day' moments of precious beauty.  Thank you for the inspiration!