Global Warming: Are We All Screwed?

/ antoniasgaze / Leave a comment

Left: August 21, 1985. Right: August 29, 2011. The Caspian Sea is the world’s largest landlocked body of water, and it’s getting bigger. In the past couple of decades, heavy rains in the greater Volga Basin have greatly increased the incoming flow from the Volga River, the Caspian’s primary source of water. These images show a small portion of the shoreline. In the 2011 image, coastal settlements have been flooded, displacing inhabitants and shutting down industrial facilities.

The other night, as I lay in the darkness awaiting sleep’s arrival, R’s voice broke the quiet “Do you think we’re really all f*cked, Kat?”

I paused, wondering at the context of the statement.  My first thought, without any context to base it on, was  “Yes.  Yes, we’re all f*cked.”  But, I cautiously asked him what he meant.

“You know, with global warming.  Is it too late to change it?”

I rolled over to face him in the dark and sighed. “Probably.” I replied.

As we both let that fact sink in a bit, I felt uneasy.  The fact that global climate change, as it’s more properly called, has fallen out of the public consciousness isn’t news.  Recent research from the Pew Research Center shows a 13% decrease in those who consider climate change to be a top campaign priority.  It ranks at a dismal 22 in voter’s lists of policy issues they want addressed by the next president, below such nebulous topics as “moral breakdown” and “crime.”

I can’t really speculate as to the reasons for this decline, but Sara Peach, a professor at the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill has written that google trend data show that searches for “unemployment” have eclipsed “climate change” and “global warming”  since 2008.  This corresponds with the 2008 financial crisis and a subsequent re-ordering of priorities away from climate change and towards the ongoing recession.

Though we can see that the issue of climate change has fallen from the collective consciousness in recent years, I can’t help but observe the stirrings of a re-emergence of the issue here and there.  On January 13th, a pilot cap and trade program was announced for the Chinese cities of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing and Shenzhen, and the provinces of Hubei and Guangdong.  This follows in the footsteps of similar programs in the European Union, and a voluntary cap and trade scheme  that operated in the U.S. from 2003-2010, called the Chicago Climate Exchange.  This appears to indicate that while Americans may not be thinking too hard about climate change, the Chinese are and they’re willing to experiment with some methods to combat it.

Yet, I sense that Americans, though they might not be talking about it, are sensing that things around them are changing.  Many parts of the United States have seen unseasonably warm temperatures this winter, which has had people raising the question of what exactly is going on?   While some suggest that this is an indication of global warming, a more likely cause is the increasing occurrence of extreme temperature events, a consequence of climate change that was predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as early 1990.

So, what is happening?  And are we all f*cked?  If we are, then do we need to be asking ourselves some serious moral questions about how to confront the challenges that climate change will present us?

Over the next few posts I want to explore some of my own thoughts on the matter, and would love to have feedback from people as to what other issues I should research and discuss.

Transformation And Transcendence: The Power Of Female Friendship – The Rumpus.net

/ antoniasgaze / 2 Comments

Transformation and Transcendance: The Power of Female Friendships

The above article speaks for itself, and it really resonated with me today.  I miss all the beautiful women in my life who set the bar high, love fiercely, laugh heartily, and make me smile when I am down.  My hat is off to you lovely ladies.  I miss you so!

Rainy Day Musings

/ antoniasgaze / 2 Comments

I’m sitting in the gray light of a rainy Brisbane day. The street we live on is steep, so there’s a torrent rushing down the side of it adding to the music of falling rain, distant traffic, and the occasional squawk of an unhappily drenched crow.

It’s the first moment of stillness that I’ve had in a few days.  I just cleaned house and I’m waiting for pizza dough to rise—now to reflect on the past few weeks.   Ah, domesticity suits me… sort of.

We had Denver friends in town for a few days as they make their way on a round-the-world trip.  It was fantastic seeing some faces from home and hearing news of people we know.  We brought them to see a soccer game, checked out the beach at Surfer’s Paradise, and grilled some kangaroo on the barby.  Also, one of them was accepted to veterinary school while here, so we had to celebrate a bit!  Good things happen to those who visit us!

But now that they’re gone, it’s back to normal around here.  R and I are taking an introductory painting class at the Brisbane Institute of Art.  We’re both running a fair amount with an eye towards the Gold Coast Marathon in July  (I’m also working on my barefoot running).  And, of course, I am on the job hunt—and there have been some promising developments, but nothing concrete yet.

Mostly today, I am reflective.  Rainy days do that.  I have felt a profound desire to disconnect, leave facebook and stop compulsively reading the New York Times—to seek a more permanent state of stillness and focus. Of course, knowing almost nobody in Brisbane and being on the other side of the world makes that prospect a bit daunting. Reliance on the electronic world to connect you to all that’s familiar is a frightening form of dependence, which scares me so much I want to disconnect. Of course, disconnecting scares me too. But why should I be scared? What is more familiar than taking some time with yourself, without a computer screen or a movie, or podcast, or ipod—just you and your thoughts.  Every time I am alone with my thoughts, I realize that I like them.  I find them comforting.  My brain keeps occupied and I don’t feel distracted.

Eventually, however, I wonder if I am missing out on something and it eats at me until I check in online.  And then 20 minutes later, sated on information, I am left shamed by my lack of spine.

I know I am not the only one thinking this. These days, I get a sense of the tide turning away from connectedness.  The New York Times recently discussed it,  I have seen multiple facebook posts about disconnecting, and then there is this game.  Twitter, facebook, text messages, blogs, and the like are all great for feeling connected but, as my friend Katie once said, “that shit ain’t real.”

People seem to want to reconnect with the wholesome – cooking, crafting, making a home; but they can’t let go of their online compulsions, so they combine the two.  Have you seen the glut of cooking blogs, or Do-It-Yourself homemaking, or crafting these days? When I google “cooking blog” I get 306,000,000 results. It’s mind-blowing.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the recipes, the crafts, and the sharing.  I cook from recipes I find on blogs all the time, but you have to wonder, is all this homemaking-themed blogging an attempt to connect with something authentic and wholesome that we hold in our distant memories and yearn for but don’t really have?  And, if you make the world’s most beautiful loaf of bread, photograph it, and share the recipe with your friends does that fulfill the authenticity-shaped hole in your life?  Do you find wholesomeness and fulfillment?  Or do you then check to see if anyone has commented on it or if the collective cyberworld “likes” your latest offering.  It’s a messed-up, vicious cycle, people.  I’m thinking of tapping out.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune recently did an article about one of my favorite authors, Sigurd Olson, who was a proponent of getting away, getting out, leaving the distractions of modern life in order to find ourselves and reunite with a peace and spirituality that becomes lost in the rush of life.  He, and a number of other environmental thinkers/writers/poets have long forewarned us against the dangers of losing ourselves in society.  See below:

One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast… a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards. – Edward Abbey

“Wilderness to the people of America is a spiritual necessity, an antidote to the high pressure of modern life, a means of regaining serenity and equilibrium.”
― Sigurd F. Olson

My guess would be that someone someday will trace the roots of modern human loneliness to a loss of intimacy with place, to our many breaks with the physical Earth. We are not out there much anymore. Even when we are, we are often too quick to take things in. A member of the group who insists on lingering is “holding everyone else up.” I think about this kind of detachment from the physical world frequently, because human beings, generally, seem to long for a specific place, a certain geography that gives them a sense of well-being. – Barry Lopez, “Permafrost”

“for how many years have you gone through the house
shutting the windows,

while the rain was still five miles away and veering, o plum-colored clouds, to the north

away from you and you did not even know enough
to be sorry, you were glad

those silver sheets, with the occasional golden staple, were sweeping on, elsewhere,

violent and electric and uncontrollable– and will you find yourself finally wanting to forget all enclosures, including the enclosure of yourself, o lonely leaf,

and will you dash finally, frantically, to the windows and haul them open and lean out
to the dark, silvered sky, to everything

that is beyond capture, shouting
i’m here, i’m here! now, now, now, now, now.”
― Mary Oliver

These writers, for the most part, have written about a society that was moored.  That was tied to a city, that was on a physical telephone line, but today society is everywhere.  If you have a phone, chances are you’re connected to the internet, and with that link out there in cyberspace, the world connects to you whether you like it or not.  You can’t just walk away from society, you have to walk away and turn off. People love to fault Aaron Ralston for his cavalier behavior in going into the canyons without telling people where he was, but damn if sometimes you don’t just want to go away and run the risk of really living your life without being connected, despite the potential consequences.

While I was hiking, recently, in Tasmania, my camera battery died.  I began using my phone as a camera.  We had no service, which I liked, so I could just snap a photo and put the camera away. But then one day, we hiked to the top of a mountain, and I turned on my camera to take a photo of R and I – smiling, happy, escaping from the world (I appreciate the hypocrisy of this after my earlier rant) and then my phone chimed.  I had email.  I got service atop a mountain.  And rather than ignore it, I checked it.  And my dog had died.  No joke.  So, you see, sometimes you just wish you weren’t connected.

I don’t have the answer on how to break away from the hyper-connectedness of today.  I wish I did.  I am starting with appreciating my experiences in the moment, rather than documenting them for future consumption by others.  I think this is a good starting goal, and as I do it I’ll begin working towards fully disconnecting.

On that note, I need to get going – too much time on the web, too little time spent outside.  The rain has stopped, and the birds are signing.  Time to live life.

Would You Stay?

/ antoniasgaze / Leave a comment

Watch the above video.  It always makes me cry.  Read below and you’ll see why.

Two years ago, today, I was presented with a difficult choice.  I learned that my boyfriend at the time had cheated on me.  It wasn’t the first time, and I hadn’t always been faithful either.  We had a tumultuous relationship, we’d done a lot of distance, we’d tried being “open,” we’d questioned ourselves, we built layers of scar tissue upon layers.  But, this time it was in my face.  The girl contacted me.  Told me she was sorry.  She wanted to be friends.  She was, sweet, almost as if she didn’t realize she’d blown a hole in my life.

I loved him.  With my whole being. I hated him for what he did.  I felt the kind of loveanger that makes you crazy and blind at the same time— completely unreasonable, completely set on ending it, completely unaware of how to live without it.  I cried mascara stains into my pillow case.  They never came out.  I knew that I had to make a change.  So, I called him to my house in Denver, sat him down, and told him I couldn’t live life wondering when my next Silda Spitzer moment was going to happen.  We had to be over.  It wasn’t a choice so much as an inevitability.

Since that time, a lot has changed.  He has moved on.  I have moved on.  We had our stumbles.  We had our tearful, rambling phone calls. Loss, over the phone line, is almost more poignant than loss and sadness in your living room, on your couch.  The distance magnifies it – the tinny sound of human on wire, over waves, through space.

Our souls fell out of solution.  Grains, one by one, falling to a cold, still bottomplace, where they rested.  Today, we live on different continents.  Lives separated by oceans, time zones, easterlies and westerlies, accents, seasons.  We share nothing.  Nothing, that is, but the history of loss.

These days, I don’t mourn the loss of that love.  I miss the boy I knew who was fragile and sweet.  I miss his insightful way of seeing the world. I feel sad that there was the callousness within each of us to hurt each other so badly.

I can’t imagine acting the way we acted anymore.  I can’t imagine inflicting that kind of pain on my new love.  I bristle at the childish notion that our hearts were so resilient.  They aren’t.  They continue beating, but the scars are still there, torquing the muscles, creating heart murmurs that whisper through stethoscopes to us, telling us not to make the same mistakes again.

And I won’t.

Soften Your Heart – Alchemy and Yoga

/ antoniasgaze / 1 Comment
I am looking at my feet.  I am in downward dog.  My calves are straining and my hamstrings are too tight and my hips aren’t open.  I am trying to will my hamstrings into giving me just a little more, but they aren’t cooperating.  My yoga teacher, Julie, places her hand at my back and encourages me to soften my focus and “soften my heart,”  so I immediately drop my chest towards the floor as much as possible, which is all wrong. “Keep your armpits lifted” she says.  I try doing that but I am not even sure what it means when I’m upside down.  I am failing to follow instructions.  I realize the more guidance she gives me, the farther I am from doing it right.  I am awkwardly making this “resting pose” quite difficult.  Everything feels wrong.

Later in class (mind you this is a class of about 4 people who are mostly yoga devotees or instructors) we are doing seated poses–forward folds over our outstretched legs.  These never go well for me.  As I struggle to soften and lead with my heart while reaching my feet, the rest of the class has their heads resting comfortably on their shins, smiling blissfully.  I look at Julie over everyone else’s shoulders, and she laughs at me.  Well, more with me, because I am laughing too.  I am so tight!  Despite years of yoga, my hips aren’t “open” and when you ask me to do a pose that requires any flexibility in my hamstrings I look like a beginner.  Julie warmly suggests we not call it “tight,” we’ll call it “strong.”  She points to a spot on my upper back just behind my heart.  “This is your problem spot” she declares.  Her compassion is kind, and her read on me, good.  Both physically and emotionally, softening my heart is the ongoing challenge I face.

In yoga you hear the phrases “soften your heart” and “melt your heart” thrown around with such abandon that they lose some of their meaning.  If one looks at the etymologies of the words they ask a few things: Physically, the phrase asks us to allow the tension to release from the chest and upper back so that it can flow into poses–like downward dog.  But there’s more to it, to melt means, literally, to soften and to become fluid–to pass from one state to another.  To change your chemical structure.  These teachers are asking us for alchemy.

It’s a pretty big request, actually.

Not to get too esoteric here, but how can one not get a bit philosophical on this stuff?  To me, yoga isn’t about loosening my hamstrings, it’s about exploring the deeper meanings.  Why are my hamstrings so tight?   Why did I start crying after doing hip openers for 2 hours?  They’ll tell you over and over about how we hold tension in our bodies, but it doesn’t mean jack until yoga makes you cry and you’re left with an emotional and physical hangover from a especially successful pigeon pose.  When you have so much stuff sitting in your chest and hips that you can’t run 10 miles without writhing from IT pain for the next day, it’s time to get a little esoteric in your approach to PT.

Thus,  I am embracing the challenge to soften my heart, and by extension, my body.  To soften one’s heart is daunting.  I have spent 28 years steeling my heart against the elements–and it shows in my yoga and in my life.  To let down my defenses now after so long a battle seems daunting. Where will my sarcasm fit in? What of my cynical side?  What is even in there?  What if there’s NOTHING?  Ha.  Hopefully that’s not the case.  More worrying is the fact that in opening and softening, one exposes the most vulnerable parts of herself.  There are reasons we erect the walls we do. 

But, my hope and my ongoing personal challenge is to live with a focus on compassion and opening and melting my heart.   It is a worthy goal and I hope to achieve it, both physically and emotionally. My personal belief is that there is a safety net in compassion that is stronger than the steel I have been girding myself with for so long.   I aim to test it.

 

The Essence

/ antoniasgaze / Leave a comment

This had to be shared. Whoever put this together did a great job!  I wish they had more video from  the long and remote trips Manito-wish offers, but this really captures a good portion of why people love this place and keep coming back.

Watching it made me very nostalgic for my time at camp.  While this video focuses on the fun and learning that happens at camp, my personal take on it is that the real learning comes on trail.  I can remember my first year at camp, unaware that we even took a camping trip, let alone for three days (I was 11, so this was back in 1994 or something and it was a big deal to me.)  I was terrified.  I had never been camping outside of my backyard, and in my backyard I was scared of raccoons.  But before long I was packed, given a talk about how sometimes girls get their periods on trail for the first time, and pointed towards an orange canoe with some unknown, antiquated looking name on it.  Thankfully for me, my mom had taught me how to stern a canoe from an early age and though hardly anyone in our group could steer the boats, I could.  This made me a hit with my leaders, and even though we got in late, crashed a campsite somewhere on the Manito-wish River, and many girls were unhappy, I glowed inside.  THIS was cool.

The next year when I returned I did a 6-day trip.  I was in heaven.  I distinctly remember that it rained incessantly, but one morning we got out and it was mercifully only drizzling– there was a fog over the lake and we paddled out into the rising mists on glassy waters.  Again, I thought, now THIS is cool.  I get it.

We ended up sharing a campsite that night with another trip group, which was good because our fire-making skills were not cutting it in the rain.  But the leader of the other group told us that the previous summer she had done a 5-week trip in Canada (we called the trip a “Canuck”) and she helped show us how to make a fire so we could all cook dinner.  She smiled out from under the hood of her raingear and she was genuinely happy to be outside, cooking dinner in the rain.  I was inspired.

Following those summers, I went on to do a 2-week paddling trip in Quetico Provincial Park with a group of girls that I still keep in touch with today.  We paddled hard, we portaged a ton, and we all giggled at each other and marveled at each other’s strengths.

The next summer, I did a Canuck as a 16-year old.  5-weeks of camping in remote Northern Saskatchewan with 4 other kick-ass girls and a leader who seriously changed the way I saw the world.  We were a good bunch who liked to challenge ourselves, work hard, and test our limits.  I learned how to cook creatively over a campfire, how to bushwack a portage with a compass and a map, to to raise a tarp and sail on a 100-mile long lake, and how to paddle whitewater, expeditionary style. I learned how to be quiet, to meditate over paddle strokes, and to ride the windswept rollers on turbulent lakes.  I came home from that summer tanned, lean, and different.  Stronger.  More self-assured.

The girls on that trip became some of the people who I most related to in the world.  We planned to do a Staff Instructor’s Course (S.I.C.) in 2-years time. We went back to Manito-wish as staff and spent a summer passing forward some of the skills and lessons we had been taught as campers.

In the time that passed between my Canuck and my S.I.C., some things changed in my life.  I applied to colleges and the process taught quite a bit.  I remember sitting in a dorm at Dartmouth with my host who told me ” I love it here, it makes the Friday nights that I stayed home to do schoolwork seem worth it.”

To me, this was a life-altering revelation. I had never stayed home on a Friday to do homework. I had always done well in school growing up and I never  learned good study habits as a result.  I was in the advanced track throughout school, placed at the top in standardized tests, won scholarships, but didn’t know how to simply do homework or study for a test.  I was a mess of unmet potential.  I had been resting on my laurels as an intelligent kid since elementary school, without putting in the time to really improve myself.

This realization led me down a strange path involving a lot of re-evaluating.  I imposed a grounding on myself, staying in for nearly six weeks instead of socializing.  I tried out for a play and got the lead.  I did my homework and did well.  I started bringing home the grades I should have been from the beginning.  In this quest for perfection, however, I stopped eating.  I got compliments and someone even suggested I consider modeling.  I lost sight of my priorities– big time.  I deferred from Macalester.  I took a year off to go figure out what was happening.

The following summer I headed out on my S.I.C., to spend 55-days paddling from Northern Saskatchewan to Arviat, a small Inuit village on Hudson’s Bay.  I hadn’t completely come to terms with some of the things that had happened in my life, but I knew that I always felt most like myself on trail.  I spent 7.5 weeks of that summer in the tundra and taiga.  I was challenged mentally and physically as I had never been before.  Worrying about my weight was an afterthought– I was worried about whether I could shoot a polar bear if I had to.   I was filleting Northern pike.  I was fending off the ever-present buzz of black flies.  I was portaging a canoe blown sideways by the unmitigated tundra wind.   I was reminded of my smallness and impermanence.  I was healing.

I came back to work at Manito-wish for 6-years.  I could have stayed longer.  Every year there I learned more about people, nature, and myself.  I never stopped growing.

Everyone has their own story about Manito-wish, but the uniting feature of those stories is that through Manito-wish people figure out who they are and what makes them tick.  They learn to appreciate the natural world and it’s intricacies.  They grow into good people.

Letters to My Future

/ antoniasgaze / Leave a comment
In the window before me as I lounge on my bed, a palm rustles and sways in the warm Queensland breeze. It waves at me, a benevolent but constant reminder that I am far, far from my home in the snowy Midwest.  The peaceful rustling of leaves is interrupted by the squawking of unknown birds, and at night ring-tailed possums occasionally saunter in through our open french doors, eyeing dinner enviously.  R chases them out breathlessly and looks at me in wide-eyed amazement. We have no screens, so every window is a doorway to the unknown animal kingdom.

I look down at my bedspread, lit coolly white in the teal glow of our walls, packed away when I left Denver in July, and finally just unpacked a couple weeks ago– a reminder of home. I look at the matching Ikea wardrobes we bought for our bedroom– Australia doesn’t do closets.  I look at my tanned legs, a phenomena never before seen in December.  In fact, December as I know it, doesn’t even exist here. My world here is different. 

I realize that this life is lived in episodes and stages, as told by Mireille Guiliano.  Having exited stage left (as you look at a map) on a plane, I now begin a new chapter.

Reflecting back on the previous chapter, I consider the time I had before leaving the U.S.– a haze.  Privileged to have a great deal of time with my family and gifted with the means to travel, I made the most of my time off, yes.  Yet, that time carries in my memory a sense of pregnancy;  a longing, knowing a great change was afoot, and sadness for a future that I will miss with my family and friends, a sadness for impending losses expected, a sense of slow unraveling of life as I knew it and dislocation from the familiar– in so, so, so many ways.

I clung for dear life to those things that I attached mentally to a sense of “home”; my family, my old friends, my old loves, and the nostalgia I hold for such things.  And they clung back with shocking frankness.  And for a few fleeting moments before I left, it felt as though I could never leave.  Something would happen.  I would stay.

But then I left.

And in days, the fact that I was oceans away led to a “come to jesus” moment unlike any I’ve had before.  A realization that with this distance, with this freedom, comes great opportunity and obligation– to be 100% honest with myself and those around me, regardless of the consequences; to embrace the life I live now without thinking of the past or too much of the future.  I looked at R, and saw one of the more beautiful and complete people I’ve had the privilege of knowing, and felt an immense gratitude to be here, with him, with an open road before me.    I feel free to move forward, unburdened.  Joyful.

Sometimes I think I’d like to write letters to myself in future, or to an unborn child, or to the universe telling them of the moments like this in life that mean the most.  Perhaps this is that.

Yuanfen

/ antoniasgaze / Leave a comment

Over coffee this morning, I skim emails on my phone.  There are always too many and lately, rather than even reading the subject line I simply check all the boxes next to emails that weren’t sent by a person in the flesh and blood, whose face I can picture, and then hit “delete.” But as I skim, one subject line pops out at me–from a philosophy website that I subscribe to but rarely read.

amp;q=10+relationship+words+that+cannot+be+translated” target=”_blank”>Top 10 Relationship Words that Cannot be Translated to English”

This gives me pause, because try as I might, I can’t stop thinking about love.  It sounds strange to say that, but it’s easier to admit to it than closet it away.  I think about it when I cook, when I write, when I sleep.  I wander through the farmer’s market pondering love and avocado.  I run along the river considering Neruda. Marquez.  Lahiri.  Yuknavitch. Roethke.  Lopez.  Cather. Plato.  I wonder what it is,and what it means, and what it entails for whom and for how long.  I wonder at its forms and at its nuances.  I wonder how it can be bent and hobbled;  how it can overcome unexpected challenges. I wonder if one kind of love trumps another, or if they are really, really, all the same,deserving the same reverence.  I want answers.

In a flash of inspiration, I remove the check from the box and keep it as I delete my other junk mail.
Later in the evening, after a day spent settling into the home I am making in Australia, with my boyfriend, far from my real home and from my past, I think back to the saved email.  I grab my phone and fall into one of the mauve, leather couches that we have scored for free from our old hotel.  They’re incredibly comfortable, despite being mauve and leather.  I open the email and read through the first few, until my gaze settles on one description in particular.

“Yuanfen:  A relationship by fate or destiny.  A complex concept that draws on principles of predetermination in Chinese culture, which dictate relationships, encounters, and affinities, mostly among lovers and friends; a binding force that links two people together in any relationship.”

In this description, counter to popular conception, fate and destiny are distinct things, which makes for an interesting exploration of love between the fated versus that of the destined.

I think of fate without destiny.   I think of love without destiny.  I think of fate without love– and fate with love.  I think of destiny without fate.  The permutations are startling in their number. This is what yuanfen means, I guess.  The chance of any two people sharing a moment, or a year, or a boat ride, are so small.  Fate brings two people together, but only destiny keeps them on the same course.

I think of my deepening yoga practice and the readings of the Dalai Lama which have been informing my daily routine. I think of relational existence and attachment.  I think of the rube goldberg that is life if all is predetermined in the way yuanfen suggests.  And I look around, and here I am in Australia, and I am happy.

I wonder at yuanfen some more.

Extraction Distraction

/ antoniasgaze / 1 Comment
It’s 4:41 am, tomorrow, for most of my readers.  Yes, that’s right.  I’m coming to you from the future.  And let me say one thing about being in the future, it can get a little lonely at times.  Times like 4:41 am.

I woke up from a dream that I want to call a bad dream, but was really more of a confusing dream.  And then, well, I laid in bed for about 2 hours before getting up to read the New York Times.  Gail Collins has a way of making me feel connected to home – like she’s the practical, liberal family friend who shares a conspiratorial laugh with you when the dinner party gets a little too politically conservative and you’re not sure whether to put up a fight or go do the dishes. I love that about her.  Especially at 4:41 am on the other side of the planet.

There’s been a lot happening recently.  Like, well, moving to Australia, finding a place to live, applying for jobs, and all that you would expect to go with that.  But there’s been more too.  I won’t go into all the details, but some recent events have gotten me into a reflective mood about what I want and who I am.  I think Australia may be a great opportunity for me to change direction in certain parts of my life – and I am pretty excited to begin.

I ran a 5k with R and his company yesterday.  It was insane.  There were so many people that you couldn’t exactly run, but you could shuffle.  So, I alternately shuffled and sprinted a 5k.  I don’t think I PR’d.

Anyway, the 5k was a bit different than in the states because so many companies in Brisbane supported teams to run it.  Huge teams.  People are so much more fitness oriented, and group-oriented.   There’s a very distinct pack mentality.  But, back to the running.  Here in Oz, they don’t give out t-shirts to identify all the members of a team.  Nope.  They give out singlets.  Ooh yeah.  Sexy singlets.   Sexy singlets with names like Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, Peabody, Hancock…

If you’re not aware of who these companies are, let me bring you up to speed.  Ever heard the song “Paradise” by John Prine?  Well, it laments the loss of a boy’s childhood paradise in Appalachia to coal mining.  Coal mining carried out by Peabody.

Or Rio Tinto? Well they’ve been associated with espionage in China and the company is named after a river in Spain that runs red from runoff of nearby copper and gold mines.   The Government of Norway officially divested from Rio Tinto saying the following:


Exclusion of a company from the Fund reflects our unwillingness to run an unacceptable risk of contributing to grossly unethical conduct. The Council on Ethics has concluded that Rio Tinto is directly involved, through its participation in the Grasberg mine in Indonesia, in the severe environmental damage caused by that mining operation.[66]

—Kristin Halvorsen, Norweigan Minister of Finance (Wikipedia)


BHP Billiton?  Well, they have run into many of the same criticisms.  In South Australia, their Roxby Downs uranium mine gets it’s water for free from the Great Artesian Basin.  This is the driest state in Australia and has suffered from serious droughts in the last 5 years, so it seems questionable to give free water to a mining company, but it happens through the Roxby Downs Indenture Act, the same act which allows the company to override the South Australian Aboriginal Heritage Act.  The company is also involved in some extremely controversial water projects aimed at providing inland mining operations with a consistent water source.

But enough of this dredging up dirt (oh, for more on dredging check out this article on the Gladstone LNG Project), my point is that Brisbane, and Australia in general, is a superhub of natural resource extraction.  Based on my reading, this is both fueled by China and in many cases funded by China.  Of course, the companies I just mentioned aren’t Chinese.  They are British and Australian and have links to Canada.  They’re multinationals.  They are many headed hydra with obscene negotiating powers based on their size, their promises of economic boons to local communities, and their multinational status.

I thought about this as I ran this 5k yesterday.  Good people all around me were running for charity in their Rio Tinto singlets and I’m guessing based on how crowded it was, that a lot of money was raised.  That’s fantastic.  But what of the larger issues?  All these good people working for Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, Peabody – are they thinking critically about the environmental impacts of their work?  Is their work done with an eye to the precautionary principle?

There is much to learn here in Australia, both about the culture and about environmental ethics here, and I don’t want to make any snap judgments on the culture, but I find it worrisome being in such a pro-extraction milieu.   I hope I can find work that doesn’t compromise my environmental ethics.  I also don’t want to work in the relatively cavalier environment of extraction because there is significantly more racism and sexism there than elsewhere in Australia – already a fairly racist country. R relayed to me that when he was doing  driver training for work, his instructors entertained the class by sharing lewd and racist jokes throughout.  Incredibly offensive jokes that I won’t repeat.  So, it’s kind of a different world here and I am hoping I can find my place.

There is some good news on the horizon though – I found a yoga studio that will let me do cleaning around the studio in exchange for classes.  Score!!!

These are the things I think about at 4 am when I can’t sleep.  

Walks

/ antoniasgaze / Leave a comment

Twisting around bone, muscles strain to find purchase in wet sand

A valiant struggle intermittently lost in the pettifog of life force, wetness, within the swells

Fresh rainwater slips overtop viscose brine, muddles, recedes again

A driving rain—a walk on the beach.