Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it, because what the world needs is people who have come alive. —Howard Thurman
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Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesday! Find out how here: https://lindaghill.com/2019/09/04/one-liner-wednesday-like-one-of-your-french-girls/
Badge by Laura @ riddlefromthemiddle.com
I don’t often remember dreams, but, last night, I dreamt that I went to my poetry residency at MASS MoCA next month without my laptop or hard copies of either of the manuscripts I have in process.
I was thinking of buying a cheap laptop so that I could access my poems from my Google Docs.
So, there’s that…
Today, the United States observes Labor Day, which celebrates workers, especially those who are members of unions.
I heard a discussion on the radio today about jobs that have been replaced by technology and another about the rights of workers who are considered independent contractors instead of employees, which generally means they get no benefits. These discussions also touched on the nature of work and what it means for human dignity and living standards.
One caller touched on a subject that is close to my heart, that people who act as unpaid caregivers are not considered part of the economy at all, despite their value to their families and communities. Most of the tasks that I have done over the years can be paid work, too, such as child care, elder care, driver, cook, laundry worker, and now even grocery shopper. Of course, these occupations are usually low-paying, reflecting the devaluation of caregiving in the United States. Granted, most people with paid employment also have to take care of homes and/or family members, but many of them pay someone to do some of that work.
Caregiving is work and those that do it should be respected and recognized as part of the economy. This dynamic is part of the movement for a universal basic income, most publicly articulated at the moment by Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang.
Having spent most of my life in volunteering and family caregiving, I know that my labor has made valuable contributions to society. It would be nice to have meaningful national recognition of that.
As anyone who has dealt with it will tell you, mourning is a process.
Likely, a lifelong process that has different impacts over time.
As this TED talk explains, grief is not something you move on from, but something that you move forward with.
It’s been a bit over three months since my mom’s death. Much of that time has been busy, with a lot of things that needed my attention, although I have often felt that my brain was full of holes and I wasn’t thinking clearly.
I kept hoping that I could clear out some mental space and feel that I could organize my thoughts better – and maybe even feel a bit creative, which is important as I have some poetry commitments coming up.
Instead, I’m just feeling overwhelmed and sad. I don’t feel like thinking or deciding things. I can make myself do important things, but it is difficult to feel I am doing them well.
I’ve been talking with some wise friends who have helped me to realize that where I am now is not unusual.
Or permanent.
That mourning is personal and unpredictable and meanders through the terrain of life as it will with no apparent timeframe.
I think I have cried more in the past week than any week since Mom died. I know that is okay, even though it seems sort of backwards.
I am blessed with family and friends to help me while I am in this frame of mind and am trying to muster the energy to ask for help when I need it, although even that can be difficult when organized thought feels like so much work.
But I’m okay. Really. Please don’t worry about me.
It’s just grief.
At the moment, B is napping on the couch. I wish I were asleep, too. Maybe I should stop now and go take a nap…
[PS – So instead of napping, I wound up writing this (sad and vulnerable) post.]
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “couch.” Join us! I’m sure you will have more to say than I do this week. Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2019/08/30/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-august-31-19/
We had a bit of excitement at home earlier this month. The Archive of Our Own won a Hugo Award!
I’m sure some of you are saying “Yeah, I know. That’s great!” and some of you are saying “What?” I will explain what this is and why it was cause for celebration at my house.
The Hugo Awards, which have been awarded annually since the 1950s, are given for science fiction. They are announced at WorldCon, which is a giant international convention of the World Science Fiction Society. Over the years, the Hugo Awards have expanded to include fantasy and fandom; they have also expanded beyond text and film into newer media.
The Archive of Our Own (AO3), a project of the Organization for Transformative Works, describes itself on its homepage as a “fan-created, fan-run, nonprofit, noncommercial archive for transformative fanworks, like fanfiction, fanart, fan videos, and podfic.” The archive is HUGE, comprising over five million works across more than 33,000 fandoms. AO3 was nominated in the Hugo Award category of “Best Related Work.”
Our daughter E was following the award ceremony online because she is part of the AO3 community. She has some of her own work on the site and volunteers as a “tag wrangler.” The tag wranglers check on the tags posted by content creators within their specified fandoms to keep the archive organized and easily searchable.
Congratulations to Archive of Our Own on their win! Naomi Novik, one of the site’s founders, gave an acceptance speech that sums up the creative, community spirit of AO3. It began, “All fanwork, from fanfic to vids to fanart to podfic, centers the idea that art happens not in isolation but in community. And that is true of the AO3 itself.” I wish them many more years of sharing and joyful creativity.
“I am loyal to the inconveniences of kindness.”
~ ~ ~ from an extraordinary poem/meditation by Reb Irwin Keller that was shared to FB by one of my friends of Jewish heritage
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Please join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesday! Details can be found here: https://lindaghill.com/2019/08/28/one-liner-wednesday-wtf-melani/
Badge by Laura @ riddlefromthemiddle.com
Large swaths of the Amazon rainforest are on fire. Media tends to call these wildfires, but the vast majority of them are intentionally set. I think of wildfires as being caused by lightning strike or an accidental spark. When fires are set intentionally, they should be called arson.
While the current scale of the fires is new, the problem is not. For years, farmers and ranchers have burned parts of the Amazon rainforest to clear land for themselves. They have been opposed by indigenous people and their allies, some of whom have been killed trying to defend the forest.
The fires are devastating for the plants, animals, and people who live there, but the scale of the destruction now threatens the very mechanism that makes the rainforest possible. The vegetation, especially the large, tall trees, transpire large quantities of water, which form clouds and help to keep the rainforest green. If too much land is burned, the amount of rainfall will decrease so much that it would be impossible to sustain a rainforest ecosystem.
Plants also take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen. It is estimated that 20% of the world’s atmospheric oxygen is produced in the Amazon. As more and more of the rainforest is destroyed, the level of oxygen in the air that all people and animals need to breathe could diminish, while the level of carbon dioxide, already at record highs, could become even higher, accelerating global warming and increasing drought, which diminishes plant growth and causes a downward spiral.
The government of Brazil is making only half-hearted measures to control the fires and has refused the assistance of other nations. President Bolsonaro is a climate change denier, who sees this issue as being solely about the economic development of Brazil. His short-sighted actions may cause world-wide suffering for decades.
It highlights to me how interconnected we are as a planet. At this point in human history, we can’t afford countries being isolationist and concerned only with making their rich citizens even richer.
Money can’t buy oxygen or make more rainfall or change the temperature.
Being in the United States gives me many more opportunities than I would like to write about guns.
This morning, I have already heard at least three stories involving guns.
First, the New York red flag law finally went into effect over the weekend. This allows for family or other people with knowledge of the situation to go to court to temporarily take away firearm access and block the sale of guns to a person who is a risk to themselves or others. It’s good that this law is finally in operation. When there was a mass shooting in my county in ten years ago, the father of the gunman, knowing his son was unstable, had tried to prevent him from getting a gun license, but there was no mechanism at the time to do it. While New York had passed other gun laws, in particular after the Newtown CT shooting, it didn’t pass a red flag law until this year, which is disappointing in that it might have prevented the shooting here, had it been in effect.
Second, a friend’s birthday is today and she is doing a Facebook fundraiser for Everytown for Gun Safety. This organization works to combat gun violence of all kinds. While mass shootings get the most headlines, many more people in the United States are killed in individual circumstances. Sadly, the largest group of gun deaths is suicides. (The suicide prevention lifeline can be reached at any time at 1-800-273-8255; the website link also offers online chat and other information.)
Third, on CBS This Morning, they are starting an interview series with surviving family members of those killed in mass shootings. One of the comments made was that life in those cities will never be the same, which may be true for Newfield and Charleston and El Paso. I haven’t found that to be the case for Binghamton, which, other than a memorial near the site of the American Civic Association, seems to be carrying on as before.
I think there are a number of reasons for this. The shooting happened ten years ago, when there was media coverage, but not the weeks of reporting that we see now. Even though it was, at the time, one of the deadliest mass shootings in the United States, it was before presidential visits and massive memorial vigils and services were as common as they are now. Lastly, as I have written about before, most of those who died were immigrants or foreign visitors who had come to a class to improve their English skills, when a deranged immigrant, who was now a US citizen, opened fire. In other mass shootings, the public tends to think that it could have been them at that store or church or movie theater, it could have been their children at that school, but their sense of public safety was not shaken as much by a shooting of mostly immigrants in a private non-profit’s building.
I do think that more and more people in the United States are appalled by the level of gun violence and want to enact more laws that keep guns out of the hands of people who kill or wound others. Congress will be back in session soon. Let your representatives know how you feel about this issue.
I spent a lot of time involved with the eventually successful efforts to ban high-volume hydraulic fracturing (fracking) for fossil fuels in New York State. Meanwhile, from my town on the NY/PA border, we have watched a host of negative consequences unfold for some of our PA neighbors. I am also only an hour or so from Cornell University, home to some of the leading researchers on fracking. I was privileged to see these professors speak a number of times, both on campus and at community events.
One of these researchers, Dr. Robert Howarth, has just published a new paper in the journal Biogeosciences about one of the most unfortunate environmental effects of the fracking boom, the release of methane to the atmosphere. Global atmospheric levels of methane are at all-time highs since recording began. The levels started a steep rise in 2006, just as the fracking boom in the United States was picking up.
Having heard and seen so much evidence of methane leakage from fracking, I had already assumed that the two were related, but, in this paper, Dr. Howarth explains the evidence by measuring the amount of 13C present, allowing him to determine the part of the global rise in methane related to fracking, most of which was emitted in the United States. The industry tries to tell us that they are controlling methane emissions through detecting and fixing leaks on the wellpads, but there are many other ways in which methane is released, including venting and flaring at the site, especially in areas where the methane is released when the company is primarily drilling for oil; well leakage that develops over time as casings fail; methane that seeps through the ground to the surface, similar to the way radon reaches basements when it originated thousands of feet below; abandoned wells when fractures intersect with them; compressor station leaks and releases; leakage from transmission and delivery pipes, some of which are over 100 years old; and the production, transport, and use of LNG.
Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide but is relatively short-lived in the atmosphere. This makes reducing it quickly imperative in the effort to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
It is also why the more ambitious climate plans in the United States, such as those of Gov. Jay Inslee and Sen. Bernie Sanders, call for a ban on fracking.
The sooner this happens, the better. The economics of fracking are already poor, with a number of companies going bankrupt because of it. In many markets, renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuel energy already and energy storage technology is progressing rapidly while falling in price. It’s time to ban fracking and new fossil fuel infrastructure and go all in for renewable energy, energy storage, and energy efficiency.
We need to do all we can to keep the planet livable for people and all other life forms. Banning fracking would be a great step in the right direction.
