The sun was out. The sky was blue. Puffy white clouds. Miracle of miracles, after these endless rains, the cold, a May more like February. Yesterday was a promise of better times.
And everyone, I mean everyone, was out drying their plumage, preening, soaking up some warmth.
The herons opened their wings to the sun rays, or flying low in a bit of a breeze.
The Bullock’s Oriole (says my bird book) competed with the golden light around it, more interested in getting the gnats out of its feathers than watching the busy swallows right above it.
Bullock’s Oriole
And the turtles?
Lined up in a row, late comers trying to score a place as well, not too successfully.
Mothers and offspring sharing a log.
Heads stretched up high, opening wet folds, drying out.
Before we get too excited with all those harbingers of better times ahead, let’s be pragmatic. The rains will reappear in the not too distant future, says the weatherman. Good for our parched state, bad for our mood. Lets not be like the theoretic turtle – let’s follow canine advice: work around it and all other nuisances…
The Theoretic Turtle
The theoretic turtle started out to see the toad; He came to a stop at a liberty-pole in the middle of the road. “Now how, in the name of the spouting whale,” the indignant turtle cried, “Can I climb this perpendicular cliff and get on the other side? If I only could make a big balloon I’d lightly over it fly; Or a very long ladder might reach the top though it does look fearfully high. If a beaver were in my place, he’d gnaw a passage through with his teeth; I can’t do that but I can dig a tunnel and pass beneath.” He was digging his tunnel with might and main, when a dog looked down at the hole. “The easiest way, my friend,” said he, “is to walk around the pole.”
My twitter feed regularly sends me images of three artists, without me ever having followed those sources. Riddle me that! I like two of them very much (Max Ernst and Varo Remedios,) but had never heard of the third one, Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898). He was a Russian Realist (in contrast to the other two surrealists,) and I now recall I included one of his paintings in a recent blog about people wandering through landscapes. But that’s it.
Pine on sand # Heuer #photography
In any case, looking at Shishkin’s landscapes, painted around the area of St. Petersburg and elsewhere in Russia, I was struck how many of them resided in variations in my photographic archives, without ever having set foot into Russia. The scenes were photographed in Europe and North America. The fact that similarities can be salient, just as dissimilarities can, seemed noteworthy in light of the fact that I know so many people who are currently moving away or have moved away from places they have called home for years. Not everything will be unfamiliar!
Stone in the forest # Heuer #photography
For the younger ones, the reasons for moving have to do with increased flexibility of the workplace, allowing to do your job long distance. For those I am most familiar with, a continual change of location implies mostly excitement, and has also been the norm between college, grad school, post docs and so on. Relocation of us older folks is a different thing – often done to be closer to family, to be of mutual support, sometimes done to find environments easier on an aging body or to escape into (visions of) tranquility. Not an entirely new phenomenon, if you think of the many East Coast “snowbirds” who annually tracked to Florida in the winter from the Northern states (again, I am aware it is the privilege of a certain class.)
Oaks # Heuer #photography
You give up a few things when you move. Your familiarity with the lay-out of your city and environs, your ease of finding your way, your knowledge of where to find things (in shops or nature,) not to mention your doctors, dentists, and last but not least the friends who remained (this latter one is for older people often a reason to move rather than to stay – people around you are no longer.) And your sense of place, your attachment to and pride in the place you call home, will be disturbed, although, as we will see, it can be reestablished on the other end with remarkable fluency.
Mounds # Heuer #photography
There is a whole research enterprise in various scientific disciplines that explores the (dis)advantages of a sense of place that comes mostly from having lived somewhere for a long time, if not all of your life. (I got my information here and here.) Definitions vary as do approaches, it can be confounding to try and get a grasp of it.
For psychologists, it is the experience of a person in a particular setting, feelings and thoughts included. In geography, it’s called topophilia, the affective bond between people and place or setting. For historians it is a sense of place that we ourselves create in the course of time. It is the result of habit or custom, reinforced by what might be called a sense of recurring events. For anthropologists, place attachment is more than an emotional and cognitive experience, it includes cultural beliefs and practices that link people to place, a symbolic element tying us to shared history.
The tree in the field # Heuer #photography
Let’s stick with the psychology: the feelings and thoughts about where you live. They can be influenced by numerous bonds. There is the biographical tie, you were born here or lived here for a long time. The bond can be based on spiritual relationships, you feel a sense of belonging within your people’s history, for example. You can be tied to a place for ideological reasons (let’s skip that…) or due to an accepted narrative (creation myths, stories of origin.) And, importantly, the relationship can be a commodity: you choose a place based on desirable attributes, grand children high on the list (!), life style preferences, health advantages and so on. Last but not least the tie to a place can be involuntary, a bond by material pressures, constrained by economic dependency or lack of choice (and I am not going into the legislative proposals floating around that in the future women will only be allowed to leave a state if they prove they are not pregnant.)
Sandy Coastline #ivanshishkin # Realism
Sandy Coastline # Heuer #photography
Note, for all of you who move(d) with mixed feeling: the element of choice is one that can (re)establish a sense of place, a positive attachment. Given that our notions of a somewhat ideal community change across the life span, it follows that we would want to relocate towards something closer to our ideals. It might not be easy, but then being stuck in an increasingly lonely place isn’t either. It might not be your first choice, but at least you have a choice, in contrast to people displaced by involuntary reasons.
Mirror Lake shrouded in mist # Heuer #photography
The research bears out that you increase the likelihood of positive attachment to a place with increased participation in a community, with benefits for the environment in return (the more attached people are to a place, the more they invest to protect that place, urban or rural). I think community participation is particularly difficult if you are older, and now constrained by the pandemic dangers for many of us. Nonetheless, focussing on ways to integrate with people who share interests or political goals might be the way to go. Joining walking tours to explore the architecture or history of a place might help. Even if you loathe group activities or don’t feel up to take history courses, there are ways to familiarize yourself with the place on one’s own. Worthwhile exploring!
(And on a totally selfish note: I miss every single one of you who is moving/has moved…. you are putting a dent in my sense of place! And welcome to the ones moving in!)
Grass # Heuer #photography
Music by a quintessential Russian composer. (And YES I do not cancel Russian artists if they have no affinity to current events.) “The 14th symphony is scored for soprano, bass, and orchestra and dedicated to English composer Benjamin Britten. Comprised of 11 texts by Federico Garcia Lorca, Apollinaire, Küchelbecker, and Rainer Maria Rilke, the theme of mortality unites these varied texts. The result is a highly unorthodox, engrossing reminder that death is always waiting.”
So we might as well make the best of our remaining time, moving and all!)
Originally, I meant to write about my Trouble with Change. I decided to get a grip instead – let me explain.
Columbia River, looking East
Two of my regular haunts, the Steigerwald Lake National Wildlife Preserve in WA, and parts of the Tualatin River National Wildlife Preserve south of Portland closed a while ago for considerable amounts of time, 3 and 1.5 years respectively, to restructure the landscape, reconnecting the rivers with floodplains. Altogether important environmental improvements, with me (and others) moping about years of lost access even while acknowledging the need, and now celebrating the re-opening.
Restored flood plain and lake, respectively
When I first learned about the closures in 2019, I was upset that everything changes, even landscapes, usually reliable points of constancy. In fact, hiking through both preserves this week, I was again sad about some paths no longer accessible, while others were rerouted and still bore signs of human construction and interference, which will soon disappear, I guess.
Harrier Hawk
I consider myself a person pretty open to change, even if it is not always chosen by myself. I have lived through and adapted to major changes, the types of environments I lived in, from small rural German village-life to years in metropoles like New York City, the languages I have spoken, careers that came and went, constellations within my household, rise and decline of friendships and last, but not least, changing capacities of an ailing body. All taken, with the exception of short interims of sadness or agitation, in stride. So why is the change in the faces of familiar landscapes such an issue? You tell me.
Herded goslings and flock of lesser yellowlegs, I think
Plain old ducks
It makes me embarrassed. Almost ashamed, given the intense demands for adaptation to change required by the many refugees in this war- and misery-torn world of 2022. Think about the psychological burdens for any given refugee, with Ukraine of course holding a special place in my consciousness right now. The trauma load often consists of the pre-flight part, where violent events, threat to life or loss of loved ones and destruction of home are experienced. Then the flight itself whether under a carpet of bombing, or across ocean with unstable boats, drowning in the Mediterranean, burning to death in dry Greek island camps or freezing to death at closed Polish borders, you name it. Then the arrival in the host country, which reacts to despondency with varying degrees of helpfulness, often dependent on the color of your skin, the (dis)similarity of religious and cultural practices, your ability to speak or learn the language and degree of prior education.
Northern flicker, joined by swallows
Add to this forms of survivor guilt, that you escape a dreaded fate that others didn’t (think of the large number of Afghans who were left behind by those who were allowed to flee,) the separation of family units (men not allowed to leave their country of origin, for example, to be recruited) and the complete loss of trust when your very own friends and neighbors became the enemy who killed you and yours (think Bosnia, for example,) or refused to believe the reality of your plight (your Russian family not accepting that war occurs in Ukraine.) It is no surprise, then, that studies indicate that depression and anxiety are at least as common as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)and suggest that one or a combination of these conditions affects at least one in three refugees. (Ref.) One in three…
Turtles
Of course there are exceptions – here is a well-told story of a Syrian refugee in Germany whose intelligence, achievement orientation and a good portion of luck enabled successful adaption despite cultural and bureaucratic obstacles. Here is a thoughtful document for professionals how to help children through the acculturation process that speaks to a larger, more general need and seems to have been successful. (Source is Canadian, the only thing I could find in English.)
Blue herons roosting
In any case: the burden of required change while under psychological duress, or even traumatized, is immense.
My own reaction to changes in nature should be nothing but endless gratitude for what I have and what I’m spared. Duly noted. Grip gotten.
Common yellow throat
Yellow-rumped warbler (Butter butt!)
Music today is a favorite cello concerto. War horse, I know, doesn’t make it less beautiful.
And here is someone waiting for the mosquitoes to enter his beak:
I spent more time than anticipated in the wetlands yesterday, coming home so tired that I had it not in me to write. Napped instead. So today it’s going to be a lot of pictures. Nothing I could say would beat the sweetness of those images in any case.
It was a day with intermittent strong showers, the world was wet.
Lots of songbirds, ospreys flying, red-winged blackbird singing their hearts out. Deer unperturbed.
Since it was an unplanned hike, I had only the small camera that is always in my pocket. What serendipity, then, that the freshly hatched goslings and their retinue crossed the path and into the water right next to the bird blind. I could photograph them from as close as one can possibly get to the edge of the water.
Some grazing on the shore
Mama watching, and off they went again.
While the geese were out already, the swallows were tending to their nests, busily populating the bird houses, bringing what’s needed for their upcoming broods.
In between they were just hanging out and grooming.
One still solitary;
Probably not for long.
I left when finally drenched. He didn’t care.
And these dancers would have fit into the landscape perfectly.
Maybe it was the cold. Maybe the decline in pollinators. The number of wildflowers were sparse. It made finding every single one a particular joy, of course, hah, another iris! Maybe this 231 acres Cooper Mountain park, new to me, never had that many to begin with, or it was still too early in the season. When trails announce Larkspur Meadow, and all you find are a few puny specimens of the plant, it does make you wonder, though.
Made me think about a recent book. If you have time, read the The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. It is a fascinating anthology of conversations between and presentations by some twenty scientists and humanists (artists and poets included), presented during a conference at UCSC Santa Cruz a few years go. As conferences go, this was surely an imaginative one: the topics of how we can live and progress on a damaged planet were divided under two headings concerning he Anthropocene: Ghosts and Monsters.
Ghosts referred to issues around landscapes altered by the violent extraction and modification during human expansion. Monsters concerned interspecies and intraspecies social interactions. The goal for all theses scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics was to suggest critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. A planet we share with other species, in other words, while making it inhabitable.
Dandelion and Wild Geranium
It is a book that has a wide range of topics, not to be read as a whole, but digested bit by bit, at least that worked for me with my aging brain. It will familiarize you with ants, lichen, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste, to name a few. We learn what has been harmed, what can be rescued, what needs adapting, and, importantly, how art can be of help in the process.
Lupine
It came to my mind on a walk on Sunday, a warm, sunny day so atypical for this dreadful April, where I found myself ambling through various biotopes: paths through old growth forests, along sunlit prairie, and in groves sheltering what remains of the oaks and freshly budding maple trees, both hung with veils of Spanish moss. Me and the rest of town – this is an easy 3.4 mile hike on Cooper Mountain near Beaverton and e v e r y o n e was out. Good for all of us – being in nature remains restorative, even when the damage is visible and seen, perhaps, by multitudes. Engaging with nature helps with (re)learning how to be in the world.
At least this was part of what Ursula Le Guin, a participant in the conference that led to the book, suggested: “To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it.” She defined two possible approaches in ways I have cited before: “Science describes accurately from outside; poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates; poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe.” She explained: Skill in living, awareness of belonging to the world, delight in being part of the world, always tends to involve knowing our kinship as animals with animals.”
And here she put it in her inimitable poetic way:
THE STORY It’s just part of a story, actually quite a lot of stories, the part where the third son or the stepdaughter sent on the impossible mission through the uncanny forest comes across a fox with its paw caught in a trap or little sparrows fallen from the nest or some ants in trouble in a puddle of water. He frees the fox, she puts the fledglings in the nest, they get the ants safe to their ant-hill. The little fox will come back later and lead him to the castle where the princess is imprisoned, the sparrow will fly before her to where the golden egg is hidden, the ants will sort out every poppyseed for them from the heap of sand before the fatal morning, and I don’t think I can add much to this story. All my life it’s been telling me if I’ll only listen who the hero is and how to live happily ever after.
–Ursula Le Guin
I’d like to add to the focus on animals an acknowledgement of plants. People nowadays, kids in particular, know fewer plants than ever before. It is a phenomenon called Plant Blindness,the inability to notice or recognize plants in our own environment. The term was coined by two botanists, James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler, who originally proposed that we are blind to plants because they lack visual attention cues. They don’t have a face; they don’t move in the way that animals do; and they aren’t threatening. They look more like each other than animals do – and the human brain is geared to detect differences over similarities. We also favor things more familiar, and animal behavior is closer to humans in that regard, establishing some bio behavioral kinship. Add to that our general separation from nature, and you end up with people unable to identify more than a few plants.
Larkspur
This ignorance, echoed and anchored in the demise of academic instruction in plant biology, is all the more worrying given the role plants play in societal developments: global warming, food security and the need for new pharmaceuticals that might help in the fight against diseases. Without young people being drawn into plant sciences we might not be able to fight new plant diseases or develop plant strains adapted to changing climate conditions or discover new medications, and so on. In Great Britain you can no longer enroll for a botany degree, for example. Across the US, university Herbaria are closing. Funding is affected: 10 years ago plants made up 57% of the federal endangered species list – they received less than 4% of the endangered species funding! (Here is a good overview article on the consequences.)
Wild Strawberries
If schools fail at instruction, take the kids to the park. An emotional connection outweighs dry instruction in any case. Teach them how plants can be – are – heroes when it comes to their healing properties or their role in environmental protection – there are plenty of guides and apps for the phone available in case you’re not so sure yourself about names and species. Snap a picture and have an identification within a minute.
Prairie Meadow. I believe the yellow flower is Monkey flower, but am not sure.
Turn it into a treasure hunt to spur the kids’ interest. Who can find more larkspur than irises? Who spots the first saxifrage? Who can tell a strawberry by their blossom?
Saxifrage
Tell fairy tales where plants play a significant role (Hans Christian Andersen scored here, as do many Native American tales), seek out botanical gardens that help with education.
Lilies
I have my doubts about living happily ever after at which LeGuin’s poem hinted – but I believe walks are the moments when we can live happily, encountering spring’s renewal, however sparse, in all its beauty, and learn in the process.
Last Friday was Earth Day. The Oak Island nature trail on Sauvies Island had just opened after its annual 6 months-closure to protect migratory birds. I can think of no better place to celebrate nature – off I went, except it felt more like an attempt to escape than to celebrate.
Escape from thinking about the ever expanding, ever faster cycle of crises, ever larger looming dangers, ever more consequential action (or inaction) threatening this planet and its inhabitants. A carnival of negativity, as someone put it in The Atlantic while describing what is happening to our young people. There comes a point where you either shut off in depression or get enraged to the point of non-functioning.
One of the opinion writers at one of Germany’s most influential weekly, Der Spiegel, advised us this week to go milk cows, or commune with nature in any which way, or hang out at a spa, in all seriousness grappling with these options to fend off paralyzing doom, sounding simultaneously ridiculous and echoing my own sentiments (I guess ridiculous ones as well.)
Poets have gone a step further, exploring the desire to go back to a state of non-sentient existence, compared to one of calmed thought after a bovine encounter (the latter state, by the way, does not result from milking cows. As one who has engaged in that activity regularly, it is somewhat nerve-racking, just saying.)
The poem below speaks to the issue, the desire to be a speck that seeded the universe, un-thinking, un-feeling, un-remembering. It will be followed by another poem written in response, that I found somehow more encouraging (and encountered here). Written by Marissa Davis, illustrated by Lottie Kingslake and sort of sung by Toshi Reagon, it celebrates more than just “being.”
Ospreys
I was thinking of these kinds of poems while walking the loop. It used to be knee deep under water in April, now dry underfoot even though this has been one of the wettest Aprils in a long while. Trees had crashed down during the winter in unprecedented numbers.
Song birds flourished. Junkos and white crowned sparrows galore.
Those old fruit trees who remained standing were pushing out enormous amounts of blossoms – I hear that is a reaction to last year’s drought, cannot confirm.
Busy birds, herons up very high flying to and fro from their nests hidden in the woods across the slough.
I even saw a humongous swan flying west from the Columbia river (not captured on camera.) Ospreys nesting, hawks hanging, buzzards circling.
Jays everywhere,
and a few glimpses of yellow-rumped warblers and wrens.
Wren in center
The sky changed constantly, from grey to blue and back. The land and water was shimmering green, a color associated with the word hope in German. If we have to feel at all, unable to escape into the singularity, let that be the emotion associated with Earth Day! (Fed by the election results in France and Slovenia this Sunday, as well. Although I do believe, as you know, that a continuation of unconstrained neoliberal policies is but creating the substrate on which those barely defeated extremist political movements grow.)
Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were?
so compact nobody needed a bed, or food or money—
nobody hiding in the school bathroom or home alone
pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept.
For every atom belonging to me as good Belongs to you. Remember? There was no Nature. No them. No tests to determine if the elephant grieves her calf or if
the coral reef feels pain. Trashed oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;
would that we could wake up to what we were —when we were ocean and before that to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was liquid and stars were space and space was not
at all—nothing
before we came to believe humans were so important before this awful loneliness.
Can molecules recall it? what once was? before anything happened?
No I, no We, no one. No was No verb no noun only a tiny tiny dot brimming with
is is is is is
All everything home
And here is the response poem, also called Singularity, by Marissa Davis.
I have been cold in April before. Seriously cold. Shipped off to England from Germany during Easter break to learn English as a 10-year-old, the host family’s daughter dragged me to old churches and had me do some brass rubbing while she absconded with a secret boyfriend. On my knees on someone’s commemorative brass plaques on the floor, large swaths of butcher paper rolled over it and rubbing oil crayon on it, like you would do with a pencil over a coin. Hours on end in unheated Cambridge cathedrals. Miserable, as well as cold.
A decade later the state was self-inflicted. I had agreed to “meet” my boyfriend who was traveling in North Africa at the Spanish port of Algeciras to drive back home together. I had taken a ferry, crowded with drunk tourists, from the island of Ibiza where my mother spent Easter with me, to Barcelona. From there a long train trip to the Southern tip of Spain. All this in the age before cell phones and credit cards, the early 70s, mind you. Found the cheapest hostel possible in Algeciras with no heat, a threadbare blanket matched by a threadbare towel for the sink with cold water in the room, WC down the hall, no showers. And then the wait began. Each day a walk to the post office to see if there was a letter kept at “poste restante.” Each day a walk to the harbor where the ferry from Africa (Ceuta, really a Spanish enclave) arrived. Standing in harsh winds from the Strait of Gibraltar waiting for the cars to unload in long lines. No message, no boyfriend. Plenty of catcalling. Cold nights with only one incomprehensible book to distract me, Leon Trotsky’s letters – don’t ask – until funds ran out, must have been a week or so. I hitchhiked home, having not enough money left over for a train ticket, with some friendly Brits. Happy ending delayed by about 2 weeks, when the parts for the broken-down land rover finally arrived in some atlas mountain hamlet and the return trip resumed. I think I was still freezing when we reunited in Germany all those weeks later…
And now snow. Mid-April. In Portland, Oregon. Obscuring the plum- and pear-tree blossoms, eliciting shivers and uncanny thoughts about another harvest damaged by extreme weather. Dickinson came to mind and her ways to observe the landscape, distilling views, providing new associations. Never mentioning the word snow once while writing an entire poem about it….
Photographs today from my garden within a 5 day span, from warmth in the 70s to today’s snowfall of 2.5 inches. I first thought I might add the newest political news on the climate denial/regulation/Supreme Court decisions front. Then I decided against it. Why mix the brightness of the snow with the underlying dark issues. Let these beautiful words ring in our ears, and the images speak for themselves.
The doves are back. Parading in front of my window, giving me stern looks that I have not put out any seed, puffing up when the cold breeze strikes. Next week is supposed to have 76 degrees one day, snow the other. Crazy.
The song sparrows are singing their little heart out, perched on my pear tree, about to blossom.
The wood violets are exploding.
The trillium are in full swing.
Maple and elderberries are stretching to the light.
Bluebells hiding in the shadow.
And importantly, the bleeding hearts are back. Just around the corner, clusters in the woods.
These are wild flowers, Pacific Bleeding Heart (Dicentra Formosa,) not the cultivated ones that you find in English cottage gardens (shown below).
There’s a somewhat timely story as to how the name, Bleeding Heart, got transformed into an insult along the lines of “such a bleeding heart liberal…”
As early as the 14th century, the phrase referred to a sincere emotional outpouring, found in poems by Chaucer, for example (Troylus and Chriseyde):
That nevere of hym she wolde han taken hede, For which hym thoughte he felte his herte blede.
Later, so Merriam-Webster dictionary tells me, the term was associated with religious iconography, referring to the bleeding heart of Christ. It was connected to his teachings and compassion for the poor, sick or struggling.
Leave it to a right-wing American newspaper journalist, Westbrook Pegler, a nasty Senator, Joe McCarthy, and a Republican President, Ronald Reagan, to turn a thought of brotherly love into an insult.
Pegler was a hater. The list was long: Communists, fascist, Jews, liberals. In the context of a new bill before Congress, he coined the term bleeding-heart liberal in 1938. The bill? Aimed to curb lynching.
Pegler argued that lynching was no longer a problem the federal government should solve: there had only been eight lynchings in 1937, he wrote, and “it is obvious that the evil is being cured by local processes.” The bill, he thought, was being “used as a political bait in crowded northern Negro centers.” (Ref.) He, by the way, became too right-wing even for the John- Birch -Society, which threw him out eventually.
The term found full attention when picked up by Joe McCarthy in the 1950s who called Edward R. Murrow one of the “extreme Left Wing bleeding-heart elements of television and radio.” Leave it to Ronald Reagan, then newly elected Governor of California, to make it his own in the 60s: “I was quite the bleeding-heart liberal once,” he told Newsweek.
Let’s co-opt the term! I am a proudly caring, compassionate, social-justice oriented bleeding-heart progressive! There! The world needs us.
Oh, and the lynching bill? Finally, passed this March after a century or so. It failed on 200 (!) previous attempts. The Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which was introduced by Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.) in the House and Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.) in the Senate, is named for the 14-year-old Black boy whose brutal torture and murder in Mississippi in 1955 sparked the civil rights movement. The three no votes: Republican Reps. Andrew S. Clyde (Ga.), Thomas Massie (Ky.) and Chip Roy (Tex.) Glad they were not on the jury during a contemporary lynching victim’s trial, Ahmaud Arbery.
(Sacral) Music is from 18th Century Ukraine today.
Join me on a walk? Take your rubber boots – the Pineapple Express has arrived, an atmospheric river that transports moisture from the tropics to the northern areas of the planet in great masses. In simpler words: it has been pouring.
And this is the foot path …..
I needed to get out yesterday to get away from the news, so many horrors all at once. Nobody able to predict what will happen next, how to approach a situation where the unchecked power over weapons destroys lives, a people, potentially the world as we know it. The reactions in favor of greater militarization in Europe are understandable but go so against the grain of what a nation – Germany – has tried to do for decades in acknowledgement of its history. All of a sudden there are billions available to fill the coffers of the weapons industry, when poverty and houselessness and lack of social services are unabated. Let me hasten to add, I do not have a clue what the right thing is to do, with the stakes so insane. And I do understand that you cannot defend yourself against unlawful, imperialistic military invasion with bare hands.
Much mud carried by the fast stream
The refugee situation is raising ambiguous feelings as well. It is great how hundreds of thousands of fleeing Ukrainians are welcomed in neighboring nations. It is horrifying that people of color have been treated very differently, not just in general (think Polish treatment of Syrian refugees) but in this particular instance – Black and Brown students studying in Ukraine not allowed across the borders, pushed out of trains and busses, humans of a second order. The internet is full of suggestions that Africans make it immediately to Romania which is set for flights to Ghana, Nigeria and Zimbabwe.
And then there is the situation of the Jews whose fate is so tied to the history of Ukraine, the unspeakable terror against them during WW II, whose Holocaust memorial at Babyn Yar has been bombed by Putin yesterday. Their status as refugees, outside of Israel, has been a double edged sword. Or even within Israel – it is the occupied West Bank that will house the influx of Jewish Ukrainians, complicating things for the Palestinians.
I was thinking back to an essay describing the experiences and difficulties of Eastern European Jews emigrating to Germany in the 1990s when Germany accepted a contingent of Jewish refugees to polish its own image, to signal repentance of past deeds.
I also remembered Hannah Arendt’s words, so applicable to the moment. In the link, her short essay We Refugeesis printed in full after her portrait.
Windfall
But lest we forget, there are also people in Russia whose life will take a devastating turn as we speak, who have few choices for protest or action to change what is decreed from above. Here is a short essay from 2 days ago by a young Russian Jew who is grieving.
And then there is a novel about a survivor of another war in Ukraine, that comforts us with a tale of resilience. Here is an excerpt of Kurkov’s Grey Bees.
Nature on my walk pretended that nothing had happened. Ignored the fact that it was so warm that everything seemed to explode in growth spurts several weeks early. An unstoppable push towards renewal.
A few of the small birds were happily chirping along, including a female ruby crowned kinglet, a miracle to catch with the camera since they move at lightning speed. (Below are Towhee, song sparrows, a female junko, killdeer and the kinglet.)
The geese did their thing, coming and going.
The wild currants joined the chorus of plants in a landscape that defiantly put up some color against the grey sky.
As did the rest of the flowering beauty:
The pussy willows, in different stages of growth, seemed to suggest that tears can be beautiful adornment, and that they will roll off by themselves – well, my mind prone to anthropomorphising suggested that, but I did not complain….
Spring is all about renewal. Renewal is also humanity’s highest good, enshrined in democracies who are willing to take risks, accept the unpredictable, renounce the statism that aristocracies or authoritarian regimes want to enshrine. Renewal is about a livable future, not an oppressive past. It is upon everyone of us to support that project of renewal, within and beyond our borders.
When the rain got too hard I found a shelter, and some earlier visitor had left something behind. At least the kids here can still assume that nothing has happened and engage their fairy worlds. Wish it was true for every child in the world.
