Although I’ve been around the interwebs, reading blog posts, etc, my attention hasn’t exactly been focused here.
It’s not that anything specific has happened since we last talked, it’s more like I’ve been grieving. Grieving the world that no longer exists, and not just because of Covid-19, although that has served to hasten things along.
This particular cycle started with my post on getting our Berkey water purification unit. (which by-the-way is absolutely wonderful)
I’m not going to go into the why’s and wherefores’ of the utter debacle of the climate crisis. You’re either on-board with it or you’re not. You’re either consciously taking action to secure the quality of life, and the lives of your Self and those around you, for the next couple of decades, (as much as is possible in any given circumstance) or you’re not. If you’ve been following my blog for a while you would be well aware of where I stand on this.
Mrs Widds and I are upending our familiar life here on Widder Island for this very reason.
Can you imagine? At our age? I certainly would’ve preferred to go forth into the unknown with a few less decades under my belt, but it is what it is.
This summer was a particularly shitty one, and it’s taken me until recently to shake off the effects, both physically and emotionally, all the while knowing that such ‘extremes’, are to be expected now.
Grief about these things is also to be expected, certainly at this time of the year (in the Northern Hemisphere) where endings are starting to occur in order for something new, something unknown, to rise in the Spring.
I’m not altogether good with unknowns. Given my ‘druthers’, I much prefer the known, but I’ve lived through enough sunrises and sunsets to know that staying within the ‘known’, once its ‘used-by’, date has come and gone only leads to stagnation.
And stagnation is much, much worse, (and far more dangerous) than venturing forth into the unknown.
Speaking of which … this was my view out of my study window this afternoon. You can’t really tell, but it’s miserable out there. Lots of wind, lots of rain … and one beautiful tree just going with the flow …
-oOo-
And I can’t use the word ‘melancholy’ in a blog post title without referencing this song in one way or another … take it away, Judy …
Widdershins Worlds 
May the sun shine again
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That’s something we can rely on. 😀 No matter what we manage to do to this little blue planet spinning through the void, that giant nuclear explosion out there will go on.
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It is a very difficult time to be alive. We need to call on everything we’ve learnt about magic, the medicine wheel, shamanism etc etc and find our own inner strength to endure and keep our hearts open to life’s joys. Good luck. 😊❤
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We won’t survive without the magic.
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That’s what I think 🙂
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The tree looks like it’s waving at you as if it understands and sympathizes.
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I’m going to miss that tree next year. 🙂
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If you have videos you can take it with you…
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Yes go for it, if the island is no longer the place it once was it sounds like a good reason to venture off elsewhere. Good luck.
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Throw in living on an earthquake zone, and only a couple of meters above sea-level, and it’s a really good time to be heading off. 🙂
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Something I had never heard of dumped a lot of rain on California yesterday – an ‘atmospheric river.’ We desperately needed the rain, but the thing was on the scale of terraforming – something that pulled huge amounts of water from the Pacific and dumped a lot of it on Northern California. Good – but sort of terrifying in concept.
As with all things lately, what we can do as individuals is so little, it’s hard to remain any kind of an optimist – and I have three kids. I swear things weren’t this bad before – but my parents’ generation defeated incarnate evil. And then proceeded to treat some of the survivors much better than others: I just heard that Black veterans were not offered the GI Bill for education that my dad was given.
It’s a wonder we survive.
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It’s sheer dumb luck that we survive, but it’s fast running out these days.
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The oscillations are hard to take.
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Sending hugs. I sympathize with what you are saying. I’ve also been feeling a sense of sadness for the death of how I thought things would turn out in terms of how I would live my life and the world around us. I’m not quite willing to put my “Widow’s Weeds” away, but I am feeling a very, very small and delicate sense of optimism.
Here, have another cyber hug…
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Many thanks for the wonderful hugs 😀 … I have a hope that enough of us will create our ‘islands of sanity in an ocean of chaos’, that our species will survive the next handful of decades, it’s not a big hope, but a bit of hope none-the-less.
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We are blind to the hidden but also to the obvious.
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If you mean ‘we, as a species, then it’s an insane willful blindness.
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I hear you. We have had nightmare summers for the last couple of years in Australia, and there are predictions for 50C degree days this coming summer… that’s 122F!! So you are very brave to venture off away from home; I am bunkering down, getting a bigger water tank, building up the veg garden, and working more from home. Where are you going? I may have missed a post or two… or are you still going driving in your van?
Grief is all around us, for many reasons, and doesn’t seem to be going away 😦 I feel so sad for the younger folks… 😦
Take care ❤
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50, eh? I’m pretty sure humans start melting in those temperatures.
You’re in a great place to hunker down if I remember that part of the world correctly. 😀 … might get a bit toasty on a decade or two. Excellent news about the water tank and veggies. Both are things that are going to be a form of currency down the road.
We’re going into the Interior, (which is anywhere east of the coast 😀 ) higher elevation, into the Rockies, (the Canadian ones) No specific location, but we have narrowed our search to a couple of regions … and yeah, still going in our travel trailer (caravan) which we’ve been retrofitting with better designed, and constructed, storage mostly.
I get what you mean by the ‘younger folks’, on the other hand they haven’t known anything different. It’s a bit like trying to describe to them how a rotary phone works. 🙂 … they might understand the theory, but without the cultural framing it’s almost nonsense to them.
I think the hardest hit demographic are the ‘middle-income’ earners as they realise their upwardly mobile aspirations are crashing down on them and they’ll be back down here with the ‘unwashed masses’, without the skills or knowledge, or resources/skills to create their own little ‘islands of survival, and will expect help from non-existent government entities. If nothing else, the debt government’s have amassed just over the last two years alone, is going to cripple any sense of a ‘global economy’ by the end of this decade, or earlier.
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Phew, you are SO RIGHT, on all points. Yes, here is a good place to settle, a bit too tropical perhaps, but good community.
May you find a perfect place to land and nest ❤
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May it be so. 🙂
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I’d like to offer a solution involving remaining chipper, inventing a new gin cocktail and infinite time to absorb good books but it sounds like you need to focus on wandermust to turn the next page. Always remember that at the end of the rainbow there’s a sewage treatment plant waiting to create gold…
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The cocktail sounds good! 😀 … yep, it’s a matter of putting one foot in front of the other until the Journey’s done. 🙂
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It’s human beings who depress me these days. We could solve everything, including the climate crisis /and/ covid, if only we, and every politician we elected, worked for the common good. But they don’t, do they? Rhetorical. Here in Australia, the morons in Canberra have finally agreed to a target by 2050…with only a wish and a prayer on how to get there. 😦
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Funny how they all were going for 2020, and when that didn’t work they changed their tune to 2010, etc. A bit like those ‘doomsday’ cults where the head honcho, usually a bloke, picks a date for the end of the world, then when the world doesn’t end, says, “Oopsie, my bad, I forgot to carry the two in my calculations, so it’s still on for next Tuesday, and the bleating idiots, in reality, very sad, frightened, people actually, go along with it … because it’s somehow easier than taking responsibility for their lives themselves … sometimes, quite frequently these days, I think we a doomed and deadly species. 😦
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The last two years has certainly stripped away the veneer of ‘goodness’. There are amazing people who do good things, but there are also @#$$%%^ . Lots of them. So many I fear you’re right about that ‘doomed and deadly species’.
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Yeah, it’s not happy times. I remember Halloweens as a kid, being very disappointed most of the time, when I had to wear a sweater over my costume, thus defeating the purpose.
I mean, yeah, it’s LA and all, but today, walking to the store, I thought I was gonna pass out. That’s how frigging hot it is outside.
I felt myself almost getting up, arms outstretched, as I listened to Judy singing, and walking toward her…
But after all, I’ve always been melancholy. It’s just sad that now so many others are, too, probably for bigger and better reasons than mine. 🙂
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They’re probably all the same reasons, just wearing different clothes at different times.
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