NOT IN ZERMATT

Americans are not welcome in Europe this year, so our annual vacation at [cool] high altitudes is not available. We are trying to find comfort in the flourishing green spaces of Carlisle (below), tall drinks of iced water and the books we've been meaning to read, with frequent trips to local farmers' markets.

Speaking of farmers' markets, Atlantic magazine send us "nine poems for fraught times", including the following link to the Poetry Foundation website:

From Blossoms 

BY LI-YOUNG LEE

From blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road where we turned toward   

signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,

from sweet fellowship in the bins,

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into   

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom

Li-Young Lee, “From Blossoms” from Rose. Copyright © 1986 by Li-Young Lee. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.

YUM. The joys and comforts of home.

REVISITING THE MOON

THIS WEEK WAS THE 50th ANNIVERSARY of the first landing of mankind on the moon, on 20 July 1969. It was fun to be in Zermatt, where the sky reaches down to touch you on a clear day, to celebrate this awesome achievement. Plus the gods were kind enough to celebrate the event at the full-moon portion of the satellite's monthly cycle, shown starting on July 16 on the chart.

Moon chart from moonconnection.com

A comparative close-up through the camera showed a mass on the moon that corresponded to a labelled image of the moon, indicating the location of the Mare Tranquillitatis -- the Sea of Tranquility where astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin had landed. It spurred the imagination to the breaking point.

On Earth, the Alps form a bowl at the south end of the valley. The tall mountains at the eastern end -- the Dom and the Breithorn, not shown in the photo -- are on the left. The queen of all the Swiss Alps, the Matterhorn, rises majestically on the right (western) end of the vista. (Cervinia, Italy is over the horizon to the south.) When you're lucky (and we were this week), the clouds do not block the view of the moon, which takes several hours to cross the "ridge" of land visible from downtown Zermatt. So I parked myself on the balcony to watch the far-away moon move from east to west on this anniversary dawn.

It was an interesting interlude. The patch of sky before me was immense; the Matterhorn, not-exactly-shabby. In context, the moon seemed so far away, and myself, sitting on a small balcony in Zermatt, seemed -- in the scheme of things -- tiniest of all. The universe so vast. We humans so fragile. Quite a humbling experience.

A SWISS WELCOME

THE JOURNEY IS MORE EPIC each year. This time, the remnants of Hurricane Barry were due to arrive in Boston just at take-off time, and the weather people were spot on. We taxied to the runway to join the take-off queue. A couple of small planes departed, then the Lufthansa 747 ahead of us was given the green light. We moved to the head of the line. Where we waited, as a number of smaller planes were permitted to come to ground -- a blessing, we were sure, as black thunderheads moved in from the west and large raindrops began to splatter across the plane's porthole windows,

"We are being held," the pilot informed us. "A serious squall line is passing through. We'll turn off the engine and wait here until the storm subsides." And we that, Boston shut down Logan airport. What followed was new to me, though the pilot had a here-we-go-again quality to his short speech. Outside the plane, night had fallen suddenly at 5:30 p.m. with rain obscuring the view entirely, except for forked, intense lightning strikes and thunder that arrived only seconds after each flash. The passengers, who had been chatting nervously, were respectfully silent. We sat through this excitement for 20 minutes or so, when the darkness lifted. Across the field, a fire truck was responding to a call. "Having way too much fun" is one ironic way to describe it. Finally, the pilot called the engines to life, and I wondered if others joined me in asking myself whether it was a good idea to chase this storm across Boston Harbor.

As it turned out, the pilot knew just what he was doing. In a steep climb, our low-mileage Airbus 300 shrugged off some minor shudders as we rose above the storm and outpaced it. Our business-as-usual flight landed in Zurich just a few minutes late, and soon the SBB Intercity 8 train was whisking us across the country to Visp.

It's a wonderful journey when it ends at the Christiana Hotel in Zermatt! Michel Franzen, part of the third generation to run the hotel, had arranged a simple soup-and-salad luncheon to refresh us when we arrived.

Before we knew it, we were enjoying a welcoming bottle of iced Les Murettes, a local Swiss wine, along with a basket of fruit and chocolates as we relaxed on the balcony looking out at the Matterhorn. (More about that spectacular sky later.)

WHAT ARE WE COMING TO?

It's official: the #1 issue facing humankind is the state of our planet Earth. The well-being of the world's population, the quality of life for future generations, and the course of world history all depend on entering a sustainable relationship with our environment. 


World leaders, struggling economies, developing countries, and countries at war -- we're all in this together. If we have a "common enemy" to unite us all, it's not arriving from outer space. It's already here, and -- to quote the great Walt Kelly of the gone-but-not-forgotten comic strip Pogo: "We have met the enemy and it is us."

Environmental writers have invented new names to describe our planet's situation -- wild, made-up permutations such as Eaarth or Eairth. 

Eaarth: An altered planet

According to Bill McKibben, pioneering environmentalist and head of 350.org, a  worldwide movement to control global warming by limiting atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions to 350 ppm, the climate battle is settled science. He's been writing books for 30 years -- his debut, The End of History -- was published in 2009. We no longer need to worry about the arrival of climate change: we're living it. McKibben continues to warn of climate change and its effects on human society. The name Eaarth, for example, was coined to indicate that our planet has been fundamentally altered by human activity. His many books form an important commentary on the staatus quo of life on earth.

The 350 ppm rollback has not been achieved. Earlier in this decade, in fact, the NY Times reported that Beijing had posted a "crazy bad" reading of 775 ppm.  And China is now burning more coal than all the rest of the planet combined.

A new website, CO2 Earth, was recently launched to report the daily CO2 readings recorded at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. It's worth a visit and a conversation.

Two more resources to consider

Two additional names and debuts to celebrate: a 2016 film from Diana Beresford-Kroeger (Call of the Forest)  and an amazing catalog of ideas from Whole Earth catalog contributor Paul Hawken (Drawdown, 2017) add inspiring ideas to the issue of climate change.

Beresford-Kroeger has consummate credentials for a forest activist. Raised in the Irish Druid tradition (Ireland is a land of forests that has lost almost all of its old-growth trees), she  learned the ways of the Celtic triad of mind, body and soul. This included the philosophy of healing, the laws of the trees, Brehon wisdom and the Ogham alphabet, all of it rooted in a vision of nature that saw trees and forests as fundamental to human survival and spirituality. Out of that huge, holistic vision have come the observations that put her at the forefront of her field: the discovery of mother trees at the heart of a forest; the fact that trees are a living library, have a chemical language and communicate in a quantum world; the major idea that trees heal living creatures through the aerosols they release; that they carry a great wealth of natural antibiotics and other healing substances; and, perhaps most significantly, that planting trees can regulate the atmosphere and the oceans, and even stabilize our climate. This film is not to be missed. It's based on scientific research published in her encyclopedic Arboretum America, about Northern American woody plants and perennials,and Arboretum Borealis, which covers plants of the global boreal habitat.


The 80 projects summarized in Drawdown include initiatives in energy, food, women/girls, buildings/cities, land use, transport, and materials science. The ideas presented are being enacted throughout the globe, and are ranked in terms of cost-effectiveness - both in carbon cost and dollar cost. Prepare to be totally engaged. If pursued with discipline, they offer a credible path to reach drawdowns - the reversal of greenhouse gases that have built up in our atmosphere primarily from the burning of fossil fuels - coal, oil, and natural gas. Entrepreneur and activist Hawken, along with  and a who's who of scientists and foundations, stand behind this awesome publication. There is even an online set of references for those who ask: What can I do to help?

Citizens' groups play a role

What if government agencies, possibly for political reasons, decline to impose or decide to remove environmental regulations and thereby endanger the climate? What options remain? Rapidly growing citizens' groups, such as Mom's Clean Air Force, co-founded by Dominique Browning in the U.S., have stepped up with rallies and projects to raise awareness and to protest rollbacks of the Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts established as part of the Environmental Protection Agency legislation. 

But will rallies and citizen pressure provide the political will needed when governmental authorities deny climate realities?

Eairth: Embracing the sensuousness of place 

A consummate spokesman for an optimistic future is the ecological philosopher and activist David Abram, whose two books -- The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal -- ask us to experience the true magic of nature from our deepest animal selves. He was one of the first nature writers to broaden the definition of our planet to include "the more-than-human world."  His writing is as luminous and compelling as clear air or clean water. I continue to buy his books because I'm forever giving away my own copies and then need to replace them. 

What will it take?

April 22, 2020 will mark the 50th anniversary of the original Earth Day in 1970. As just one of the myriad small community groups who support the "friends of the Earth" agenda, our local garden club is planning a community event to commemorate ongoing efforts to honor and befriend the planet. We will also focus our outreach programs to address issues such as sustainable gardening practices; concern for native species, pollinators, and biodiversity; the inclusion of fruit and nut shrubs and trees in our home garden "bioplan"; carbon sequestration; implementing energy-saving initiatives; seed swapping and saving -- the list goes on. We hope to raise community awareness that all these efforts make a difference. We're celebrating the Earth by gardening as if the planet depends on it. 

We are fortunate to have a wonderful local non-profit called Grow Native Massachusetts. Their motto is: "Every garden matters -- Every garden counts." They sponsor ecological workshops (for locals) as well as a fabulous series of talks by leading garden practitioners and researchers (with online videos for anyone who has an Internet connection). Check them out. They're answering the urgent call of famed biologist and author E.O.Wilson, as laid out in Half-Life: Our Planet's Fight for Life (p.3). It's called the Half-Earth proposal. It's radical, and it runs like this: "...by setting aside half the planet in reserve, or more, we [can] save the living part of the environment and achieve the stabilization required for our own survival." Wow -- Are we up for (or is it "down with"?) that?

ITS NAME IS WRIT IN WATER

LOOKING FORWARD TO RETURN to Zermatt, where it's cool and the skies are open. The mountains host  their share of primal storms, but the community has  created a building code that can withstand the weather. How great to live in a world of ample water, water that's doing good work -- refreshing, powering, sustaining and soothing. The Christiana hotel in Zermatt sits next to the Vispa river. It's frozen in winter, but in summer it provides cool evenings and a delicious white noise that lulls you to sleep. Waking, it's sometimes hard to tell whether a powerful rainstorm has moved in, or whether it's just ol' Ma'am river roaring and rolling rocks down from the glaciers above.  As you can see,the Swiss have found it prudent to corral the waters into a concrete channel -- neatness counts.

Wherever you travel in the mountains there are pounding streams, noisy waterfalls, trickling tributaries over soggy slopes. There is generous snow melt most years, but the rivers "normally" continue into the fall by residual melting of  ancient glacial shelves. But  now those shelves are retreating.  What will happen when the glaciers are gone?

GOOD-BYE AND THANK YOU, MARY OLIVER

A FRIEND posted this poem, which I had not seen. A message for our worrisome times:

“I Worried" by Mary Oliver

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading, or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.”
                              -- From "Swan" (2012. Her 20th book)


And now she needs to worry no more. But we shall miss her songs...

STARTING ANEW

Since much of this blog was composed during summer vacation, I've neglected those important "other" seasons at home. In the past year, I've also become enchanted with the passing seasons, as catalogued by the above example from amazing Grant Snider. He's a delightful artist, down-to-earth and airborne philosopher, and author of the amazing "The Shape of Ideas" -- a book that can change your life. He was also an orthodontist, when last I looked, to pay the bills. You can follow his work at his website and the social media sites listed there. You can even make a donation at Patreon if you want to support his creative urges.

***

So here we are, sitting among the bare trees in mid-January, waiting for the wallop of the winter's first storm. Rushing to pick up the last of the downed tree limbs, store anything that needs to be put in its place, filling the bird feeders, wishing there had been more time in the fall...

Now we will hunker indoors, and watch the show through the sliding doors that overlook our frozen landscape. And wait for birds to swoop down from the trees to snatch their seeds. As the squirrels leap from bare branch to branch.