Climate Change soon coming to a store near you

Cherry Blossom Season in the New Normal
http://www.rnw.nl/english/radioshow/natural-disasters

I've just read a heart wrenching article by Gretel Ehrlich in Tricycle Magazine about the catastrophic Japanese tsunami. I found this image online that conveys a sense of the unbelievable damage inflicted along 365 miles of Japanese coast; the image also illustrates the title of this blog: climate change soon coming to a store near you, as if it were a refrain from an ad about an earth-shaking new consumer product. 

Is this a taste of our future? Will devastating climate change be coming to a store near us, no matter where we live?  Is this our new normal?  How will we react when it happens to us? In the following quote a Zen abbot at ground zero gives us one humble but existentially profound answer:

"Since the disaster, some older people have committed suicide. But there’s no reason to do that. We just start from where we are, from whatever the day brings to us.” *

Check out the second part of this post by clicking here...

* quote from Spring 2014 Tricycle Magazine excerpted from Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Face of the Tsunami by Gretel Ehrlich.

Silvana Cenci’s Spring Tooth Harrow

Polarized image of Silvana Cenci's Spring Tooth Harrow
CC Jean Stimmell: 03/04/14

Silvana Cenci’s Spring Tooth Harrow *

Struggling in the midst of divorce

with no firewood cut for winter

I answered an ad: “wood for sale.”

That’s how I met a unique soul

known as “the dynamite lady”

who used high explosives

to blow up metal to create art

known around the world.

Silvana Cenci was her name.

When I came by to pick up my first load

She told me in her rich Italian accent

how her father was a famous anarchist

and so was she, living life
according to her own rules:

and “If people don’t like it,

they can fuck off and drop dead.”

She talked with her hands, gesturing

with her chain-smoked, unfiltered cigarettes

weaving a spell in words and smoke

enveloping me as I loaded my wood.

When she paused to offer me a cigarette

I carefully explained how I had quit

but promptly smoked one anyhow

inhaling the smoke felt illicit and intoxicating

like I had joined a revolutionary movement.

Each time I came by for wood

we talked and smoked

 and soon became friends.

She told me she had reached an age

where it was time to make a change.

She was selling off everything

to move to the Arizona desert

where she would support herself

selling hotdogs from a food cart

pulled by a camel.

Wanting to buy something else

to help her on her quest

I offered to buy

her ancient harrow

festooned with weeds,

thinking I could use it to till

my homestead garden.

But she said “absolutely not.”

This was not a farm implement

but a precious piece of art which

she’d always intended to mount on

the side of her studio.

I was finally able to make a deal

buying the harrow for fifteen dollars

only after I promised to cherish it

as a piece of art.

That winter I burned the wood

and had honorable intentions

to mount the old harrow

on the side of my barn.

But somehow now

30 years have passed

and my ancient harrow

still stands abandoned

in the dirty snow

at the edge of my field.

While composing this photograph

of Silvana's spring tooth harrow,

my memories came rushing back

of this remarkable person

 now departed to her home

to join the legendary ranks

of the mythic gods of Rome.

See: www.silvanacenci.com/index.html

---

* A spring-tooth harrow is outdated piece of farm equipment that uses many flexible iron teeth mounted in rows to loosen the soil before planting.

Fairy tales: Alternative to environmental doom?

Late afternoon sun through the woods across from our house: 2/28/14
CC Jean Stimmell

Theodor Seifert, a Jungian analyst in Stuttgart Germany, believes that fairy tales tap into the vast richness of our collective unconscious, representing hard-won wisdom accumulated over time since the dawn of our species, working in concert with the more-than-human wisdom of the earth itself.

Seifert, like most Jungians, views the various characters in a fairy tale, not as different people but as different universal aspects of our individual psyche. Therefore, to him, a fairy tale is a metaphor for the drama that plays out between these various parts during the course of our life.

As such, fairy tales can teach us crucial, life-affirming lessons. For instance in his book about Snow White, Seifert shows us how this fairy tale is really about meeting ourselves in all our forms – “from self-reflection to self-criticism to self destruction” and then goes on to tell us why this is of the utmost importance to us today:

“Today we are in a position to annihilate ourselves completely, as global self-destruction is an acutely threatening possibility.  Will we escape it? I believe …fairy tales as embodied here in Snow White – can show us alternatives, alternatives that must be chosen by the individual.

With the individual begins the transformation that can progress from the one to the many. If we find and honor our own inner earth, the planet earth will also again become something like our mother, which in fact it always has been.”*

* Snow White: Life Almost Lost by Theodor Seifert. Chiron Publications. 1986: page 118

DEFINITION OF POLARIZATION

Dead oak leaf blowing in the wind
 near Sewells Falls in Concord
CC Jean Stimmell: 2/22/14

POLITICAL POLARIZATION

Twisting in the wind

like a dead leaf on a stub

Stuck on our preconceptions 

Cabin Fever: Trapped, Frozen in Time

Back in February of 2012, I wrote in my blog about the unseasonable warm weather, calling it "the winter that wasn't." As you can see below, for some deluded reason, I thought I was suffering from cabin fever: 

February 7th of 2012 from our N.H. winter that wasn't

The ice is unseasonably thawing at the edge of Jenness Pond

re-freezing each night only to be pushed up the next day

from the heat of the sun and expansion of the ice pack

forming shifting structures that look like

turtles run over by a 10-wheeler
or houses after an earthquake
to my cabin-fevered mind.

------------------------------------

Unfortunately, two years later, in February of 2014, we have all been rudely reintroduced  to what cabin fever really is!!!  In the first 20 days of February '14 alone, we have been hit with 8 storms, dumping three feet of snow on us, on top of what we already had.

This photo I took on snowshoes of the back of our house two days ago, during yet another storm, expresses the true essence of cabin fever: the monotone melancholy and sense of being trapped, frozen in time:

When the Earth Screams

Mostly frozen Merrimack River at Sunset: Valentine's Day 2014

CC Jean Stimmell

A flush of anguish and despair settled over me while photographing this sunset. I felt like I was at Jesus’ crucifixion writ large: witnessing the spilling of the blood of Mother Earth.

My mind flew back to a passage from When the Earth Screams[1], a science fiction piece written by Deleuse and Guattari almost 30 years ago. The lead character is a scientist named Challenger who is intended by the authors to be a caricature of modern science, but who unfortunately is, in a metaphorical sense, uncannily spot on.

The plot is well summarized by the translators: “Challenger argues that the Earth is an organism, much like a sea-urchin, hard on the outside but soft inside. Human beings are a fungal growth of which the planet is completely unaware. Surrounded by skeptics, he proposes to prove his point by vigorously stimulating the creature’s sensory cortex, that is, driving a shaft into the centre of the Earth, thereby gaining its attention…”[2]

After a brief lecture to a restless audience, Challenger presses the ‘electric button’ that sends an enormous iron dart into ‘the nerve ganglion of old Mother Earth’:

There erupts “the most horrible yell that ever was heard…a howl in which pain, anger, menace, and the outraged majesty of Nature all blended into one hideous shriek. For a full minute it lasted, a thousand sirens in one, paralyzing all the great multitude with its fierce insistence…No sound in history has every equaled the cry of the injured Earth.[3]

This science fiction story of 30 years ago feels too damned real to me today and, coupled with the blood red sunset, appear to be apt metaphors of our future, triggerings questions that still feverishly bubble in my brain:

Is my sunset the blood of my Mother pierced by the “enormous steel dart” of fracking?

Is the unprecedented rise in my Mother’s temperature, a sign of Her raging fever?

Is that whimper I hear faintly on the winter wind the Final Solution: my Mother choking on green house gases, the last gasp of yet another Holocaust victim murdered in this giant gas chamber built by men?

XXX

You might also be interested in my previous blog entry on Guattari: 

3 Ecologies: combating monstrous and mutant algae

---

[1] Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II

[2] Guattari, Felix (1989) The Three Ecologies. Translator’s Introduction, p. 2.

[3] Ibed. p. 2

An image of the sublime

Image of the Sublime
CC Jean Stimmell

A broken shell on Wallis Sands Beach 

photographed by me yesterday

irridescent in the receding tide.

Lifted off the sand with Photoshop

and mounted in its proper domain:

the infinite and the sublime.