"February on the prairies can also be a wild card. Some days are warm enough to melt the snow on the side streets; three days later it’s four inches thick again. Although spring supposedly arrives next month, we can still get blizzards and temperatures in the minus thirties. In February, we haven’t arrived anywhere. We are waiting for a train in a chilly wood-lined station where our voices echo. We are in the middle of nowhere, in the no man’s land of mood between the new year and the spring equinox.
"February’s white skies, which have neither camber nor variety, suffocate me with their enormous wool blankets and smother my spirit. That’s February, that sense of boredom, that nothing is changing, that everything is muffled—feelings, vitality, all muffled in an unending round of uncertain days. When the white skies meet white snow, I don’t quite know where I am or where the cloud’s ceiling is. That disorientation that is almost existential—that’s February.
"February calls for patience. It’s fitting that February’s tedious minimalism—this hoary muffled world of days that seem stubbornly to crawl across an empty horizon—calls for patience, which is really a hard-won minimalist response to the world."
But what about mean March? That we say it either comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb or that it comes in like a lamb and goes out like a lion indicates the uncertainty of its weather. March is the month where grit is everywhere. It's the month when I dread falling on the ice that's come overnight, following on the previous day's thaw. So we rejoice at the warmth one day and then we go down on our bums the next morning. Mean March!
And yet. And yet. A week ago, I had begun to walk outside since I could find a clear path into Regina's Crescents neighbourhood, and it gave me such joy. I looked around me and saw grit and grey and unenthusiastic trees and shrubbery looking like an old Brillo pad, and I felt such lightness. This was probably because of the light: the sun is higher and has warmth in it, and the days are longer. Our bird brains react to this with a lift. But the world was not visually beautiful. I have recently learned that human beings are wired for vision. The occipital lobe, our visual processing centre, takes up about a third of our brain and registers everything from colour to shape to movement. It's no wonder that when we think about beauty we imagine seeing it.
So I had to shift my perspective to understand why I was so happy walking down the gritty streets. The first thing I noticed was birdsong. Geese and ducks and sparrows and one lone seagull. There was also a very quiet pair of partridges.
And then I had to make contact with my skin, with the delightful feel of a light breeze on my face. It didn't feel like my skin would begin to turn up at the corners of my face as a prelude to coming off altogether, as it does on bitterly cold days. My skin was happy to be out and about.
But it was eagerness that caught my attention, eagerness as a thing of beauty. There was a father and son throwing a football in a small triangular park still full of snow. There was my delight in being able to take a walk--no matter what it looked like--not in a mall full of boredom (this is something I've noticed about the people who work in malls), not to the mall muzak but to the sound of birds, not after a fifteen-minute drive that I'll have to repeat when I'm done, but right out my door. There was eagerness in the conversation of the teenagers who were decidedly, bravely, eagerly underdressed.
Then last Thursday hit and we were threatened with blizzard-like conditions. My friend dee Hobsbawn Smith drove in from Saskatoon to launch "One Book, One Province" events focused on her wonderful book of essays, Bread and Water, and said it was awful: blowing snow and fog--and then sudden blue sky above Lumsden, but with wind continuing to howl. She wrote that the trip home the next day was even worse, "a shit show. Five accidents. Semis and pickups in the ditch, the highway blocked by semis in two spots, one in each direction, with EMS on the scene." March came in like an eager lion, windy and cold. It gave us some serene days in the middle, and then roared lustily out again, leaving us with an April Fool's joke today--more snow and temperatures 8 degrees lower than normal. Conditions after the Ontario ice storm are way beyond any joke. People without power for three days. What's up?
Solastalgia. In 2003, Glenn Albrecht coined the word out of three Latin roots that highlighted comfort, devastation and abandonment, and grief. The word is meant to describe our feelings upon finding that the natural world has been dramatically changed by the climate crisis to the point where we no longer feel at home. No respectable climate scientist is going to point to March in Canada and intone "Climate change." But we feel the change in our bones--sometimes literally. I feel it in my energy level, in a creeping sense of despair at yet another cold windy day when my body and my psyche is seriously ready for a break from winter.
But what can we do? We can acknowledge what economists call "The Tragedy of the Horizon," which is basically our inability to pay attention to the effect our current actions will have on the future and on future generations. I learned about "The Tragedy of the Horizon" in Joseph Stiglitz's wonderful (and readable) book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, where he actually envisions a "progressive capitalism" that isn't winners take all. Importantly, Stiglitz distinguishes between "freedom from" and "freedom to," explaining that one person's "freedom from" often compromises another's "freedom to." His opening example is, literally, explosive. Freedom from limits on buying guns tops another person's freedom to live. In climate terms, corporations' freedom from regulation and limitations compromise future generations' freedom to live on a liveable planet. What if we could just say that? That our actions and choices today limit future freedom? It's a good place to begin making the changes we all need to make. If only we could convince the people who are way more powerful than we are of the same thing.
Maybe patience isn't always a good idea.
No comments:
Post a Comment