I’m sitting at my desk watching a guy I’m paying to landscape my front yard hack a butt. This, after a healthy (and apparently exhausting) period of scrolling on his phone, while leaning against an idling excavator he’d half-heartedly tinkered with to start his day. The morning is half gone and I’ll be damned if I can point to a clear unit of work accomplished aside from showing up at the right address.
It’s a frustrating feeling to see your expectations and hard earned cash literally go up in smoke. Infuriating really, and also humbling to not feel like you control enough of the variables to get things back on track. But, I have been accurately accused of having both high expectations and a short(ish) fuse, so perhaps I’m the one who needs to take a break.
(wild?) fire season
Like many people across Canada and around the world, I have found it difficult this long, hot summer to watch the ever-expanding wildfires systematically burning down that which we have taken for granted for so long. From coast to coast our pristine, endlessly rolling hectares of forest have been on fire. Here in British Columbia by mid July we began setting new records for area burned and through August things got increasingly worse until a provincial state of emergency was declared August 24. As I write this, August 31, there are 425 active wildfires, thousands of people on evacuation order, and so much more of the ‘season’ still ahead. For those on the periphery of the fires, it is worrying yet almost considered bothersome – people complain of smoky skies ‘ruining’ their summer holidays. Vacations had to be cancelled and local tourism subsequently decimated in affected areas. I imagine those directly affected have a very different perspective; devastation felt for their community, their homes, potentially their way of life. And yet this is a human-centred point of view – who mourns for the hectares lost? The trees? The bushes? The grass and the soil? The scorched fungal networks? The wildlife destroyed or displaced? Who cries for Mother Earth?
menopausal mother
I imagine Gaia, our beatific Mother Earth as personifying many of the characteristics of a menopausal woman. She’s self-combusting from hot flashes. She’s exhausted. Her body aches all over. She’s boiling with rage one minute and simpering with sadness the next. She’s gaining weight she doesn’t want, and losing cognitive function she does want. She’s seeing suitors abandon her for new, shinier planets and is not sure she cares. She has extreme reactions to things she used to absorb and ‘roll with’ so expertly that no one realized she had been absorbing them since time began. She’s been tired for a millennia and, frankly, doesn’t have any f*cks left to give.
I imagine her choking on her high expectations and biting back reproach. I imagine her turning her anguished face to one side and letting her eyes fill with acceptance. I imagine her weeping silently as she absorbs blow after blow to her abdomen. I imagine her looking at her children and hoping she has taught them enough to survive once she is gone. I imagine her standing in front of me, burning. I imagine her gone and it turns my insides to stone.
Where does one place the impotent rage and cascading despair? I place mine here.
