How to be ok when the world is burning up?
I am trying to get back into my personal creative practice. Like I said in my last post, trying to catch up / get back to all sorts of things that slipped with all the deadlines and events of the summer. On Labor Day this past Monday, I finally collected bits of stuff and glued it down in my journal. I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to write about or create. But it felt good to cut and glue while on the couch during my current Netflix binge (I’m over a decade late to TWD party, but I am fully committed even through all the gruesome munching sounds.) The pink paint was from my Posca marker. I love Poscas. When I am working in my journals, I am usually not in my studio and don’t have access to paints and don’t feel like investing the energy and time into brushes and paint and setting up so I don’t ruin our furniture. Poscas are handy like that.
I like to keep my visual journal entries easy and less mess intensive. Otherwise, I won’t do them.
And what was on my mind that night? Heat. Hot. II had gone to the Maryland Fair earlier that day and literally felt like I was melting. t’s been miserably hot here in Maryland this past week. And no rain. There’s been promise of rain or a thunderstorm and then nothing comes. Today it will be 98 degrees with a heat index of 103. This is the 3rd day like this. It worries me, of course. I do the things individually that I can do- reduce, reuse, recycle, plant pollinator gardens, compost, etc. etc. But until systems change and governments and large companies change, then we will continue on this path.
So not only is it uncomfortably hot and sweaty, but it’s depressing. But we continue on. I probably should have changed “Bake the cookies” to eat the ice cream.
“We need to have a whole cultural shift, where it becomes our culture to take care of the Earth, and in order to make this shift, we need storytelling about how the Earth takes care of us and how we can take care of her.”
-Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
If you are interested in listening in on critical discourse on the cross section between ecological renewal, social justice, and wilderness conservation, this is a great podcast For the Wild.