July 25th, 2007 writerspice
Not long ago I heard an interview on CBC. It was with a guy. Nobody special. A businessman, I think, if I remember correctly. But he did have one claim to fame. He decided to cancel his family’s summer trip to Europe in order to save on the carbon costs.
Good for him, you’re likely thinking. And, yeah, sure, so am I. Where it gets weird for me is when he appeared on the radio, with a host asking him questions, and they talked for half an hour about his personal choice.
Clearly he’s one of the good guys, this fellow, for opting out of an act that is becoming more and more a moral no-no. After all, in recent months, air travel has been called a sin and we’re seeing the full arrival of the new morality of global greening.
Posters in supermarkets promote buying reusable bags and David Suzuki’s face shines out at us from giant billboards asking us to change our lightbulbs and Toronto mayor David Miller requests that everyone to be a good citizen and car pool and turn down their air conditioners and Ontario premiere Dalton McGuinty raises his fist in the air (well, actually, I’m making that part up) and proclaims that standard lightbulbs will be outlawed.
All excellent things. All things meant to inspire us, the citizens, to engage in this new age of green goodness, claim our power and be part of the solution rather than the problem!
And this is great.
Uh, except for the fact that residential energy use accounts for less than %20 of total energy expenditure and was already, according to Stats Canada’s most recent statistics, starting to drop back in 2005. This same panel of stats shows energy consumption by the transportation sector, already the largest consumer of energy at about %30, rising by 2% along with a rise in the commercial and public administration sectors.
Which brings me to one word. Spin. Say it with me people: spin, spin, spin.
Yes, certainly, spin those old lightbulbs out and the new compact flourescents in and make all the other changes you can but we should also be aware that the whole truth is not as cut and dried as the moral agenda we’re being led to believe.
It’s a lot easier for governments and big business to inspire a feel-good mission for individuals than it is for them to impact the economy. And it’s a lot easier for us to swallow the lesson that our calling in this arena is only answerable by changing our lightbulbs and installing solar panels (both good things, I repeat, that should be done).
But by making going green a moral issue, we bare the weight of responsibility for shifting a system that will never change until money is no longer the most valuable thing – for us, and for everyone around us.
So having some guy lauded for taking his kids to the beach instead of Berlin really doesn’t do much for me. What I’d like to hear? More million-dollar-making CEOs who decided to cut profits in order to invest in alternative energy use because, you know, it’s just the right thing to do.
Posted in Going Green | 1 Comment »
July 19th, 2007 writerspice
I realize I am crawling along in the blogosphere these days. While the words launch and ricochet and ping on other blogs all around me, I am in slow motion, watching my brain creep along before anything gets written down.
Hence, the desert of days between updates.
I know why this is. It’s because I think too much. Ponder and wonder, just like I did when I wrote my weekly column for the local paper. What shall I write?, I’d question until the deadline appeared, stark and empty before my face. At that point, I usually had to just grab something out of thin air. I’d cruise the net for the latest gaffe by W. or try and find some controversy sprouting in the downtown soil of my small town. I’d get it written, but it was painful. More painful, much more, than grabbing the braided rope of inspiration and following it through the snow storm until you find that bright light in the barn.
That’s fun. I want more of that.
During this past week, some of it spent up north in my old home town, I’ve thought of a bunch of things to blog about. But none of them even made it into my notebook. I like to say they’ve all got a bit more fermenting to do, but the real truth is that I’m too busy. There’s just too much to do: pitches to write, trips to plan, contracts to negotiate, hair to tear out, walls to paint, radio to listen to, dishes to wash, hair to brush, dog to pet, husband to hug and all those other things of having a life and living it.
Inspiration is grand. Exciting and fulfilling and the thing that fuels. The trick, I guess, is finding the time to let it live.
Posted in Contemplations, Writing Life | No Comments »
July 12th, 2007 writerspice
Coincidence. Serendipity. Whatever you call it, I know it. Intimately.
I’m one of those people who might be riding a bus through the wet jungles of Bolivia only to find I’m sitting beside a long-lost cousin.
No, that hasn’t happened to me, but lots of other oddities have, many of which I recounted recently in a personal essay in Simcoe Life Magazine.
So the latest one shouldn’t have surprised me. But of course it did. Those shimmering glimpses of the fabric that holds it all together always do. I get goosebumps and, geez, I wonder.
Jason and I were in Utah. Southern Utah, to be exact. At the bottom of Boulder Mountain, in a dry land of red rock and canyons weirdly dissected by a cool alpine stream.
It was only two days past my uncle’s stirring memorial where, over a church picnic of pulled pork and chocolate cake, I’d realized that my plans to go hiking in the footprints of the early pioneers was less a testimony to his spirit and more a search for him. Somehow, in some part of me, I think I’d thought I’d find him, dusty and sweaty from some steep climb, smiling in the glare of the unstoppable sun.
That was a hard thing.
The sun was certainly unstoppable. It stared down at us as we wandered through the Calf Creek Recreation Area, dryly laughing at us for thinking we might be able to hike the six-some miles to the waterfall. Ha! Jason tried to catch some fish in the creek and I followed him with the camera before finding shelter under the only thing big enough to cast a real shadow: a thermal mass of rock.
Before long, we headed back to the parking lot, pausing on the way to sit on a grassy shore and cool our feet in the water.
And that’s where we were when this guy appeared, armed with a huge camera, obviously a photographer. He stepped inside the river as well.
It’s one of those discussions that you retrace afterwards. How did we get there?, you wonder and so you unravel it, wandering backwards through the casual conversation of who-are-you and where-are-you-from that happens between strangers.
Whose funeral?, he asked. So I told him.
Turned out he was one of my uncle’s students.
Turned out my uncle asked him to take his portrait for a newspaper story about the 30th anniversary of the time he burned the American flag as an English professor in Indiana and big sh*t hit the fan.
And then we shifted to that regular talk – how many miles he had to drive to get back home, where we were off to next. But by that point, I was standing up, hiking boots abandoned by the river.
I was standing up because I felt compelled to move towards this stranger, to figure it out, to find out why we were meeting. The wonder was a need. A need to seize the moment, to grasp it.
That’s what always happens for me in these times of what my brother calls grace and Jung called synchronicity. I want to hold on. I want to decipher.
But there is no figuring it out. It’s only a glimpse. Sudden meaning crystallized in the chaos. And all we can do is stand back and watch, smile, swallow, and say goodbye.
Posted in Contemplations | 2 Comments »
