Your words here evoke a deep memory of being at the shoreline somewhere along the northwest coast when I saw/knew that the ocean was breathing in with every wave rising and out with the crashes pounding the sky, it's mists, vapor and air into communion with Earth. This knowing penetrated, vibrating a chord deep in this being.
Oh, I love that. I lived right on the shoreline in Sydney, Australia, for a couple of years, and never got tired of watching the ocean's movement, but that was a long time ago and I at the time I didn't think about it in terms of all that interconnectedness.
I love the talk about breath. In Anishinaabe cosmology, we believe all people were created when Kitchi Manitou took a handle of soil from Mother Earth from each of the four directions and placed them in a shell, then breathed into it. What emerged on the other side was the first human. If that isn't a nod to the reality that we are all made of breath, of warm, holy, humid vapor, what is?
The sun halo photo was the bomb...wow. If you are interested, a great book peripherally about plate tectonics is "a crack at the edge of the world" -- a possible downside is it was written by Simon Winchester who I remember you have mixed feelings about. I agree with your take on SciFi and perhaps by extension Fantasy (mostly because of J.R.R. Tolkien) Best wishes for the new year.
Last comment your observation about it all being about weather reminded me of the recent news that new science from the Chinese Lunar Mission tells us now that the water ON THE MOON arrives via the solar wind...now that is weather!!!
Isn't it incredible? It's hard to believe that sun halos exist but I've now seen two like that, huge and vivid and lasting most of the day up on the ski mountain, and they insist on being real despite being surreal.
I think I read that book of Winchester's? Geology might hold my interest even more than the weather does, but it's hard to rank them.
Can't beat Tolkien.
I'm reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy right now, and your water on the moon comment is a good reminder that weather is truly universal! Space weather is another whole fascination. Cycles of solar flares, radiation, everything else moving and shifting about up there and on different planets and moons.
Beautiful piece, Nia. Thank you. I especially enjoyed the paragraph about how the weather will change and the potential for it to be different as the seasons change and the sense you provide of just being open to it all. I wish you a fine start to 2023 in all of the ways.
Thank you, Sean. 🧡 Yeah, those are always good lessons for me. I know what weather I'd like, but accepting the weather that comes ... there's a lot of useful metaphor in that.
Speaking of weather, I’m reading Tristan Gooley’s _The Secret World of Weather_ again and thoroughly enjoying it, and speaking of science fiction, I’m also reading Becky Chambers’s Wayfarer Series after snagging a bit on the first one and am loving it now on myriad levels.
I snagged a bit on the first one, too! It was somehow almost too happy for me? But a friend strongly recommended the second and explained why, so I tried it and was completely hooked. It's so complex and ... human.
I should get that one! I love listening to Gooley talk about the signs we overlook all around us almost more than I enjoy reading about it. So much to learn.
Jan 4, 2023·edited Jan 4, 2023Liked by Antonia Malchik
I just wrote something about plate tectonics, and came here straight afterwards, and that first quote about change was *chef's kiss*. Thank you. Perfect for my brain.
(Do you think so much of what can ail our societies is based in roots of a fear of change, and of a lack of teaching into (a) the inevitability of change and (b) how utterly necessary change is to instil life-force and energy into all the right things, including our psyche?)
(Sorry, I'm still in writing mode, clearly. Ignore that unanswerable question. I'm just keeping my typing fingers warm.)
I can't wait to read your book, and I hope you know that (but you don't know *how much* I look forward to reading your book, which is a LOT). But reading this, I have a question, a slightly tangential one:
You mentioned that to write about somewhere you need to find its sense of place. What is that, when it manifests, when you find it? Is it something you feel in your bones, or you know from its absence in what you're trying to write which makes you hunt for it a bit harder - or is it something else you can generally recognise when it's present? (Or is it always something different?) Is it something spatial that's going on in your head, where you can see how things fit together...?
This is such a vague question, but I've been fascinated in it for at least a decade. And since you write so well about places, I'd love to take a peek inside your head... #nosey
(Yes, I do. I think it's a huge part of it. I've become more convinced of it the longer I live in my super-conservative home county. Have you ever watched the Lego movie? The part about the Kragle and how Lord Business wants everyone and everything to just stay put and stay still and not be so messy and confusing and chaotic. It's not everything but it's a LOT. Think about how badly huge numbers of people just want genders to stay in the clearly defined boxes they've always understood them to be. It wouldn't harm anything to let that go, but it feels like chaos and is terrifying to many people.)
(This is something I also appreciate about the -- very short and easy to read! -- book "Finite and Infinite Games," which is basically just, you have finite games that many people want to win, but the real goal should always be the infinite game, which never ends and whose whole purpose is to ensure that life/everyone gets to keep playing.)
What a good question! I don't think I have an answer, sadly. We both started out in travel writing, where, as you know, a sense of place is important if you're trying to do it well. I have so many memories of working on pieces at my desk and sitting still for a long time trying to remember a scent, or the way air felt (cold, humid, etc., but not those words -- what those words *feel* like). I would have to think about it a lot harder, but it's an embodiment thing. When you're writing it, it starts to feel right when your body feels like it's there, but then you have to make sure that other people, whose bodies weren't there, can feel it, too. Which I guess means you just need to feel it again yourself?
You don't want to see inside my head right now. It's mostly a muddle of thinking about tea and chocolate and wishing for more sleep. 😂
This comment is meant for the DIALOG between you and Mike. I believe the two of you settled on the existential challenge of how CHANGE is SO HARD for people. As an optimist, change will bring us forward. While I am not so arrogant that there is something special about today out of some misplaced observation that I happen to be here. Rather, I think we are transitioning through times of RAPID and DISRUPTIVE change and this is merely the time in the human scale when it arrives. This will continue to clash with an amazing yet humble electrochemical soup of a brain in each of us. A superoptimist purports we will see more change in this generation from 2025 to 2045 than perhaps the previous 20000 years. We only get one chance to get this right. The human mind is readily manipulated and resists change. I hope we can collectively find our better angels. Just think of the number of useful myths that, when questioned, cause people to become animated, dug in, and even prone to attack the very question.
This is very interesting, re the pace of change and the human mind. It's a good way to think about it that we have a chance to get it right, and could expend some energy doing our best to make sure that happens.
The very same intention of this comment for both of you. When my children were young, regardless of where their studies led them, (they all wisely chose not to be like Dad and be a pinhead) I spent time with each of them to explain the basics of optics. While it seems like a big ask, I think the bit of time needed to talk through optics opens a world through the language of mathematics for people. There is so much beauty to marvel at with light. It's mysteries as they are unlocked can be beautiful in a different way. There are few things as beautiful as the way a dusty snow whether in the sky or on the ground on a sunny day refracts the light and gives us a show that makes us all smile. I think I must seek out a halo b/c it looks so beautiful.
There is something about having prisms explained for the first time, isn't there? Learning about what happens when light is refracted. It's really fascinating, thinking about what light *is.*
The sun halos are caused by sunlight hitting crystals of snow. The crystals have to be a particular shape -- hexagonal maybe? I'd have to look it up again. the first time I saw a big, full one like in the photo was just a few years ago and it was otherworldly.
I agree and believe that prisms presented well can unlock an interest in the young to pursue a better understanding. It is amazing how the lack of broad understanding does not prevent progress. For me the incadescent light is a perfect example. We lived with incandescent lights for more than 100 years and they were always SO HOT to unscrew. We managed to build a lit society and did not even know the spectrum of light was a real thing till years after GE wsa incorporated. So much of an incandescent bulb produces light outside the visible spectrum and is just a monumental waste. A modern LED is so efficient because it ONLY PRODUCES visible light! I think we are still learning about light. The point of this weird tangent is that, even when we understood how inferior the incandescent was, there were people (like the former Presient) who campaigned to keep the status quo. It was genuinely idiotic and a waste of cycles to explain it. Humans resist progress and change of all sorts for all sorts of random and odd reasons even when they know it is not sensible.
Jan 6, 2023·edited Jan 6, 2023Liked by Antonia Malchik
Yes - change as a threat that triggers a defensive response, vs. the seeming comfort of the familiar. It's such a huge issue, especially when it turns political and into an identity, because then it's become "well, your change is now a personal attack on ME, HOW DARE YOU ATTACK ME" and then everyone's arguing about different things, which is never a constructive situation...
Light bulbs are such a great example of the importance of change. Light pollution (and the heat from it) is wasted energy - energy that's escaped from its original purpose to be wasted into the air. That's the functional view - light pollution can also be beautiful, and it can also light dark places in a way that keeps people safer. But - it's still an unintended consequence. Like the heat from incandescants! And improvements to the tech help remove those consequences, chipping away at them. LEDs are such a great step forward - and I bet there will be others. At the same time, I've seen LED bulbs designed to mimic how the old style of lightbulbs worked, just so it won't trigger people who want to feel like the future is arriving at a manageable rate.
It's such a balancing act. And pursuing either extreme just isn't going to get anywhere good (either "we don't want change!" or "you're all fools for standing in the way of progress!"). Everyone needs to meet in the middle and talk until everyone understands and agrees upon the basics.
(Except that certain former President. I don't think he even recognises there's a middle.)
Skies and breathing, gasses and grids - so much here that gives me pause, makes me wonder. Thank you for this, friend. With each walking composition I am drawn closer and closer to perspectives in my own thinking about nature, the land, our planet that are crying out for more connections. You provide sources of connection in abundance. Looking forward to walking another year alongside you.
Oh my goodness, so am I, my friend. Your writing does the same for me! Draws me closer to examining my own perspectives about so many things. And hope that we get to walk together in person sometime! In Wien in spring, maybe, ...
I have but only a little! I need to set aside time to really sink into it. And I just started listening to the Stories for Action podcast (which was featured on Reframing Rural), and it looks like they have a number of episodes related to Life in the Land stories: https://www.storiesforaction.org/podcast
(Actually, it looks like Life in the Land is a Stories for Action project? I'm a bit confused but it doesn't really matter -- important work any way you get into it!)
Unfathomably young. When I think of the power of her writing so early on and what more could have come ... including, I'm sure, to the people in her life who knew her and loved her and live with that loss.
Beautiful, thank you. I've been dazzled by amazing skies while sailing on the Chesapeake Bay. My husband jokes that *this* is the real "big-sky" country. :-) I love this essay on weather and mood, by David Abram. Enjoy. https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-air-aware/
So many places are truly Big Sky Country! Though it's the eastern part of the state that truly gives Montana that name. I'll post more photos from there as summer starts, but in the meantime I highly recommend following Chris La Tray and some of his photo essays: https://chrislatray.substack.com
And what an essay by Abram! I don't think I've read that one before. This line in particular -- I think a lot about the mind and what it really is and if we could ever know. This definitely hit me: "mind is not at all a human possession, but is rather a property of the earthly biosphere — a property in which we, along with the other animals and the plants, all participate."
So glad it resonated. Vintage Abram, for sure. I used to have my architecture students read it and we always had some wild discussions. . . . Hmm, maybe I'll bring that one back.
I love the way our pine forests smell in a wet spring or early summer, but even when they're dried out and it's hot, though then I worry. But yes, you're right, much of that smell -- the smell of soil really -- is a fertile, earthy smell. So enriching.
Your words here evoke a deep memory of being at the shoreline somewhere along the northwest coast when I saw/knew that the ocean was breathing in with every wave rising and out with the crashes pounding the sky, it's mists, vapor and air into communion with Earth. This knowing penetrated, vibrating a chord deep in this being.
Oh, I love that. I lived right on the shoreline in Sydney, Australia, for a couple of years, and never got tired of watching the ocean's movement, but that was a long time ago and I at the time I didn't think about it in terms of all that interconnectedness.
I love the talk about breath. In Anishinaabe cosmology, we believe all people were created when Kitchi Manitou took a handle of soil from Mother Earth from each of the four directions and placed them in a shell, then breathed into it. What emerged on the other side was the first human. If that isn't a nod to the reality that we are all made of breath, of warm, holy, humid vapor, what is?
That says it all, doesn't it?
The sun halo photo was the bomb...wow. If you are interested, a great book peripherally about plate tectonics is "a crack at the edge of the world" -- a possible downside is it was written by Simon Winchester who I remember you have mixed feelings about. I agree with your take on SciFi and perhaps by extension Fantasy (mostly because of J.R.R. Tolkien) Best wishes for the new year.
Last comment your observation about it all being about weather reminded me of the recent news that new science from the Chinese Lunar Mission tells us now that the water ON THE MOON arrives via the solar wind...now that is weather!!!
Isn't it incredible? It's hard to believe that sun halos exist but I've now seen two like that, huge and vivid and lasting most of the day up on the ski mountain, and they insist on being real despite being surreal.
I think I read that book of Winchester's? Geology might hold my interest even more than the weather does, but it's hard to rank them.
Can't beat Tolkien.
I'm reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy right now, and your water on the moon comment is a good reminder that weather is truly universal! Space weather is another whole fascination. Cycles of solar flares, radiation, everything else moving and shifting about up there and on different planets and moons.
I would love to see one someday (a halo). Light is really magic when you just take it in.
Beautiful piece, Nia. Thank you. I especially enjoyed the paragraph about how the weather will change and the potential for it to be different as the seasons change and the sense you provide of just being open to it all. I wish you a fine start to 2023 in all of the ways.
Thank you, Sean. 🧡 Yeah, those are always good lessons for me. I know what weather I'd like, but accepting the weather that comes ... there's a lot of useful metaphor in that.
Happy 2023 to you, too!
Thank you as always, Nia!
Speaking of weather, I’m reading Tristan Gooley’s _The Secret World of Weather_ again and thoroughly enjoying it, and speaking of science fiction, I’m also reading Becky Chambers’s Wayfarer Series after snagging a bit on the first one and am loving it now on myriad levels.
I snagged a bit on the first one, too! It was somehow almost too happy for me? But a friend strongly recommended the second and explained why, so I tried it and was completely hooked. It's so complex and ... human.
I should get that one! I love listening to Gooley talk about the signs we overlook all around us almost more than I enjoy reading about it. So much to learn.
I just wrote something about plate tectonics, and came here straight afterwards, and that first quote about change was *chef's kiss*. Thank you. Perfect for my brain.
(Do you think so much of what can ail our societies is based in roots of a fear of change, and of a lack of teaching into (a) the inevitability of change and (b) how utterly necessary change is to instil life-force and energy into all the right things, including our psyche?)
(Sorry, I'm still in writing mode, clearly. Ignore that unanswerable question. I'm just keeping my typing fingers warm.)
I can't wait to read your book, and I hope you know that (but you don't know *how much* I look forward to reading your book, which is a LOT). But reading this, I have a question, a slightly tangential one:
You mentioned that to write about somewhere you need to find its sense of place. What is that, when it manifests, when you find it? Is it something you feel in your bones, or you know from its absence in what you're trying to write which makes you hunt for it a bit harder - or is it something else you can generally recognise when it's present? (Or is it always something different?) Is it something spatial that's going on in your head, where you can see how things fit together...?
This is such a vague question, but I've been fascinated in it for at least a decade. And since you write so well about places, I'd love to take a peek inside your head... #nosey
(Yes, I do. I think it's a huge part of it. I've become more convinced of it the longer I live in my super-conservative home county. Have you ever watched the Lego movie? The part about the Kragle and how Lord Business wants everyone and everything to just stay put and stay still and not be so messy and confusing and chaotic. It's not everything but it's a LOT. Think about how badly huge numbers of people just want genders to stay in the clearly defined boxes they've always understood them to be. It wouldn't harm anything to let that go, but it feels like chaos and is terrifying to many people.)
(This is something I also appreciate about the -- very short and easy to read! -- book "Finite and Infinite Games," which is basically just, you have finite games that many people want to win, but the real goal should always be the infinite game, which never ends and whose whole purpose is to ensure that life/everyone gets to keep playing.)
What a good question! I don't think I have an answer, sadly. We both started out in travel writing, where, as you know, a sense of place is important if you're trying to do it well. I have so many memories of working on pieces at my desk and sitting still for a long time trying to remember a scent, or the way air felt (cold, humid, etc., but not those words -- what those words *feel* like). I would have to think about it a lot harder, but it's an embodiment thing. When you're writing it, it starts to feel right when your body feels like it's there, but then you have to make sure that other people, whose bodies weren't there, can feel it, too. Which I guess means you just need to feel it again yourself?
You don't want to see inside my head right now. It's mostly a muddle of thinking about tea and chocolate and wishing for more sleep. 😂
This comment is meant for the DIALOG between you and Mike. I believe the two of you settled on the existential challenge of how CHANGE is SO HARD for people. As an optimist, change will bring us forward. While I am not so arrogant that there is something special about today out of some misplaced observation that I happen to be here. Rather, I think we are transitioning through times of RAPID and DISRUPTIVE change and this is merely the time in the human scale when it arrives. This will continue to clash with an amazing yet humble electrochemical soup of a brain in each of us. A superoptimist purports we will see more change in this generation from 2025 to 2045 than perhaps the previous 20000 years. We only get one chance to get this right. The human mind is readily manipulated and resists change. I hope we can collectively find our better angels. Just think of the number of useful myths that, when questioned, cause people to become animated, dug in, and even prone to attack the very question.
This is very interesting, re the pace of change and the human mind. It's a good way to think about it that we have a chance to get it right, and could expend some energy doing our best to make sure that happens.
Also, that sundog is absolutely barmy.
Isn’t it? My mind refuses to believe they exist even when I’m staring straight at one like that.
The very same intention of this comment for both of you. When my children were young, regardless of where their studies led them, (they all wisely chose not to be like Dad and be a pinhead) I spent time with each of them to explain the basics of optics. While it seems like a big ask, I think the bit of time needed to talk through optics opens a world through the language of mathematics for people. There is so much beauty to marvel at with light. It's mysteries as they are unlocked can be beautiful in a different way. There are few things as beautiful as the way a dusty snow whether in the sky or on the ground on a sunny day refracts the light and gives us a show that makes us all smile. I think I must seek out a halo b/c it looks so beautiful.
There is something about having prisms explained for the first time, isn't there? Learning about what happens when light is refracted. It's really fascinating, thinking about what light *is.*
The sun halos are caused by sunlight hitting crystals of snow. The crystals have to be a particular shape -- hexagonal maybe? I'd have to look it up again. the first time I saw a big, full one like in the photo was just a few years ago and it was otherworldly.
I agree and believe that prisms presented well can unlock an interest in the young to pursue a better understanding. It is amazing how the lack of broad understanding does not prevent progress. For me the incadescent light is a perfect example. We lived with incandescent lights for more than 100 years and they were always SO HOT to unscrew. We managed to build a lit society and did not even know the spectrum of light was a real thing till years after GE wsa incorporated. So much of an incandescent bulb produces light outside the visible spectrum and is just a monumental waste. A modern LED is so efficient because it ONLY PRODUCES visible light! I think we are still learning about light. The point of this weird tangent is that, even when we understood how inferior the incandescent was, there were people (like the former Presient) who campaigned to keep the status quo. It was genuinely idiotic and a waste of cycles to explain it. Humans resist progress and change of all sorts for all sorts of random and odd reasons even when they know it is not sensible.
Yes - change as a threat that triggers a defensive response, vs. the seeming comfort of the familiar. It's such a huge issue, especially when it turns political and into an identity, because then it's become "well, your change is now a personal attack on ME, HOW DARE YOU ATTACK ME" and then everyone's arguing about different things, which is never a constructive situation...
Light bulbs are such a great example of the importance of change. Light pollution (and the heat from it) is wasted energy - energy that's escaped from its original purpose to be wasted into the air. That's the functional view - light pollution can also be beautiful, and it can also light dark places in a way that keeps people safer. But - it's still an unintended consequence. Like the heat from incandescants! And improvements to the tech help remove those consequences, chipping away at them. LEDs are such a great step forward - and I bet there will be others. At the same time, I've seen LED bulbs designed to mimic how the old style of lightbulbs worked, just so it won't trigger people who want to feel like the future is arriving at a manageable rate.
It's such a balancing act. And pursuing either extreme just isn't going to get anywhere good (either "we don't want change!" or "you're all fools for standing in the way of progress!"). Everyone needs to meet in the middle and talk until everyone understands and agrees upon the basics.
(Except that certain former President. I don't think he even recognises there's a middle.)
All very true. And nice job wrapping light back around to resistance to change!
Skies and breathing, gasses and grids - so much here that gives me pause, makes me wonder. Thank you for this, friend. With each walking composition I am drawn closer and closer to perspectives in my own thinking about nature, the land, our planet that are crying out for more connections. You provide sources of connection in abundance. Looking forward to walking another year alongside you.
Oh my goodness, so am I, my friend. Your writing does the same for me! Draws me closer to examining my own perspectives about so many things. And hope that we get to walk together in person sometime! In Wien in spring, maybe, ...
Beautiful, Happy new year Antonia, as always more interesting links, like you said, so much to read :-)
Thank you, Alain, and Happy New Year to you, too!
I bet you've already explored this site, but just in case you haven't, here's a link to lots of different perspectives.
https://www.lifeintheland.org/
I have but only a little! I need to set aside time to really sink into it. And I just started listening to the Stories for Action podcast (which was featured on Reframing Rural), and it looks like they have a number of episodes related to Life in the Land stories: https://www.storiesforaction.org/podcast
(Actually, it looks like Life in the Land is a Stories for Action project? I'm a bit confused but it doesn't really matter -- important work any way you get into it!)
Octavia Butler was a true gift.
I cannot stop myself going back to her repeatedly.
She died far too young.
Unfathomably young. When I think of the power of her writing so early on and what more could have come ... including, I'm sure, to the people in her life who knew her and loved her and live with that loss.
Beautiful, thank you. I've been dazzled by amazing skies while sailing on the Chesapeake Bay. My husband jokes that *this* is the real "big-sky" country. :-) I love this essay on weather and mood, by David Abram. Enjoy. https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-air-aware/
So many places are truly Big Sky Country! Though it's the eastern part of the state that truly gives Montana that name. I'll post more photos from there as summer starts, but in the meantime I highly recommend following Chris La Tray and some of his photo essays: https://chrislatray.substack.com
And what an essay by Abram! I don't think I've read that one before. This line in particular -- I think a lot about the mind and what it really is and if we could ever know. This definitely hit me: "mind is not at all a human possession, but is rather a property of the earthly biosphere — a property in which we, along with the other animals and the plants, all participate."
Thank you!
So glad it resonated. Vintage Abram, for sure. I used to have my architecture students read it and we always had some wild discussions. . . . Hmm, maybe I'll bring that one back.
I love the way our pine forests smell in a wet spring or early summer, but even when they're dried out and it's hot, though then I worry. But yes, you're right, much of that smell -- the smell of soil really -- is a fertile, earthy smell. So enriching.