1. Tonight I finished reading the fascinating, haunting, complicated, and often difficult book, Fathoms: The World in the Whale by Rebecca Giggs. Upon completing it, I took a short break from reading and then started reading Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter by Ben Goldfarb.
I'm drawn to writings about interconnectedness, both in the natural and the spiritual realms, not for sentimental or romantic reasons, but because of what interconnectedness demands of us, if we are not indifferent to it, don't ignore it, or don't act as if it doesn't exist.
I'm not sure I can, right now, spell out the demands of interconnectedness -- or interdependence --, but upon finishing Fathoms and then reading the introduction to Eager and thinking back to reading Dan O'Brien's brilliant Buffalo for the Broken Heart and recalling when about thirty years ago when I read Bruce Brown's astonishing Mountain in the Clouds: A Search for the Wild Salmon and Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, I came to an obvious and sobering realization.
Human beings are the only creatures on Earth that can ignore ecological relationships, can be indifferent to them, and can act (often aggressively) on this apathy. On the other side of this fact is this one: we are the only species on Earth that can examine, analyze, and arrive at understanding of the planet's ecology.
One brief example: beavers and swans cannot choose to break off their ecological relationship to one another. Swans benefit from the dams beavers build. The water behind a beaver dam provides still water for swans to glide on, shelter for nesting, and support for the life forms swans eat. When trappers ravished beaver populations in the 19th century to make money off of beaver furs, swan populations diminished because of habitat loss. The swans couldn't decide they were no longer ecologically dependent upon beavers. All they could do was begin to die off, and, over time, a series of ecological relationships were damaged. One quick example: beavers' dams enhance wetlands. Wetlands might be lousy areas for commercial or residential development and they have to be drained if farmers want that land to grow, say, alfalfa or expand grazing land for cattle, but ecologically they provide water filtration for aquifers, suppress wildfires, help dissipate floods, among other benefits. Beavers enhance wetlands. The loss of beavers meant a loss of wetlands, too.
Humans can decide what they want to do within ecological systems, whether mindful of the impact of their actions or not. Humans can also decide to back off -- not trap or shoot beavers, not fill in wetlands, and not do countless things that upset ecological balances.
Plants, water, animals, air, rocks, soil, climate etc. can't decide.
They are dependent on one another and often at the mercy of whether humans have regard for the place plants, water, animals, air, rocks, soil, climate, etc. in the ecology of creation or not.
It's sobering.
2. I can't say that I've come to accept all inconstancy, inconsistency, and unpredictability in my life and in the world around me, but I do my best to embrace that we live in the midst of impermanence and constant change. It's kept me from being disillusioned about the latest news regarding Covid-19 and the delta variant. Right now, I am uncertain enough about the percentage of people vaccinated in North Idaho, my own susceptibility to the virus because I have chronic kidney disease and a history with both toxic and bacterial pneumonia, and the potential for me to be a vector of the virus (I don't want to spread it), even though fully vaccinated, that I'm going to spend most of my time here in the house and always have my mask with me so I can slip it on if, say, Yoke's or the liquor store seems crowded to me. I was already going to be spending most of my time indoors before the latest Covid news came out because of how hot and smokey it is outside. But, for the time being, my plan is to exercise caution -- and, I suppose, err on the side of being too cautious.
I know I say this all the time, but there seems to be a stigma about fear and the virus. So, I'll just say, I'm not feeling afraid. To my way of thinking, it's rational for me to lie low again and put whatever protective measures I can into practice. I'm fortunate that doing so doesn't mean I'm not living my life -- thanks to books, cooking, family dinners, movies, electronic contact with friends and family, the companionship of Luna and Copper, and my enjoyment of quietness, I will not quit living just because I won't be out doing things very much.
3. Normally, Copper maintains a fair amount of distance from me, but I think he's much more bothered by being alone than Luna is. Copper never wants to be far away from me -- he likes to be in a chair near where I'm sitting or, if I'm in the Vizio room, he likes to be in the same room and lie on the rug.
This evening, though, as I was lying on top of the covers, waiting for the fans to bring more cooler evening air into the bedroom, Copper inched toward me and somehow non-verbally communicated to me that he wanted me to pet him. We had a short session. Satisfied, he loped to the foot of the bed, not far from my feet, and resumed his usual posture of being nearby but not too close.
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