Two blog posts in as many days is definitely odd for me, especially when there are often months between posts. Yesterday was the Women's March On Washington while that was uplifting, it has kept my thoughts firmly on the future, but in a rather bleak way.
With temperatures well above zero degrees yesterday (and today, and all week!), I am having a difficult time quelling feelings of dread. The unseasonably warm temperatures make me worried. Like many of us, I've known for years that climate change is a real, human-made emergency. Anyone who believes in reputable scientific opinion has known that this is coming. But, it's only in the last year or two (that I can remember, anyway) that I've really started to notice changes in my environment. Bizarrely hot summers with little rain and winters with almost almost no snow. And fog! Fog! I haven't seen fog or mist like this since I lived in B.C. This is coastal weather. This is the new normal? This mist makes my once familiar home look like an alien planet. This is especially true at night. The light of the street lamps and car headlights bounces off the moisture droplets in the air; this hazy glow transforms the world into a mysterious and desolate looking place. It is evenings like last night that I feel even more uncertain of the future. I worry so much about what's going to happen in the coming decades. I'll be 35 in April. What will Southern Ontario look like when I'm 55? Or 75? With the inauguration of Trump and the immobility of our own government on issues around fossil fuel production, I'm not feeling very optimistic. On the other hand I realize that feeling anxious about the future will not help prevent the outcomes about which I am so worried. Only real action, the start of which I witnessed yesterday, can help to change the future. I went out to take photographs last night because I was enchanted with the way the world looked and I raced outside as soon as I got home from dinner at my parents'. But as I started making the photographs,I felt as though I was walking around a dream. A surreal place. In surreal times, maybe this is the new normal.
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Liz CooperPlaces I've been, people I've seen. Archives
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