Don't tell my heart, my achy breaky heart

I am acutely tuned into the weather.  All the time. It has been that way for many years. 

Maybe because right from my childhood, I was always listening to my great uncles and the people in the villages talk about the rains, water level in the canals, wind storms wiping out what would have been a bumper banana crop, ... So much so that I would get an uneasy feeling if there were reports that the monsoon had failed.  It felt personal.

It continues to be personal.  Acutely so.  There are times when I have had to calm myself down.

I am an environmental nutcase.

I have mentioned in plenty in this blog about what a paradise this part of the world is.  I often worry that climate change is messing up the paradise. 

The effects of a weirding climate are even worse in the old country; I have stopped reading news reports primarily because it aches my heart that we humans have made such a mess of life.

I can, therefore, relate to people writing and talking about climate trauma and eco despair--even though to most outsiders I don't ever come across as an environmental nutcase.

In the Red Hook workshop, which used the pioneering decades-old work of the environmental grief activist Joanna Macy, the facilitator, Jess Serrante, said something that hit me like a thunderclap.
“Our pain for what is happening is the other side of the coin of our love for the world,” she told us. “We feel such depths of despair because we love the planet so much.”  

I do. Which is why many times I have embedded in my posts Carl Sagan's moving, poetic, note about our pale blue dot--"a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

There is always an underlying panic, I think, that the paradise won't be a paradise for long.  The writer says it well for me too:

I found myself paying greedy attention to the rustling trees, the flutter of teeny birds. I felt a visceral thrum of gratitude for what still exists, for what has to be fought for, while it still can be beheld.