Greetings after a months-long pause in blogging!
I hope you remain healthy as winter inches towards spring (at least in New England…)
I also fervently hope that you have not experienced any climate-related catastrophes in recent weeks — or war-related catastrophes — or ANY catastrophic circumstances at all.
Each and every day I remain grateful for healthy food to eat, a warm place to sleep, a functional bicycle, gainful (if very modestly-paying) employment, and clean water.
Deep breath in.
Deep breath out.
I also remain very grateful for all the folks who visit my blog — anywhere from four to eighteen each day during the past ten weeks — even though I have not published a new post since the end of December.
THANK YOU!
Right at the end of 2023 — having relied upon showers for the past few decades to keep myself clean — I re-discovered the delicious experience of taking a bath (after a long and chilly day of travel to visit relatives in upstate New York).
Wow.
Soaking in even a few inches of hot water is such a different experience from taking a shower.
One can slow down and lose track of time…
I also feel as though the heat from the bath water soaks deeper into my body and stays with me longer than the heat from water in a shower.
Or maybe I am imagining that…
And one final bonus is that I have a compelling reason to scrub my bath tub on a regular basis (which, when I was just taking showers, I could easily overlook for weeks on end…)
Hurrah!
Another deep breath in.
And deep breath out.
My latest song release — an Ode To Water — celebrates all forms of water here on planet earth.
And its release coincides with another round of extreme rainfall and flooding here in the not-so-United States.
I continue to be flummoxed by how most of our political leaders — despite the increasingly destructive weather events occurring on a increasing basis all around our amazing planet — remain largely in denial about how closely we are inching towards some significant environmental tipping points — from which it will be very difficult if not impossible to recover.
Maybe it’s because they are human beings and — like most of us — tend to function in a state of denial until a catastrophe enters the inner circle of our lives.
To me, climate change/catastrophe underpins every other issue — huge imbalances of wealth/power, all sorts of civil rights challenges, the rising trend towards fascism in many countries including our own, women’s ability to make decisions about their own health/bodies, the industrial agri-chemical contamination of the web of life, etc. etc. etc. — which we are facing as human beings here on planet earth.
Here in Massachusetts our liberal Democratic governor is waffling about the proposed expansion of an airport used by private planes/jets called Hanscom Field, which is located eleven miles from where I live.
Making it easier for more rich people to fly in private jets is a perverse example of us NOT making the difficult changes in our human behavior/expectations that our climate change/catastrophe is calling for.
But I am guessing that Governor Healey is at least partially beholden/indebted to wealthy donors who have contributed to her successful political campaigns and may be inclined to help make their lives easier — even though it is well documented that air travel is one of the worst offenders regarding our fossil fuel over-consumption (and private jets are even worse than commercial flights!)
Yet another deep breath in.
And deep breath out.
Two states away from me in Maine, a friend has co-owned a tiny, one-room (former) fishing shack for decades with her extended family near Kennebunkport which serves as a very humble summer refuge for a large web of siblings, cousins and friends.
I have felt very fortunate to visit (and even perform) there a few times!
During a recent storm, this tiny cottage (which is boarded up during the winter months) experienced higher flooding than anyone can ever remember happening… and lost its front porch.
Another, larger shack (on tall stilts) which had been damaged last year and thoroughly repaired was entirely WASHED AWAY.
It had withstood nor’easters for over a hundred years… and now is gone!
The time to make difficult choices and change longstanding habits is NOW regarding how we human beings (especially those of us in developed countries) consume fossil fuels.
To top it all off, I recently read an article in The Guardian about how we human beings are very close to experiencing a major tipping point in how water circulates in the Atlantic ocean.
Yikes!
Due to my recent embrace of baths, I have a keen awareness about how water behaves in my tub.
Colder water sinks to the bottom, and warmer water stays near the surface.
In the Atlantic ocean there is something similar called the “Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) — a vast system of ocean currents” that helps to regulate our planet’s climate.
“AMOC, which encompasses part of the Gulf Stream and other powerful currents, is a marine conveyer belt that carries heat, carbon and nutrients from the tropics towards the Arctic Circle, where it cools and sinks into the deep ocean. This churning helps to distribute energy around the Earth and modulates the impact of human-caused global heating.”
But AMOC “is being eroded by the faster-than-expected melt-off of Greenland’s glaciers and Arctic ice sheets, which pours (very cold) freshwater into the sea and obstructs the sinking of saltier, warmer water from the south.”
And new analysis by scientists has determined that “AMOC is…on track towards an abrupt shift, which has not happened for more than 10,000 years and would have dire implications for large parts of the world.”
Another huge YIKES!!!
Followed by one final deep breath in.
And deep breath out.
This is why I ride my bike and/or walk and/or take public transportation.
This is why I eat less meat.
This is why I choose not to fly in order to visit friends and/or family in faraway places.\
And this is why I remain deeply grateful for all of the miraculous basics in my current life — including clean, fresh water to drink and to cook with and to clean with and to bathe in plus a non-leaky roof over my head.
Here is a link to my “Ode To Water“ in case you might like to stream (music flows in bits of electronic data these days these days…) it.
And as I have explained before, if you “like” one of my songs or add it to one of your playlists, that will improve the algorithmic sharing of my music.
Furthermore, if you listen to it via Spotify, I would be particularly grateful because Spotify recently changed its business model.
Starting in 2024, they are no longer paying indie artists half of the royalties (which are already absurdly low) due to them for any song streamed fewer than 1000 times per year.
So I need to get another 337 streams in the next ten months (so far it has earned 663 streams from 476 listeners around the world in the two months since it was released!)
I will probably write about this discouraging “rob from the poor to pay the rich” business strategy in a future blog post…
But, returning to several of the “glass-more-than-half-full” blessings in my life, I would like to thank Doug Hammer for playing so expressively on this recording and for being such a terrific engineer/producer.
Thank you to Stephen Fischer for his elegant graphic design work.
Thank you to the photographers at Pixabay for their beautiful images.
Thank you to the amazing cycles of water which circulate — from oceans to clouds to earth to plants to us and back around again and again and again — on a daily basis here on planet earth.
And thank YOU for reading and listening to another one of my blog posts!
ps: If you are thirsty for more musings about water, you can click here and here to read blog posts from 2022 and 2020 which featured earlier versions of my “Ode To Water.”
amusicalifeonplanetearth 