Sage advice

The question I had stopped on yesterday was whether the key to appropriation was a profit motive. That didn't seem quite right.

Was it maybe that there was a public aspect? 

Like, perhaps if you wear a kimono around the house, it is not an issue, but when you wear it out and about because you are delightfully quirky, maybe that is a problem?

We are actually going to return to the idea of using identities as costumes, but first I want to write about something for which I was actually able to find the link I remembered:

https://x.com/oodhamboi/status/1875913166301077832 

In the attached video, a white woman wearing a shirt about "matching energy" parades on Bourbon Street shortly after a terrorist attack there, burning sage to remove the bad energy.

I don't know that there is much benefit in reading the replies -- some of which agree and some of which are defending the woman -- but the one I found most interesting is someone who got offended at the poster referring to sage as protected and endangered. That has been a growing concern:

https://unitedplantsavers.org/what-is-going-on-with-white-sage/

I remember reading a story of a woman going to a sacred harvesting site that she had used for many years and there was a truck pulling away; the entire patch had been uprooted. 

There are things that commercial use doesn't handle well, but maybe we covered that enough yesterday.

As it is, if you do some searches for more information on sage and smudging, you will find many health and wellness sites talking about the potential benefits. They will mention roots in Native medicine, but not grapple with the aspects of appropriation, or whether for spiritual practices you should pull from your own history and traditions rather than appropriating something to which you have no connection.

I suspect for most white people who burn sage (I don't even want to call it "smudging"; you may use that word but you know nothing about smudging), it is really no different than burning incense, except that maybe it feels cooler and more special. 

That it also does more to eradicate a diminishing resource that is spiritually important to some people must just be a bonus.

I agree that there would have been a lot of bad energy going into the attack. That probably would have persisted around the site, where there was terror and violent death and grief. It was preceded by anger, religious fundamentalism, and resentment. 

I have heard of people using smudging to change the energy of a house, whether one they had newly moved into or one where they personally had bad memories.

I know of people burning sweetgrass when there have been bad experiences and anger. It seems to relate more to personal space and energy. 

This means -- and I fully acknowledge that I am not the expert here -- that it would be really arrogant to think that your buying a sage bundle at Anthropologie and burning it in the street is going to do any healing of a terrorist attack, even if you know what you are doing. If you feel a desire to help, there will surely be ways but they are probably going to be more personal and more work.

They will require less arrogance and more thought.

Maybe choosing thought over arrogance could be a key.

Appropriation for cash

One regret I have now is that I never watched the full Tiktok with sound that started the bonnet conversation. I read a lot of tweets responding to it, but I never saw what she was actually saying.

I did get a glimpse of her shaking her head, and there was a tie around her bonnet, so I assumed it was something about keeping it on at night. Mine often slides down while I am sleeping, sometimes completely off, but sometimes just partway down the back of my head.

Even though it seemed like she might have some useful information for me, I felt that if I were ever going to get around to addressing it (again, I am not known for the effort I put into my appearance), I would ask a Black woman.

I suspected that this one had a product she was selling, and she was not going to be my source.

I may have been wrong about that white woman, but there is always this one.

https://www.theroot.com/white-woman-claims-she-invented-the-hair-bonnet-black-1836603944 

https://www.today.com/style/nitecap-founder-responds-cultural-appropriation-backlash-75-hair-wraps-t159639

The Root article is more fun, but I have the Today article there for balance.

Now, if Sarah Marantz Lindenberg was in fact the woman in the one video, I don't know that. 

I do know that when this one says she invented this concept out of a need, from her own mind, I do not believe her. 

I believe she ripped off a long tradition, felt special and smart, and then set a ridiculous price point. She charges $98 for her model; I bought mine at Fred Meyer for about $5.

I believe she Christopher Columbus-ed that bonnet.

Like two white people seeing the scholarship of a Black woman, being shocked "no one" is talking about it, and then crowdfunding to make a documentary on local segregation, Whitelandia.

Like one white woman being introduced to congee, "elevating" it, and calling herself "The Congee Queen".

She also charged an outrageous amount of money for it.

I actually have an even worse example, but I want to step back to that question of appropriation:

Is the money what makes it appropriation? 

 Remember, I don't think me wearing the bonnet at night is appropriation, but other people making Tiktok videos about their bonnet wear might be. 

That is something I want to explore more.

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2014/08/stolen-labor.html 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2021/08/white-nonsense.html 

Reference albums for mixing from Home Recording for Dummies

I finished Home Recording for Dummies in March, but I wasn't done with it yet.

In the chapter on mixing (song order, spacing, balancing), Jeff Strong gave a list of examples of well-mixed albums. I felt duty-bound to listen to them all.

That probably wasn't the best approach. Going over the list, it appears to be an attempt to cover a wide variety of artists and genres. A better approach might be listening to Mutations by Beck and then listening to other Beck albums. What stands out about that particular mix?

(I believe that the inclusion of S&M by Metallica is not just to represent metal, but also to represent live/concert albums.)

I may at some point decide to go back and listen to multiple albums from a particular artist on that list. If I do, it will most likely be Los Lobos, because I was unfamiliar with Kiko but enjoyed it, and I haven't listened to very much by them. It seems like it would have the highest payoff from a pure listening standpoint, but where I also might get more insights about mixing.

As it is, I don't regret the listening because I got other things from it. 

There was a lot that was unfamiliar, mixed in with some familiar.

I resisted listening to Marilyn Manson, but even that was not too terrible (though I don't anticipate doing it again any time soon). 

Otherwise, it reminds me of this other article I shared recently from Esquire: 

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a63107453/how-to-find-new-music-30s/

I have definitely been in musical ruts before. That changed dramatically in 2012, leading to me listening to all kinds of different music and reviewing over 600 bands. It was an amazing time, sometimes magical and always interesting.

About five years later I didn't have time to keep it (or much else) up and then the pandemic stopped concerts for a while. 

I did not end up quite in another rut, but it might have been getting closer if not for the daily songs. 

Currently working my way backwards through hits, but also frequently reading about music and then doing more listening based on that, things stay pretty interesting.

Maybe they will even get magical again.

Anyway, this was Strong's list:  

Mutations by Beck
Burn to Shine by Ben Harper
Fundamental by Bonnie Raitt
Ultra by Depeche Mode
2001 by Dr. Dre
Ten New Songs by Leonard Cohen
Kiko by Los Lobos
Joshua Judges Ruth by Lyle Lovett
On How Life Is by Macy Gray
Mechanical Animals by Marilyn Manson
S&M by Metallica
Return of Saturn by No Doubt
Come Away With Me by Norah Jones
Yield by Pearl Jam
So by Peter Gabriel
Surfacing by Sarah McLachlan
Two Against Nature by Steely Dan
Brand New Day by Sting

Bonnets

One thing we have learned about different prejudices is that they can combine.

When we combine the specific aspect of racism that is anti-Blackness with misogyny, we get what Moya Bailey termed misogynoir.

This is an important topic and there are some good options for additional reading in the Wikipedia article. I am linking it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misogynoir 

Bigotry does not always result in a rejection; appropriation is also an option.

We are going to approach this topic by talking about bonnets.

I suspect part of the reason that some practices become accepted is that there are a lot of beauty expectations put upon women. Something that helps may be harder to resist because of that.

Bonnets are eminently practical.

I have mentioned before (though it's been a while) that my hair is very course, thick, dry, and curly, a combination that does not make my hair easily manageable. Most of my better practices have come from Black women.

One of those is putting a silk bonnet over my hair at night. It retains some moisture and prevents some tangling, making my hair a little less wild in the morning. It is good protection against breakage for all hair types.

I also believe that since I generally wear my hair tied back -- pulling away from the scalp -- that having time where the hair is being held in is helpful. 

I realize that I am not known for putting a lot of time or effort into a beauty regime; there are many other things I could do and don't. 

In fact, there are lots of hair options that I don't use, and they might do better with different options. 

For example, with various chemical relaxers and options, you may not be able to get your hair wet. That can lead to a need for bathing caps and shower caps.

If you wear your hair in braids or other styles, different coverings may work better. That is not limited to women. Bedtime Bonnet, a picture book by Nancy Redd and illustrated by Nneka Myers, can be a fun introduction to that.

Discrimination against the hair of Black women was set in enough to require an act of Congress to make it illegal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CROWN_Act_of_2022

So even though there is this extra pressure on Black women to have their hair look "good", requiring effort and expense, those aids to the hair, like women wearing their bonnets in public, were frequently mocked.

Then it became a Tiktok trend, with white women doing it:  

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/white-women-just-now-starting-173000764.html

That article references conversations in two directions. 

One is the previously mentioned question of wearing them in public. A lot of people do criticize that one, but I find I don't really care. I mean, it doesn't look "good", but do people have to look good all the time? That's a lot of pressure; I gave up long ago.

(I don't wear my bonnet in public, but I only wear it in bed, so it wouldn't come up. If there are other people who benefit from wearing it more, let them.)

The other question is whether white women should be wearing them at all; that's where we get to the question of appropriation. 

See, we weren't there yet. That's where we are going to pick up Tuesday. 

Obviously I am a white woman who wears a bonnet, and I believe that is fine.

Prepare for some pretty big "but"s. 

Hygiene, part 2

After yesterday's post, you may be wondering if -- as misogyny can be used against men to encourage them to choose filth -- can you use racism similarly against white people?

Yes. Yes you can.

In this case, the racism will not always work as expected, but there are factors that are worth looking at.

Let me back up.

A few years ago there was some discussion about how a lot of people don't wash their legs. 

These people did tend to be mostly white, but it is not most white people. About a fifth.

The primary reason appeared to be laziness, but also a belief that the soapy water is flowing down anyway, so that perhaps that passive exposure could be enough.

https://www.today.com/health/do-you-wash-your-legs-shower-internet-divided-t154176

I will agree that it is not necessary to scour yourself; your skin is very different from the cast-iron skillet you fried fish in. 

There must be a happy medium.

Something else that came up -- not necessarily directly connected -- was that it was common for Black people to use washcloths for bathing, but less common for white people.

This was sent up in an early episode of The Neighborhood:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzg6aaX1QTg

One thing I remember from the first time I saw that clip was Beth Behrs coming out amazed saying, "Who knew?", her use of the washcloth having been transformative.

For my two cents on the topic, I can see the advantage of a washcloth doing some light exfoliating while spreading the soap around, and then going through the laundry cycle in a way that a loofah probably wouldn't. That is valuable after collecting dirt and dead skin.

I still use my hands, because that is what I am used to. Old habits die hard.

I also know that the division does not strictly follow racial lines, with there being white people who use washcloths and I assume Black people who don't.

However, there is a stereotype there, so when you have a comedian expressing disgust at people using washcloths and taking it as a sign of poverty, well, that says something:

https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/this-feels-extremely-racist-tom-segura-washcloth-controversy-explained-poor-people-comments-sparks-furor

The article says that after being called out for the racism he denied it was about racism. Don't they always?

The article also keeps referring to "poor people", but I remember him saying it as "the poors"; adding the "people" is giving him too much credit.

It's a weird reaction anyway, but it's in keeping with his stated refusal to wash his legs and feet. I mean, confronting legacy racism is even more work than washing your legs.

Let me throw in something else; I do know Black people who -- if they do not shower at night -- wash their feet before getting into bed.

I see the value of this too, but generally do not do it.

Now, you may be thinking that with a lot of Black people there seems to be some overkill on the cleanliness issue, and then kind of the opposite on white people.

Is it possible that some of that comes from a history of slavery and Jim Crow and then the War on Drugs and urban dog whistles, where part of white supremacy was associating darker skin with dirtiness and contamination and poverty and crime?

Could families that believed that they needed to work twice as hard to get half as much also have tried hard to prove themselves clean, inculcating generational habits that are not thought about so much now, but happened for a reason?  

Could that have also led white people to feel less of a need to try? 

Old habits die hard.

Hygiene, part 1

Today is going to reference some articles that are pretty gross and vulgar. They are not the main point, no matter how worthy they are of consideration.

We'll just get those out of the way now. If you want to read only the headlines, it's fine.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13248105/Shocked-doctor-discovers-30-YEAR-build-smegma-foreskin-married-man-suffering-agonising-pain-penis.html 

https://metro.co.uk/2017/10/29/toxic-masculinity-is-preventing-some-men-from-wiping-their-bums-properly-7036601/ 

These are just the first articles I found for topics that have come up before; there may be better sources.

I don't know if the man with the 30-year smegma buildup had a reason other than ignorance for not cleaning under his foreskin; maybe it was concern about it being too close to masturbating. 

I do know that one motivation against butt-wiping is that it might be "gay".

(I am using quote marks around "gay" because it is being used in a derogatory manner that I do not agree with but that is crucial to the issue.)

I also know the smegma (I don't know another word for that) guy was experiencing great pain. He also probably had a pretty bad funk, though I am not sure how far it would have carried.

For the larger mass of men who don't wipe their butts (women too if it applies), there is going to be a smell for sure. Laundry will be much grosser. It is not particularly healthful, either, to spread fecal matter, let alone the irritation that can come from it not spreading, instead lingering where it could easily have been wiped away.

Washing in the shower would undo some of that, though there would still be skidmarks, but apparently many who don't wipe also don't wash.

I can't help but idly wonder if in those circumstances a bidet would be acceptable or still "too gay", but again, my post is not really about butts.

(Therefore I will not be offering tips, though they are out there.)

The point is that being influenced by bad sources has bad results. Seems obvious, doesn't it?

Ignorance would leave you more vulnerable. 

A man raised in a home where he was taught about personal cleanliness and hygiene all along is more likely -- if someone should try to convince him that wiping is bad -- to think "That's stupid and gross. What is wrong with you?"

Even better, someone who was raised to not be so concerned with properly presenting a masculinity that is so toxic and fragile that even the most basic cleanliness negates it... you know there is a whole list of pitfalls that can be avoided there.

A lot of the discourse on butt wiping comes from horrified women who start dating someone who doesn't wipe, thus getting a revolting introduction to this being a thing. 

I would say it is ironic that something that makes you less repulsive to women could be conceived of as being "gay" but once you are down that rabbit hole you will see posts about it being "gay" to be with a woman with a short haircut, or to do various acts that might be more for her pleasure... once again, there is a whole list.

It would appear that a lot of homophobia is based on such a deep contempt for women that any effeminacy in men is an affront to the whole gender. There are similar issues with transphobia.

The actual point of this post, then, is that the people who are trying to influence you with fear and hatred of the other may not have your best interests at heart. 

Sometimes that will lead you to having no healthcare to help get you through the increasingly polluted environment, and no living wage because prices are outrageous and labor is not valued, plus leaders so shockingly incompetent it's amazing that so much of the destruction is hypothetical.

Other times, the result is a painful swelling in the front, chafing in the back, and a nasty stench all around.  

Don't let that be you.

The commandeered past

Here's a tangent on the way to my post. 

When caring for my mother was at its hardest, my respite was usually going to movies. I have this list of movies I saw then, where I had thoughts but never wrote about them. I was not able to blog much then. 

Whether I ever get to the rest or not, here is one:

Dunkirk (2017)

It wasn't from the movie itself, but from the articles that were coming out about the subject matter.

What they were saying is that there is this collective English memory of the country's WWII experience as the stiff upper lip and "Keep calm and carry on", but in fact the majority of the people were very against involvement initially.

A large part of that change in mindset is due to Winston Churchill and how he framed his speeches, essentially telling the people how brave and patriotic and good they were more than how good they needed to be.

For some perspective, the United Kingdom and France combined declaration of war on Nazi Germany was September 3rd, 1939, in response to the invasion of Poland.  

The Dunkirk evacuations took place from May 26th through June 4th, 1940, with June 4th also being the day of Churchill's "We will fight on the beaches... " speech.

July of 1940 is when people really started turning on Chamberlain; at least it was becoming more public. 

A lot of that was feeling that they were inadequately prepared for war by his actions. Maybe part of the shift was an acceptance that the war was happening -- maybe it had been inevitable -- so that's why you carry on with the stiff upper lip.

They really didn't give a lot of details on that, but what stuck with me at the time was that a narrative gets shaped, and that is what people remember. Stories are easier to remember, but also, history is written by the victors.

That tangent brings me to what I wanted to get to.

It started with In Defense of Witches by Mona Chollet. 

It wasn't my favorite of the relevant books, but one point it made pretty clear was that we think of witch trials as part of the Dark Ages, but they came after that, related to Renaissance and Enlightenment and all of that growing modernization. 

Much of it was due to economic competition, as men moved into industries typically dominated by women. Some of it was just about control. 

Somehow, "enlightenment" -- such as it was -- came with some serious misogyny.

This was reinforced by The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution by Carolyn Merchant, but it was especially important in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici.

What is more, you can see that it wasn't always that way.

It sent me to another book that had been on my reading list for a long time: The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium, An Englishman's World by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger.

There is so much that we get wrong. 

You might think... Dark Ages; life is "nasty, brutish, and short", right?

Well, that was written by someone in the 17th century. Yes, life could be hard earlier and there were lean times, but there was a calendar that allowed for many holidays and there were resources in the commons, and there are ways in which moving forward was not progress.

Then there was this article:  

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/these-rare-artifacts-tell-medieval-womens-stories-in-their-own-words-180985317

Women had more contributions and more power than we readily acknowledge. 

How did that happen? Men's increased repression was very successful. Then they got to convey the mindset that supported them.

Shockingly, the other changes happening at that time led to a consolidation in wealth and unequal changes in the standard of living, even among men. I suspect this is not a coincidence.

Here's the thing that is so important about it -- and Federici's book is the one I recommend the most -- when we don't look at what is happening with women, we don't truly understand what is happening with the men.

Let me add more to that: inasmuch as there is a dominant race, focusing on them where the oppression of other people goes unnoticed, will eventually spread up to that dominant race. It sure doesn't start at the top top.

There is so much that could be mined here, but this is a long post. 

I believe this topic will be revisited (and I hope to spend some time on artifacts that male archeologists could not figure out until they got a woman's input), but first I am going to spend some time writing about music.

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/03/spooky-season-witches.html 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/04/book-messiness.html

How are you coping?

Personally, I am struggling.

The specific thing that is happening is that I will see things, feelings of anger and hopelessness will rise up, and it then makes it hard to concentrate, mostly on schoolwork, but other things too.

Where I am feeling it most is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and that even a unanimous Supreme Court decision doesn't seem to be helping. Do you know how messed up something has to be for even Thomas and Alito to have a problem with it? 

And Trump told Bukele to build five more prisons.

Some people have suggested tuning out the news.

I suppose the argument in favor of that is that there probably isn't a lot I can do about some of these issues.

I have seen that enough time spent angry and hopeless can lead to people becoming hard-hearted and directing their anger at the people suffering instead of the cause of the suffering.

I still can't turn away in good conscience. I may not know if we are going to get to vote again, but if I do I want to do it with full knowledge of the reality; I wish more people had done that before.

Plus, it's not just a horrible government, but you can't see stories about them without also seeing comments from people that are terrible, and often delusional in surprising ways.

That is depressing.

I need to stay grounded.

I also really want to graduate though. I want to read books and get things done.

I will have to find my way to do that.

One thing I have thought about is whether I can get my schoolwork done before seeing any news. 

That is really hard to do. If I open a web browser to look something up, there will probably be headlines. 

If I open any social media, there will be headlines, and more of that than social interaction lately.

I haven't worked it out. 

I do know that there are not going to be Wednesday and Thursday posts this week. I don't know if that will be permanent, but I am making a push to get some schoolwork done, and that is part of my facilitating of that.

I also know that our care for each other matters. We can't lose that.

So yesterday and this morning I wrote out a bunch of cards to touch base with people, and this post is also touching base with you.

How are you doing?

Can I help? 

Spooky Season: Hodgepodge and hereafter

The problem with the hodgepodge part of this post is that there are only two books left: 

Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths by Darren Naish

The Skull by Jon Klassen 

(For quantity, the "hereafter" part will make up for it.)

The Skull is a variation on the story where a traveler needs to spend the night in a haunted house. For younger readers, it's a good bridge between a picture book and a comic book, as well as being spooky but not too scary.

Hunting Monsters is really good, but something that will be hated by its target audience. It turns out that the harder you look at various famous cryptids, the less likely it is that they exist. 

If that doesn't surprise and dismay you (so, if you are more Scully then Mulder), then some of the history and psychology and even zoology can be really interesting. At times the thoroughness borders on pedantic, but overall I was glad that I read it.

(For a story that covers a lot of the same material on the Loch Ness Monster specifically, but with a more believing nature, visit https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-obsessive-life-and-mysterious-death-of-the-fisherman-who-discovered-the-loch-ness-monster?utm_source=pocket_shared.)

Remembering that it took me two years to get to where I could write about this spooky season, it may be foolhardy to predict too much about the next one. I will try anyway.

Sometime around last Halloween (October 2024), teachers of small children were looking at various seasonal but also age-appropriate picture books. One of the coworkers of one of my sisters remembered a book, but not the title.

In it, a girl believes her house may be haunted, but at the end you see shoes sticking out from under a sheet that made you suspect the girl's mother was behind the haunting. Did that sound familiar?

Not at all, but I did try some searches to see if I could figure it out.

While that did not work, I stumbled across another thread that helped someone find Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn. I totally remembered reading that! Wait, was that the one with the owl with love in its eyes? No! There are some common threads, but that was The Ghost Next Door by Wylly Folk St. John. 

In searching for those, there was this list of best middle reader spooky books. It back some fun memories, but did not answer the original question.

Together, they made me really want to explore both picture books and middle reader books with spooky themes.

There are lists (and memories) for the middle reader books, but I wasn't sure how to choose the picture books. There is still a hope that I can find the one that started all this.

If you search the Washington County library system for picture books with the keyword "ghost" there are 272 results. 

When I found that out, I saw that there were also about 27 weeks until Halloween. I could do ten a week.

No, I am not going to read every single one. There are some that are familiar and some that are parts of franchises that I am not really interested in. It will still be a lot.

I am not adding them all to Goodreads. Many of them are fine, and I may pass many of them on to my sister, but I will only be reviewing them in Goodreads if there is something memorably good or bad about them.

So far that is mainly Ghost Cat by Kevan Atteberry, which hit home hard so I made both of my sisters read it and we all felt that one. 

I don't know if it will work for finding that one; that will depend on whether it is in the Washington County library system.

I do know that there will be lots of ghost books coming in and out. 

Boo! 

(There will also be the continuations of the series mentioned in https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/03/spooky-season-series.html. So if it does take me another two years, that will be why.)

Dire

Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. -- Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

The articles heralding the return of the dire wolf are already being replaced by articles saying that they aren't really dire wolves, so that is interesting, but not really my issue.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/colossals-de-extincted-dire-wolf-isnt-a-dire-wolf-and-it-has-not-been-de-extincted-experts-say/ar-AA1CBYQB?ocid=BingNewsSerp 

The story did originally make me think of Jurassic Park, and not just as a matter of whether or not someday these cubs will kill someone. 

Yes, I thought about the could/should thing, but there was also something in the first article I read about how they might eventually be helpful with current endangered species. That was treated when Hammond found the scientists less than enthusiastic and said if it had been California condors they would have been fine with it.

No, hold on. This isn't some species that was obliterated by deforestation, or the building of a dam.

That particular conversation also mentioned them not knowing enough about the ecosystem. That part might be less of an issue with the dire wolves, who existed much more recently than dinosaurs. It should not be an issue at all for currently endangered species. However, the reasons for them being endangered are generally habitat loss. Poaching and over-hunting played factors, and toxins in the environment that concentrated as they went further up the food chain... those have played roles, but you cannot minimize the importance of habitat loss.

When we got to a situation where the last male white rhino died, that might be a situation where cloning could be beneficial. It being beneficial would still require the issues that led to the sever habitat loss being resolved.

Here's something not from Jurassic Park:

‘Nobody ever saw anything like this before. The first day, 25 September, I saw 10 river dolphin carcasses. That was a shock. Then two days later I saw 70 carcasses along the lake.’ One dolphin, swimming in circles, was in agony and struggling to survive. ‘We didn’t know what to do or how to help it,’ he told me. ‘If you try to rescue an animal that is already hurt, it can die from the extra stress.’

https://aeon.co/essays/we-can-still-get-out-of-the-climate-hellocene-and-into-the-clear 

That is about Amazon pink dolphins not doing well with the rise in river temperature. Let's say you clone them, where are you going to put them?

That requires a completely different kind of effort. Amazing scientific knowledge can be helpful, but not nearly as necessary as people actually becoming committed to the health of the planet and the value of species, sometimes at the cost of not maximizing profits.

I suspect they don't really care so much about restoring endangered species as they care about doing something cool; that was probably just something they said to sound better. 

What does this give us?

First of all, you have pack animals who don't really have a pack or parent animals to teach them how to behave. 

Apparently the process is really hard on the mother. I imagine that has to do with issues of size and anti-immune responses, and I don't like the thought of that. There may be animal research that has enough of a benefit to be justifiable, but we need to be really careful and ethical about how we treat living things. I can't imagine that those criteria can possibly be met here.

Introducing them into the wild sounds like something that can only go wrong, so what do you do with them?

There will certainly be people who would pay for the exotic pets, imagining themselves as Stark children I suppose. Bound to go badly.

I imagine there will also be people who would pay a lot to hunt them. Gross.

Theme park attraction? That just sounds revolting.

No, it's not the cinematic levels of mayhem that were imagined with an island full of dinosaurs -- I guess we can be grateful for that -- but it still feels wrong.  

Nature loving us

Going back even further than the 2013 ICAF, there was a 1994 movie that captivated me: The Secret of Roan Inish.

Set in Ireland after World War II, war-time evacuation took a family away from their island home. In the process, one of the children was lost. 

During the evacuation the gulls and seals were very upset to have the family leaving; that is why they took Jamie and kept him with them. Of course, there was a selkie ancestor, so the seals are really all kin and Jamie was a "dark one", so more seal-ish.

Okay, that is fiction, and folklore. What struck me at the time was the strong sense of connection to place. The people were tied to the land and the sea in a mutual way that seemed lost for our time and place.

I remember discussing it with a friend. Part of it seemed to be that these were people whose living was more tied to nature. Jamie's family were primarily fishers, so were going out onto the sea all the time, needing to be aware of the weather and changes and how it works. 

You could have similar ties with hunter-gatherer societies, and even farmers, but there are different ways of farming. If you are sowing genetically modified corn that goes straight into High Fructose Corn Syrup, it might be hard to feel connected to that.

(King Corn from 2007 could be relevant here, but that is a very different movie than The Secret of Roan Inish.) 

Here are things that I am thinking about in conjunction with the movie:

There are some plants that do better when harvested, which may include wild populations. This includes sweetgrass, as mentioned in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and camas, as mentioned in the following article:

https://www.vox.com/climate/377249/climate-solutions-traditional-indigenous-foods-water-potato

While selkies themselves are from Celtic and Norse lore, various Native American groups have many stories of people being adopted by or marrying or spending time living with animals, as well as other stories focusing on the relationship between them and plants or animals that are a food source. It would be easy to write them off as folklore, but that would be missing the point: different lifeforms are intimately connected and we need each other.

Some of the recent reading has been about economic changes and the rise of capitalism, where we also see the trend toward urbanization. In some ways, the estrangement from the means of production was really estrangement from nature.

Now, this probably seems like a good launching point for just going off on capitalism. I am not ruling that out.

However, there is a really recent story that is all kinds of wrong, and I think I am going there first.

Connected to nature

This is going to be one of those times where I am going to tell a lot of different stories that may not feel cohesive. You will have to decide for yourself the level of relevance.

Twelve years ago the International Comic Arts Forum held its gathering in Portland. I was able to attend quite a bit. I wrote several posts on it at the time.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2013/06/international-comic-arts-forum-source.html

While there were people who traveled to be there, Portland has a wealth of local comics creators (largely because of the presence of Dark Horse). One vivid memory that wasn't really about comics was a panel of writers who lived locally but were transplants, talking about coming to the Pacific Northwest.  

I remember someone talking about how beautiful it was, but also the coldness. That was not as a matter of temperature, but that nature doesn't care about you.

I believe a big part of the reason that stuck with me was because other people were nodding along, while I was like, "What are you talking about?"

I didn't contradict anyone there. I am not sure how I would have. It didn't sound right to me, but trying to argue that nature does care about you would also be weird. I don't think I could convey verbally a logical explanation for why I feel that is wrong.

(This is where you will need to figure out relevance and meaning for yourself.)

I will tell you another, kind of similar story.

A former coworker was with her family, and they noticed a flower child type of person literally hugging a tree. 

Her brother went up and hugged the tree too. He asked "Doesn't it have the best energy?" 

The flower child was all in agreement, but it was a funny story for them. I don't believe it was mean-spirited, but the brother was nonetheless teasing the flower child.

I have hugged trees. It's not something I do often, but there have been times when I have felt connection and closeness, and like maybe with that embrace we could share strength.

Now, I would also like to point out that I have never felt I needed to hug multiple trees. With what I know now about how they connect through the ground and canopy, maybe I was onto something.

Okay, I sound hippy-dippy. Well, the more I talk about fighting this administration, the more hippy-dippy I sound; that may just be what it takes.

I don't know why I feel that connection. Sure, we camped and hiked fairly often in my childhood, and a lot of my early jobs were picking berries and weeding and things, but I am not sure that's how it works.

I am currently reading Lost Woods, a collection of lesser-known writings by Rachel Carson.

She always felt that interest in nature, and she expresses her fascination with it beautifully, 

I can say that for me there was always that desire to know what that sound was or what that plant is named, so there was looking and observing and wondering. Maybe that's how the connection was built.

I'm not saying the plants were looking back, but maybe there was just an openness on their end, and if you stepped into that you became part of it. And if we're talking animals...

Here's the other thing I remember from that panel. Back when he was new to the area, one of the members remembered talking to someone who was saying it was pretty good out here, but "every now and then, a woman goes missing."

I think the timing would have put it around the height of the Green River killings. Of course that wasn't the only serial killer to hit the area, and there are women who disappear in less notorious ways all of the time.

I suppose I remember that because there seemed to be a coldness to the way the guy said it that perhaps matched the perceived coldness of nature.

Let me close with this from Carson when she addressed the Sorority of Women Journalists in the spring of 1954: 

Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, with steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water. Perhaps he is intoxicated with his own power, as he goes farther and farther into experiments for the destruction of himself and his world. For this unhappy trend there is no single remedy -- no panacea. But I do believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

Book messiness

In case it was not obvious, I am usually reading from multiple lists at a time. While I have been reading for Spooky Season, I have also been reading for Native American Heritage Month.

There have been three NAMH books that could be considered a little spooky, two of which seem to be series.

Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

Now, Moon of the Crusted Snow is the only one that actually has a sequel out (Moon of the Turning Leaves), though Elatsoe has a prequel, and I believe there will be others.

Moon was something I read specifically during this time, because I had seen it described as Native horror and I thought it would fit. 

If I were writing about these books now for real, I would argue that Bad Cree fits the category better, and that Elatsoe does not, despite the presence of ghosts and vampires.

I am not writing about them now because there are different things I want to say about them. Besides, there is one viewpoint from which it might makes sense to treat Bad Cree and Moon of the Crusted Snow with Braiding Sweetgrass

I mention this because I had thought that Native Horror could be the bridge for ending Spooky Season and moving into Native American Heritage Month. It could, except that there are ways in which there is an equally good bridge between Native American Heritage Month and some science reading I have going on.

That seems like it could work too, except part of that relates to the reading associated with Caliban and the Witch. Okay, I already wrote about that, except there are aspects of it that sent me down paths I didn't expect. I had not expected to be looking at any medieval studies, yet there I was.

This is a big part of why I am always behind in my reading, but that isn't just me being easily distracted by potential knowledge.

It is also how much of this knowledge connects to other knowledge. It is the patterns that we are constantly repeating, with not nearly as much variation as you would hope and certainly not the desired learning.

Next Friday I am pretty confident that I will write about the last couple of books that were read for Spooky Season.

After that, well, I could start with Science or things we misunderstand about the past or I might take some time to berate James Comey, though with those last two they might end up escaping the Friday posts and happening as part of the earlier writings in the week.

I will probably not start writing about Native American Heritage Month until I do some of those, but I am not positive. 

There will be more writing about music too, so there's that.

Permaculture

When I wrote about messiness, one reason I had been thinking about the term was an article I had read about how cities did not want to deal with fruit trees, because then you have fruit falling and rotting and it takes more work. Of course, then there is a missed opportunity for a food source. 

In fact, I do remember an Italian prune tree on my way to the bus stop that scattered plums all over the sidewalk each year, where they would turn to fruit leather.

They are a fruit I like a lot, but it didn't feel right to pick them off of someone else's tree before they fell, and it was not desirable to pick them after they fell.

What puts the "perma" in permaculture is that there are members of the system that fill multiple different roles in the cycle so that it can be self-sustaining. That does tend to eliminate waste, but it can be messy.

About the time I went to Outdoor School (many years ago), there was this process going on of moving away from the concept of a food chain to a food web. They were beginning to understand that it wasn't linear.

Having ground cover of native species does mean that there should be local pollinators and probably soil compatibility and maybe that your ground cover acts as a source of food and housing for local fauna.

To get it so that there is food and shelter for the fauna at different stages of life, and something handling the decay so that nutrients are put back in the soil, that becomes more complicated, but at the same time it becomes sustainable. It can continue.

Yes, it produces food -- lots of food -- but not all of the food is for you. Then you have lots of healthy living things around you that contribute as part of the web to the part that is for you. 

It's beautiful, and something that takes place naturally all the time, but something that our interference can make really difficult.

I admit that if you are looking at trying to set that up it can feel overwhelming. You need to start looking at different layers and interactions. What's going on in the roots? It will take time to grow a canopy.

It also shows us a path for healing and making things better.

One of the most beautiful books I have ever read was Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway.

It not only helped me understand some things that I had already observed, but also gave me hope for things I would not have expected, like a permaculture area in Arizona that was always 5 degrees cooler than the rest of the area.

Five degrees may not seem like much, but when we are talking about climate change, we are talking about one or two degree increases overall. If we could expand the area, and if we could heal polluted ground, and strengthen endangered species... there are a lot of things that we can do.

I recommend the book, no matter where you are in having a yard and what to do with it.

And it looks like next week -- instead of starting on one of the six areas I was already looking at -- I am going to go in a completely different direction.

These things  happen.