Tag: driving

Music for the Heart and Soul

It’s been stressful just to be a human and an American lately. Though my stresses are lower than many people’s—I’m Anglo; I can get by without my yoga teaching income; writing fiction is work I can do alone at home; I live in a state with a lower infection rate than its struggling neighbors; and I practice a lot of stress management skills—I feel the impact of what’s happening. You’d have to be numb not to. I’ve been feeling the grief of the whole country, the losses, the tragedies, and the outrages, as well as dealing with the necessary contraction of my social life. And then there was the stress of this Thursday’s errands: getting a mammogram during a pandemic, going grocery shopping during a pandemic. Getting ready to head home, I reached into the box in the back seat for music for the drive. My hand grasped the CD Walela from 1992. Beautiful choice by chance. Healing and uplifting.

Yes, this is another RAIN post. It’s the monsoon season. Rain is sacred in New Mexico. It’s a manifestation of spirit, not just the hydrologic cycle. One of those July magical moments appeared, rain in the distance as a curtain across the landscape, a few drops on my windshield, and then I was in it, smelling it, hearing it, my little car being washed with a blinding blast of it. Wind flung rain sideways across the road, and this song came on in the middle of the storm.  Circle of Light. There are no images with the video, so you can close your eyes and imagine a New Mexico monsoon while you listen.

I’ve been disappointed in my fellow humans at times lately, yet most of them are kind, patient, considerate, and loving. And the people who go to work so others can eat or have medical screenings are also brave. The occasional jerks I encounter stand out, but they too have souls and hearts and are capable of love, though their public behavior might make me think otherwise for a moment.

The song blew through me like the storm, cleansing and powerful. All of us, all of us, are in the circle of light.

Feeling the Change, from Painful to Positive: My Small Part Matters

Generally, we humans don’t change our lifestyles unless staying the same is more painful. Change, after all, is uncomfortable and difficult. If nothing bad has happened yet as a result of what we do, we’re inclined to believe it never will. Delusional, yes, but that’s human nature.

I suspect that those of us who regularly do things others think of a disciplined actually have powerful imaginations, experiencing future consequences vividly in the present. If this, then that, and it will feel terrible. Or wonderful. Or conflicted.

I do some slightly disagreeable things because I’d feel worse if I didn’t do them. For example, every time I see plastic litter lying in the street or snagged on a thorny plant, I picture that piece of trash floating down the river, choking birds and fish and turtles, and I visualize the trash islands in the Atlantic and the Pacific. The problem is tangible and ugly. It’s also easy to act. All I have to do is pick the thing up and either recycle it or throw it in a trash can. A minor inconvenience.

It’s been different for me with climate change, though. I grasped it intellectually and as matter of principle, but I never felt personally responsible the way I do when it comes to keeping plastic out of the Rio Grande. I can’t see my CO2 output or instantly clean it up. Denial was easy. After all, I drive a fuel-efficient car, and live in a really small apartment. I’m not wasteful.

But I drive that little car a lot. Everyone in small towns in New Mexico does—if they have cars. We accept it as part of life that we have to drive one to three hours for specialty medical care and for a lot of our shopping. Truth or Consequences has plenty of music and art, but we don’t have sports medicine orthopedists or dermatologists. So we drive. And I never questioned it.

Until Australia started burning. People I knew were in the middle of a climate-related disaster. I saw pictures of the orange skies, heard news stories of people huddling on beaches, trapped between the fire and the ocean. And then there was the firefighter I heard on the radio describing how he had to take a break after six weeks on the fire line because he was so overwhelmed by hearing the screams of the koalas and finding their little dead bodies “curled up like babies.” I felt that. Deeply. I’m part of the problem. No excuses. Those are my koalas. It’s an emergency, and it’s today, not ten years down the road.

I can’t put out the fires. I can’t do a lot of things. Can’t make medical specialists move here, or alter our local retail offerings. But I can buy a modestly priced used electric car and cut my driving-related carbon footprint substantially, doing my small part.

I felt inspired, committed to participating in a positive future when I made that decision. New Mexico is headed for a clean energy transition. The process is complicated and flawed, but we’re making a start. We use enough clean energy now that an electric vehicle is the equivalent of a car that gets 60 miles per gallon. Even my 40 mpg Fiesta doesn’t match that. And as the energy mix gets cleaner and cleaner, EVs will contribute less and less to greenhouse gases. I’ve contacted people at all levels of state and local government about the need for better EV charging infrastructure. And I found my dream car online.

Working out the details of actually acquiring it and owning it is proving more challenging. Much more challenging. The car is long way off. More about that later, as I deal with RV parks, The Mexican Bus, all kinds of cords and plugs, and the possibility of having to cave in and get a smart phone. Yep. Change is uncomfortable. But so is staying the same. I have to do something. It may turn out to be an adventure.