Abbie Chatfield, Muskism and the state of your heart in this breath

ensure you check in with the latter this week

Hello. How is the state of your heart in this breath?

My question is the Arabic translation of the English “How are you?”. In Arabic it’s Kayf haal-ik? In Persian it’s Haal-e shomaa chetoreh?.

I ask this question in Wild and Precious and explain:

When we ask, “How are you?” we are generally met with the equally flat “Not too bad.” The whole thing becomes ago-nowhere “connection-lite” interaction. The Arabic and Persian versions, however, lift everyone to a bigger, kinder place in the mere asking…

The “in this breath” part brings us into nowness. When I’ve asked friends, “How is the state of your heart, in this breath?” I’ve been aware that both of us come into the moment. I listen fully. So does the other person, so their answer is always wonderfully

Me, my heart is constricted and clutching at I-don’t-know-what (it just clutches, or yearns, forward). My heart, right now, is not properly landed in myself.

It’s the time of the year, to some extent. Many of us feel this way. The horrible consumerism, the over-emphasis on happy families (does any other household unit get to have a say?), the race to tie things up, the pressure to get away…it doesn’t feel mindfully discerned. There’s intent there, but the execution is crook. And so Christmas is yet another reflection of where we get it all so wrong. Perhaps this is what my heart yearns - the original intent of the Yuletide spirit, of welcoming other humans into a rested space, of landing.

So, this fricken festive season, how is the state of your heart in this breath? Do let me know. I’m genuinely interested.

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Freak yourself with solar geo-engineering

and try deny shit hasn’t got real

How’s this for an approach to getting us all to wake up to the climate crisis – exposure to the painful (almost) reality of geoengineering. 

I’ll explain.

In the frantic race to cool the planet, geoengineered solutions are being plonked on the table as a serious fix. One such is space sunshades - big umbrellas in the sky that deflect the sun back to space. Another is stratospheric aerosol injection. Which is as it says on the packet. It basically entails high-flying aircraft injecting sulphuric acid droplets into the atmosphere which then – goes the theory – reflect away the sun’s radiation back into space, thus cooling things. For a bit. After two years the sulphur all rains back down to Earth.

Yeah. So. What could possibly go wrong?

This New York Times article argues in support of  this solar Frankensteining of Earth as perhaps the least horrendous option available to us. Even so, it acknowledges it will cause air pollution and damage the global ozone layer. But, the writer (a solar engineering researcher) adds almost trying to bring a cheery spin, “Air pollution deaths from the added sulfur in the air would be more than offset by declines in the number of deaths from extreme heat, which would be 10 to 100 times larger.”

Climate scientist Kate Ricke says of all that sulphuric acid: “It's not benign—it's the same stuff that comes out of power plants. Large concentrations of it in one area makes people and crops sick.”

And of course it does nothing to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. So once it all rains back down to Earth (no doubt carefully orchestrated - meteorologically - to land on third world territories) we are back to square one. Oh - wait - but worse. Because the abrubt jolt will worsen climate change causing more droughts and floods.

And this is now seriously being presented as possibly the only good-ish solution to cool things fast enough in the short-term to save us.

But…

This WIRED article that I read this week suggests that the reality of geoengineering is something of a gift. Yes! Because, “it tends to make people want to mitigate greenhouse gases more, because people think geoengineering is kind of nuts and scary. They see it as an indicator that climate change is a big problem.”

Hmmmm…your thoughts?

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A podcast recommendation on “Muskism”:

A few newsletters back I asked whether, amid all the Metaverse hoo-ha, anyone is asking the moral questions on our behalf required to determine whether such a reality is what we want, or if it’s dangerous. Because once the horse bolts, there will be no turning back.

One of my favourite historians Jill Lepore, in her new podcast series called The Evening Rocket, asks the same question of Muskism which she describes as a kind of political economy, or extreme capitalism.

You might enjoy listening to her Vox chat that goes into the philosophical and moral issues of Elon’s vision that we are being subjected to. It got me reflecting how Muskism, predominantly Space X, is the perfectly low expression of peak capitalism…

We trash one planet, we don’t mend it or heal it and grow in the remaking of things, instead move to the next.

Jill refers to how these billionaire boy-men get to decide humanity’s fate, and in the process stretch the gap between the haves and have nots even further (I can’t imagine they’ll be shipping us all to Mars when it all goes down!).

Really recommend the Vox podcast for a great fleshing out of this stuff.

I have a few playlists you might like

Check them out here. ‘Tho you might like to start with the Wild one…

I collate my tunes from my brother Ben, a yoga teacher at my yoga studio of choice Body Mind Life and an Australian DJ, Dena Amy, and more.

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To wrap, my next Wild with Sarah Wilson podcast guest is Abbie Chatfield. Do check it out…I was a bit thrown/blown by our chat. It got me really alive to where young women are at (she’s 26, a vibrator saleswoman, reality TV star blah blah). It got me questioning my judgement of her generation, of where feminism has landed in 2021.

Please do think about subscribing (you’ll be taken to the option to pay $5 a month to keep things going). Or not. I’m cool with either.

I hope the state of your heart in this breath is peaceful and expanded as the season turns silly,

Sarah xx