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Welcome to Your Daily Dot where Dot will share tips, advice, and stories on how we can make our world better. |
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All Dear Dot illustrations by Elissa Turnbull. |
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Dear Reader,
I feel environmental changes most acutely at my family cottage: the silence where I used to hear a chorus of frogs; the shoreline of a creek now crowded with phragmites where we used to be able to easily launch a canoe; the stars of a night sky far dimmer to the eye thanks to my cottage neighbors’ near obsession with outdoor lighting.
“Solastalgia” (as Bluedot wrote in this In A Word) is nostalgia, but not quite — “an ungainly portmanteau — sola from the Latin, sōlācium or solace, and algia from the Greek, meaning pain,” explains Anya Kamenetz. Literally, solace with pain. The discomfort of a home growing less familiar. The pain of missing something that is not yet gone, or that’s only partly gone.
Dot recently watched The Wisdom of Happiness, a film about (and mostly narrated by) the Dalai Lama. He talked about his childhood of cold and snow in Tibet, and the changes he’s observed there in his lifetime, due to a warming planet.
But he talked too of holding onto joy in the midst of solastalgia, the importance of compassion for each other because we’re all navigating this increasingly unfamiliar world.
Imagine if the changes to come were part of that joy! An energy system based on renewables, for example. Urban streets designed for recreation and human-powered transportation. An agricultural system that eschews cruelty and profit.
While the Dalai Lama wouldn’t take issue with dreaming, he would remind us to focus on the now, on our connection to each other and to the natural world, and on cultivating compassion.
I am, slowly, starting to hear frogs again near my cottage. A community initiative to tackle invasive phragmites has been largely successful. And on moonless, cloudless nights, the vast star-dusted sky still makes me feel small and insignificant, yet wonderfully at home.
Compassionately,
Dot
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