Settled, Nurtured, Treading Water

This is a different last chapter, for time in Madison. The sharp-eyed owls would have already noticed that I wrote nothing of the week in Madison between Chicago and the Grand Canyon, and I feel hesitant about writing about the two weeks that Merle and I are coming to the end of now.

That may be because Madison time is not the new adventure each day that has marked the trip so far. It’s a very different rhythm: settled and nurtured, and also treading water. There’s also news from US Congress and from Palestine that makes anything else seem paltry.

It’s been a settled time because we are in a rented house with a room each, in central Madison with the Yahara River running by a back veranda; we don’t have to get out each morning to hit a new road. It’s nurtured, because much of what we are doing is from a song-book provided by Nancy and often accompanied by her and Mariamne. And it’s treading water because there’s a lurking fear in me of the challenge and expanse of returning to Shipley next week.

Settled

To have nothing planned is a special part of any holiday. Late breakfast, lazy days. On the other hand, it also tends to un-settle me because I am drawn to depress myself by filling time with hours of rapid online puzzles and chess, that I then see as a shamefully indulgent waste of time. I don’t do settled easily.

I have managed to spend a rewarding day reading ‘The Disordered Cosmos’ that I picked up at the Socialism conference in Chicago, by a particle physics professor. She is Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and she declares up front that her writing will be rooted in her African American anticolonial agender consciousness. I’ve read a handful of accounts of relativity and quantum physics and that part of this book leaves me bewildered like all the others. I can’t quite grasp it. But that’s followed by powerfully written chapters on the physics of melanin, on hard-to-see dark matter (don’t compare it with Black people within hearing of the author), on Black women in science, and on the process of science and writing about it. It’s all written with a rational energy that explodes on racial capitalism and its long-time every-day impact on lives. I’m loving it. It’s no surprise to find online that she is a grand-daughter of Selma James.
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Nurtured

Nancy and Mariamne have taken me to the Frank Lloyd Wright Center at Taliesin, to the Spring Green desert (seriously, a micro-climate), and to the American Players Theatre for ‘Royale’, the life and challenges of Jack Johnson, black boxng champion in 1910. I’ve eaten Peruvian, quite a few peanut flavoured meals, and a lot of ice-cream. I don't know how I can say I've not had daily adventures.

We’ve been to the Trempealeau wildlife refuge on the Mississippi and ridden a paddle boat. I’ve been to the International Crane Foundation where most of the world’s species are on show and being helped back from close-extinction, and we’ve seen dozens of sandhill cranes in the countryside and in the suburbs. Cranes are so graceful, and they make you feel that they own the world.

I've kept bringing climate change with me, it's been a much-hotter-than-usual start to October, until an overnight drop from warm to cold on 7th October. The changing autumn leaf colours have been beautiful collages of yellows reds golds oranges greens, which the winds will take away soon.

I’ve been kayaking with Merle on one of the lakes that downtown Madison is squeezed between. And Merle’s made online friends who in the real world have taken her to bars and entertainment that I can only imagine. How special to start and end with Len and Merle.

Treading Water

What to do back in Shipley? I managed to watch Chris Packham’s Channel 4 ‘Is it time to break the law?’. You’ve only got until 19th October to catch it (and if you’re not in the UK you need a VPN

connection to the UK). Doesn’t he make the case well? With survival of nature and humanity at stake, something has to be made to shift. I want maximum shaming and disrupting government, which Just Stop Oil’s non-violent clogging-the-roads-and-the-courts is aimed at. Of course it could be aimed more accurately and it's not the only show in town, but it’s the most effective show so far. I have a court case on November 3rd from an action last October, which might be thrown out or might end in a fine, and the following week is another week of action, with possibly bigger consequences. I want to find ways to encourage a problem that can only be solved by unwaveringly climate-and-jobs-and-serving-the-people politicians.

Everything else is treading water and putting up with corruption and genocide. Not in my name.

And that’s it and that’s all.