Tag Archives: water

Being near water

I meet my uncle on Zoom every Monday morning. We usually start the meeting at 6am on work days but over the summer break we have been meeting at 6:30am, (9:30am for him in Ontario). This morning I was up on time, but on holiday mode I ignored the calendar reminder that popped up without reading it, and so was late, only getting online after a text reminder. We are in a campground and so as not to wake anyone, I headed down to the beach for my conversation.

Our friends are up here, one campsite over, and also wake up early. They saw me and took a few photos.

What a wonderful location to hold a meeting! There are times that I wish I had a job that I could do from anywhere in the world. If I had such a job, I’d do my best to be near water often.

Yesterday I shared this 16 second video on Twitter from the same location, taken at dusk:

I love being near water, be it an ocean, a lake, a river, or even a tiny babbling brook. It seems like a mixed metaphor, but I feel grounded around water. I feel calm and centered. It’s always a good day when I can spend some time near water.

What’s an environment that comforts you?

The unseen casualties to come

I am saddened by the physical destruction, and especially the death and disruption of innocent lives happening now in the Ukraine. But I think (and hope) this will end soon. However, this war will affect far more than the Ukrainian people. As US President Joe Biden said,

“It’s going to be real. The price of these sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia; it’s imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well,” Biden said. “Both Russia and Ukraine have been the breadbasket of Europe in terms of wheat, for example — just to give you one example.”

This will have a massive impact on the world’s poor. Many reading this will feel the financial cost of increased prices, but that burden can be absorbed. We simply will have less buying power and less options of things to buy. But we won’t go hungry. For people living at or below the poverty line, and especially in developing countries where limited food choices become both expensive and scarce, it’s a different story. People will go hungry. People will revolt. People will die.

Since WWII many of the global conflicts have been about oil. The conflicts of the future will be about food and water. No matter what the reason, global conflict affects us all more and more in the interconnected world we live in. It’s one thing to look at the horror of lives lost in a conflict like this, still another to know that more casualties are coming.