The BIG 3-5

Something about turning 35 tomorrow is making me think about resolutions. I failed this year at coming up with a New Year’s resolution, and wanted to revive it for the Chinese New Year, but missed that one, too. Lent, another opportunity to transform some small aspect of my life through giving up or taking on, soon followed, but I let it pass as well.

My problem with resolutions is I tend to use the ritual as an opportunity to take stock in everything I want to change about myself. This year’s littany might go something like this: Eat better, eat local, exercise/do yoga more, WRITE EVERY DAY, write letters to friends (like Melissa, Jen, Joy, Tiffany, Amy, Barb, Anne, Judy, Greg), interview my family to compile a family history, be more kind to the people I love, be less moody, read Ulysses, finish Swann’s Way, read the NY Times every day, teach my son sign language, learn Spanish, blog….

You see why this never works?

So, on the cusp of middle age I’m trying to reinvigorate this notion of meeting my life with more intention. (A resolution in and of itself….I suppose I am making a resolution to make resolutions…ha ha!) And today I’m deciding that resolution will be keeping this blog more regularly. That’s it…and, of course finsh Swann’s Way (before the end of the month so I can start Ulysses!!).

No, not really. Just this blog. That’s it. Nothing more.

The date stamp on each entry will let us all know when I fall off the wagon, if that is indeed the proper idiom for this situaiton.

Ironically, in this first entry of the new year (2008, year of the rat, #36) where I begin to try to take up more cyberspace via blogging, I want to talk about the carbon footprint.

Why do I care about my carbon footprint? The honest answer is I don’t. I sit here with any number of electronics humming in their sleep mode while lamps in several rooms of my more-spacious-than-average apartment burn away. The number of cheap toys, makeup, toiletries, blank tapes, batteries, plastic thingies, and clothes I have bagged up and put out on the curb in my lifetime will have me in the Ninth Circle of consumption hell for all eternity. (And there is such a hell; it is full of Americans, oil-thirsty, resource-hoarding Americans.) But, I believe in the idea of a carbon footprint. When I think of the concept of a minimizing one’s carbon footprint, I think of the ethics of Thoreau. I’d like to think I could one day aspire to his great experiment, but I’m a long way from there.

Still, I’m happy that it is getting more difficult to escape news features about climate change. One word that pops up in these discussions is locavore, the word-of-the-year for 2007 according to the Oxford American Dictionary. Thisword describes a person who only eats locally-grown food.

I was turned on to this idea through Animal, Vegetable, Miracleby Barbara Kingsolver, specifically by this chapter. It prompted my husband and I to begin buying all groceries at our local farmer’s market (sparse as it is in January) and to buy a cheesemaking kit. We have yet to make the mozzerella, and thirst for greens and other vegetables has sent us to the big grocery stores recently. But I still think the idea of buying/eating local is right on. To me, it’s a concrete way to begin to align want and need, two things often misconstrued in the big capitalist machine. Again, I think of Thoreau, specifically his chapter “Economy.”

This article in the New Yorker by Michael Specter explains how complex the concept of our carbon footprint truly is. There are so many factors when it comes to energy consumption– so many links in the chain at this point– that the solution to limiting our imprint on the planet is often not as obvious as it seems.

(Audible sigh here)

Why can’t it be easier?

Right or wrong, my mind jumpt to another metaphor: the time and effort it takes to close up someone’s life after he passes away. A person’s life in the bureaucratic world requires months, if not years, to expunge. Forms filled in triplicate, copies of death certificates sent to agencies you never even knew existed. Meanwhile, there is the palpable fact of a personal scent clinging to clothes that have yet to be boxed up and sent to charity, no time to measure their worth vis a vis the space they occupy or the need they no longer fulfill. Then, there are the personal connections to salve. Long lost friends, perhaps coping with a separate sorrow, who call again and again and have to be told (again and again) the one they seek has passed. There may even be fights, personal or legal, that ensue long after, just so someone can earn the right to define what to do with this empty space to fill.

…And of course those last five lines evoke “Reasons for Moving” by Mark Strand:

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

What carbon consumption have I burned in the 40 minutes I have been writing? Or, more importantly, what space am I filling? What absence have I become? What threadbare self am I striving to keep whole?