Earth Day 2022, Sharing Ambient Space

Wednesday, April 20, was the day I selected to become “My Personal Earth Day.”  I gathered binoculars and iPhone, put on comfortable shoes, greased up with sunscreen and drove off to be the first in line to pay my $7 to enter the White Tank Mountain Regional Park.  It was my intention to immerse myself into the ambient life of the desert by walking the Waterfall Trail.  With no schedule limitations I would take time to sit on memorial benches and tune all of my senses into the desert surrounding me.

The hike was an unexpected adventure: buzzing bees, scented shrubs, glistening rock walls, soaring hawks, whistling Wren and Swifts, lizards, a Painted Lady Butterfly and finally a young Diamond backed Rattlesnake.

Click the Menu bar of my website to select the Newsletter option for the hike presented Nature Notes 4-22-22.

Returning home, I discovered Yolanda Kondonassis’s newly released “Five Minutes for Earth” album being played on 99.5 FM radio station.  Yolanda is an Emmy nominated harpist who made it her mission to compose fifty, five minute pieces while isolated 2020 to 2021 by the COVID pandemic.

“Five Minutes” is the metaphor for the urgent and compressed timeframe that remains for our global community to find and implement solutions to the environmental crisis facing our planet Earth.

Yolanda ‘s project expanded as she invited fifteen of the world’s most innovative compositional voices to express their most powerful experience inspired by one of the Earth’s many conditions or atmospheres.

The completed “Five Minutes for Earth”  album became available on April 1.

As the my “Earth Day” came to a close I remained captured by the sights, sounds, scents, inventive creativity and hope of our planet’s natural inhabitants.

Just one more element was needed to complete my “Earth Day Discovery” experience.  I needed a bed time story.

Jean Craighead George’s nature writing has always been a favorite of mine.  The Maricopa Library System’s Overdrive app sent me to her latest and final publication, Ice Whale.  The novel completed by her sons posthumously in 2016  thoroughly edited and research for geographical, lingual, scientific and social accuracy is available in the audiobook format.

 I listened to the entire four hour long recording.  The captivating story tells the of the Eskimo community around Barrow, Alaska’s dependence on the whaling industry.  Beginning with the birth of a male Bowhead Whale with a distinctive marking on his chin and a young Eskimo he and his descendants  engage with the same whale through two hundreds years of social and climate change.