Sylvia's Journal

From often windy and overcast and drizzly Scotland we are back in daily 10+ days: blue skies, no or light breezes and temperatures that the Scots would consider too hot but we feel are just right.

After no exercise (other than walking a lot) for two weeks, I resumed my daily swims in Lobster Cove waters that are as close to warm as it gets. 

Before I go in the water I scan the mouth of Lobster Cove for fins, white fins. Great white sharks (one or many I don’t know) have been spotted nearby. Since we already have had a 45 feet whale in the cove (granted, it was dead), why not a great white shark?

I swim with goggles because I want to know what is going on beneath me, which is why I don’t like dark muddy ponds or the open waters outside the mouth of our cove.

Lobster Cove is fairly clear these days. I can see the green crabs fighting with each other. Fine, let them kill each other, after they have eaten all the baby mussels it serves them right!

I just finished Maria Popova’s opus magnum (Figuring), all 550 pages of it; a book I plucked from Sita’s eclectic collection of books, and have been carting across the Atlantic and back.  

Popova (whose ‘Brainpickings’ I have subscribed to for several years now), has created something best described as a tapestry of words. Using diaries and letters as her main source, she took me into the lives of some extraordinary women who choose paths of great resistance over prescribed social conventions. They were all pulled by an innate force that knew of their talent. What obstacles, what bigotry, what bias they all had to deal with. And I wonder about all the women that were not able to muster all that courage, or weren’t supported by some remarkable and enlightened men (fathers, lovers, publishers, colleagues); how much talent was lost?

One of the last creative geniuses Popova writes about is Rachel Carson. I think a lot about Rachel Carson as I step into the waters of Lobster Cove, and watch, like a voyeur, what’s going on beneath me; the creatures that eat each other, wondering about the white shark that would eat me. Rachel Carson saw with great clarity, all these years ago, that you cannot interfere in ecosystems without expecting consequences: the killing of seals (they open lobster traps) led to their protection, which led to seal overpopulation which attracted sharks, first the smaller ones until word reached the larger ones that there was good food to be had along the Massachusetts coast. So what are we going to do now? I know what I am going to do now: I am going to re-read Carson’s Silent Spring.