Solastalgia is the emotional distress that is caused by environmental change or existential woes that impact us as we see our homes and familiar spaces shifted, never to be the same again.  Nostalgia is easily understood as homesickness (leaving home) where solastalia explains that similar feeling or pathos when we recognize Earthy spaces like home but we aren’t gone from them rather they leave us through environmental shifts.

These are a set of plants that litter our native floors before the trees leaf out or grasses gain in height.  During the early season as the ground warms up form available sunlight, which can be harnessed due to the open un-leaved canopy, this mosaic of natives come to life.  They use these months to fulfill that sexual journey of flower only to retreat back to summer dormancy during the shadier months.  

Heading East for the Potomac, and sheltered by the southern tree line we found ourselves completely alone.  It was beautiful!  The water was flat the breeze gentle.  However, the rig sticking up above the southern coastline began to catch the breeze without us feeling it on our faces.  Soon we were charging along at over 7 knots on pure crystal glass.  Serendipitous ethereal sailing like never before experienced.  

Sustainability is a frustrating subject.  It’s relevant to time, place, emotions, more. Easily it balloons into metaphysical or political debates about an unknown future that often detracts from the core of a topic.

What were once wooden corpses slowly becoming compost are now fiberglass containers holding small samples of polluting fluids.  What presented itself as a great idea years ago in the age of the ‘classic plastics’, now exist as unwanted rotting anchors that aren’t worth the money to bring back to life and equally not as easy to discard.

Wetlands are considered one of our Earth’s most productive ecosystems.  The Chesapeake Bay watershed and all states involved not only add to that productivity, but more so this precious ecosystem hangs on their support.  In 1963 JFK coined the well-known phrase “a rising tide lifts all boats”.  Likely, and sadly more pessimistic I fear a lowering tide grounds all boats.

As leaders, academics and advancing professionals we find ourselves deep in the pages of many authors.  Most of our books are disciplinarily technical or informative on haw to maximize the products and teams around us.  But, every now and then we need a break.

With the autumnal shift we look on change as a natural transformation from season to season, shifting from summer to fall, triggered by the internal metamorphosis of our ancient tree friends who transition the color of their own skin from lively green to the splendor of oranges and reds.

How, on a human scale do these issues impact us and are there more basic initiatives in addressing the problem which should be acted on first?  One simple example is eating local.  Food is fresher, money stays in the pockets of your neighbors who grow or sell the food and we use less carbon shipping produce across the country or worse - in from another countries. 

Not too long ago I read a story of the third-century monk St. Antony of the Desert.  It related him as being approached by a philosopher and apparently probed about the abilities to live in such baroness, and more so without books.  How could one grow and expand without these needed works of knowledge?

Names must be the one or two words that carry more weight than any other words we use. My guess is that this is as universal as the emotion of love.

With many years of horticultural experience, with lots of theological debates, with a hand full of applicable classes I have clearly identified the fruit from the Tree of Life.

We have become a rather mobile species, exponentially really. With each invent of mobility time decreases while the expansion of distance increases.

The landscape come March is a great blank paper where for the recent three months we have watched the unfolding of a vast mosaic cast with blankets of colors.  The ebb and flow of nature’s art shifting from early, to mid, to late spring translucently flooding into summer.