the cassandra pages

Stars

January 6th is Epiphany, when Christians celebrate the coming of the Three Kings from the East to the cradle in Bethlehem, led by a star blazing in the heavens that "stopped over the place where Jesus lay." It's always been my favorite Christmas story, in spite of the fact that I hardly believe a word of it. Like all the Biblical narratives, it probably has seeds of truth. The Greek word magos (of which magoi is the plural, later shortened to magi) gives us "magic" and "magician": the magi were generally thought to be priest-astronomers who were well-versed in astronomy and astrology, alchemy, and other types of esoteric practices. A cult of such "wise men" did exist in Persia, and were almost certainly known to the early Christians of Judea; perhaps some emissaries like these did visit Herod, bearing gifts.

Fr Dwight Longenecker, a Catholic priest and writer who is also interested in archaeology, has attempted to trace the origins of the Magi in his book The Mystery of the Magi-The Quest to Identify the Three Wise Men. He looked toward Arabia, rather than Persia, because for the Judeans of Matthew's time, Arabia was actually "East". Longenecker believes that the Magi could well have been astronomers from Nabatea, whose wealthy capital was Petra, in Western Arabia. He writes:

Just two details will illustrate the wealth of evidence that combines to strengthen this theory. The finest gold in the ancient world was mined in Western Arabia, and the shrubs from which incense and myrrh are sourced only grow in Eastern Arabia and Northeast Africa, which is all territory controlled by the Nabateans. The gold, frankincense and myrrh were clearly diplomatic gifts (representative of the Nabtean kingdom) from King Aretas IV of Nabatea to honor a grandson or great grandson of his neighbor King Herod.

Secondly, new discoveries by archaeo-astronomers from Spain have shown that the Nabatean temples were aligned to the solstices and constellations, and the archaeological dig at the temple of Khirbet et Tannur, uncovered a stone carved zodiac proving that the Nabatean Magi were star gazers.

Most of the details of the story that we've internalized don't come from Matthew's account at all - for instance, he never mentions that there were three wise men, or that they were kings. Later writers, some of whom may have been fascinated with astronomy and astrology, elaborated and embroidered the Gospel infancy narratives:

Around the same time one of the earliest Christian writers, Ignatius of Antioch (d.108) in his epistle to the Ephesians, waxes eloquently about the star, “a star shone in the night brighter than all other stars. Its light was indescribable, and its strangeness produced wonder. And all the rest of the stars with the sun and the moon made a choir around that star which outshone them all.”

Contemporary scholars mostly agree that the story is likely a fabrication; but still, it caught and continues to capture our imagination and love for the mysterious and miraculous, the contrast between great wealth and extreme poverty, and the table-turning concept of kings bowing down to an infant in a manger.

I thought about the Magi again this past weekend as we watched a documentary about the James Webb telescope, launched on Christmas Day and now well into its journey to deep space, where -- if everything goes as hoped and planned -- it will send pictures and data of unprecedented clarity and detail back to earth, furthering our knowledge of both the near and far reaches of our universe and its origins. The telescope will be able to "see" infrared light from over 13.5 billion years ago, when the first stars and galaxies were forming, and it will also give much clearer data and measurements of planets in other galaxies which might harbor conditions conducive to life.

In some ways, it's easier for me to believe in wise men from the East, following a star to Bethlehem to search for the infant King of the Jews, than to wrap my head around stars coming into being from a Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago -- what does that number even mean? Let alone the concept of some sort of ultra-compacted super-heated Density suddenly expanding into the Somethingness that eventually gave rise to Everything. But I do trust science, and mathematics, and the observations of astrophysics, and I am prepared to be amazed many more times in my life by the explorations and discoveries of space science. I hope I live long enough to see some proof of what I have always believed: that we are not alone in the universe, and that Life probably exists in many other places and forms.

These ancient and modern quests come together in expressions that are quintessentially human: the upward, wondering gaze toward the night sky; the search for that which is greater than us, and for unifying principles and meanings; the quest for Life in its infancy; a way to make sense of who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. I like to think that the ancient astronomers would be proud of us for continuing their search for knowledge, and that we might look back and realize how remarkable some of their observations and calculations actually were. In the cosmic sense, of course, the 2000 years that separate us is barely a blink of an eye, or the trace of a shooting star.

 

Lights on at 1 pm: Winter Solstice

The shortest day of the year was a sunny one in Montreal, at least for the brief daylight hours. I started this quick watercolor after lunch, and noticed that the park lights came on at 1 pm! It's 3:45 now, and the sun is going down - there are just some last rays on the tops of the trees, and white snow on the ground that looks as though it might stay. If I ever forget how far north we live, the solstice reminds me.

The day may have been sunny, but the mood in the city definitely is not, as we battle an Omicron surge that is frightening in its speed and intensity of transmission. Many restrictions have been put in place already by the province, including closing the schools, and our mairesse, Valerie Plante, has declared a state of emergency from her home, where she is isolating after testing positive herself. The hospital emergency rooms are already near capacity.

My Christmas wish to all of you is to that you won't disregard the threat of this variant. The behavior you've adopted that has kept you safe so far is probably not enough to avoid infection. Please get a booster if you're eligible; wear a high-quality or a double mask; keep your social contacts and your errands in public places to a minimum. The exponential rise in cases we are seeing here is astounding, and half or more of those admitted to hospital are now double-vaccinated people.  Booster roll-out has been slow in Canada; here in Quebec only the elderly have received third doses, and people above 65 have just recently become eligible to make appointments -- the virus is taking full advantage of that fact. (My own appointment is scheduled for December 27.) And while hospitalizations are about a third of the level they were with the first wave, and deaths are still fairly low, the danger is not just to the elderly or vulnerable, or the unvaccinated. A two-month old baby died of COVID in hospital here last week. Please, be very cautious, and if you live in a place where Omicron has not yet hit, think very carefully about your holiday plans, who you will be seeing, and what it means to love them, because with this variant, everything can change in a week or less. This is one year when the pressure or desire to visit one's family should take a back seat to protecting them. I say this particularly to my friends in the U.S., many of whom still seem oblivious to what we are going through up here -- and it's not even the worst of it yet -- or what people in Europe are going through.

So it will be a different Christmas, once again...we have a tree, and lights, and the smells of baking; there's snow outside and warmth inside, but the holiday will be a quiet one. I'm sure we'll check in with friends and family via zoom. My daily task is to keep my own spirits up, and to face the seemingly-interminable pandemic, and uncertainty about the future, with courage. It's not easy for me, and takes conscious intention. Today before I got up I thought quite a bit about gratitude. Later I baked a complicated cake, made some five-pointed origami stars, wrote letters, took a long vigorous walk in the park, and still, I felt the presence of discouragement and anxiety in the background. The predictability of the solstice is ancient and steady, though -- and I took comfort in that.

Painting the Spring

Unidentified tree bud. Watercolor on paper, about 5" x 7".

My friend Dave Bonta taught me a new word yesterday: ecdysis. It's the process of an arthropod moulting its exoskeleton. We were talking about these paintings, which I first posted on Instagram. I said I had recently become fascinated by the swelling and bursting of buds on plants, especially trees, and Dave remarked that budburst each spring has every bit as much drama as ecdysis in the animal kingdom. (For the other language geeks out there, the word comes from the ancient Greek ἐκδύω (ekduo), "to take off, strip off.")

Unidentified tree bud. Watercolor on paper, about 4" x 4".

He's right about that drama, but in all these years of wandering the woods and pathways in spring and looking at wildflowers and ferns, I've never really paid that much attention to the trees. You can't ignore a magnolia tree or crabapple in bud, but if we're talking about ordinary trees, well...  Like most of us, I always notice and love the first haze of red buds on the maples and the pale green that one day changes the hillsides and city streets from the scratchy traces of bare brown branches against grey sky to the softness that heralds the true start of spring. I've brought maple branches into the house before, trailing huge cascades of maple flowers, and I've noticed willow catkins. But as for the particularity of what is actually happening at each of those millions and millions of buds on hundreds of different species of trees -- I really had no idea.

Violet. Watercolor on paper, about 4" x 5".

This year, I've gone out into Montreal's alleys and green spaces during the past week and taken a closer look. In one park, beneath a large tree -- an ash, maybe? I can't tell until it leafs out -- the ground was completely covered with the hard, burst shells of the bud casings - each a perfect almond-shape in a beautiful polished ochre. If nature had provided trees with sound, none of us would be able to hear right now, because the noise of what is happening would be deafening.

Forsythia. Watercolor and acrylic on paper, about 7" x 5".

Of course, all the other plants are coming back to new life, too, and we humans tend to be drawn to color and showiness. I felt like this year I wanted, instead, to look for the simple and the unexpected - the small common things under our feet, the single blossoms of plants like forsythia that we usually see as a mass of color, and the unusual forms of flowers bursting from tree buds.

Magnolia. Watercolor and gouache on paper, about 7" x 7".

And I realize it's wrong to say I haven't noticed at all before, because it's those vast bouquets above my head that make my eyes itch and my nose sneeze each year at this time. Right now I don't mind; what bothers me is that I just can't keep up with this fast-moving and extravagant show at all.

(These paintings are not [yet?] listed at my online gallery, but if you're ever interested in anything you see here that isn't there, please just send me an email to inquire.)

Stalking Primitive Plants in the Laurentian Foothills

When setting off into the woods, our friends S. and G. always wear bear-bells and mosquito veils. We didn't see any bears during our stay in the near-wilderness two weekends ago (though bears regularly ransack our friends' bird feeders) but we certainly attracted a lot of hungry mosquitoes! I did OK with a netting over my neck and ears, long sleeves and pants, and a liberal spray of musk oil on my hat, wrists, and ankles.

This area, northeast of Montreal, is part of the North Woods in the foothills of the Laurentian Mountains. It's a mature mixed deciduous/coniferous forest containing paper birch, maples, aspens, oaks, mountain ash, pines, spruce, firs and junipers.

The understory is sparse except in clearings, where you find a lot of lichens, clubmosses, mosses, and some ferns. From the mix of species, you can tell that you're either getting up high or going north, and that the soil is quite acidic.

Redcap or "British soldier" lichens

I've always been interested in primitive plants: lichens, mosses, clubmosses, ferns. Lichens are very cool, because they are actually aren't a plant at all, but a combination of an algae and a fungi living together to form what's known as a "composite organism." As one website stated, "Lichen are pioneers in places that are too harsh or limited for most other organisms. They grow on bare rock, sand, cleared soil, dead wood, bones, rusty metal, and bark. They're able to shut down metabolically for long periods of time when conditions are unfavorable, and can survive extremes of heat or cold and long periods of drought." In Iceland, for instance, lichens and mosses are the first species to colonize new lava fields.

Growing among these lichens, I found several species of wildflowers, new to me, that are in the Pyroloideae (below). And when looking them up, I learned that these are both mixotropic plants-- they gain their nutrition not only from photosynthesis, but also from a symbiotic relationship with fungi.

 

This is a Pyrola, though I'm not sure which of the thirty species it is.

 

This one is (I think) Chimaphilia umbellata. The name means "loves winter" (from the Greek: cheima 'winter' and philos 'lover'); both of these plants have leaves that stay green in the winter. Chimaphilias were used by the Native Americans as a treatment for rheumatism, and it was thought that chewing the leaves warded off tuberculosis. Pyrola americana, or American Wintergreen, is another related plant (also found in these woods); wintergreen oil contains salicylates (like aspirin) that act as painkillers but can be toxic at higher doses.

 

Like the lichens, these Chimaphilias seemed to be thriving here: under some trees on one side of the clearing, I found a huge patch of them.

 

Mosses also thrive here. These are primitive, non-flowering plants that grow close to the ground and reproduce by spores (borne on the tops of the reddish-orange stalks you can see here.)

 

Clubmosses, or Lycopodiums, are some of my favorite plants. Like moss, they reproduce with spores. They're related to the earliest plants that had a vascular system for carrying water and nutrients up into the plant from the soil - an obvious prerequisite for the evolution of plants that can grow tall and bear specialized tissues such as flowers. The northeastern clubmoss species are relatively rare; local populations have been damaged by the overuse of endangered clubmosses in Christmas decorations. Lycopodium powder -- the dried spores of common clubmoss - was used by the Victorians in theater to produce gunpowder effects, because it burns brightly and quickly but without a lot of heat.

I love being in woods like these, and to prowl around and discover some of the reasons why certain species exist there. It's a harsh environment: the soil is acidic, the rocks are close to the surface, the winter temperature is very cold. Still, nature evolves, and the result is a rich mixture of species that are adapted to survive.

Fire and Brimstone

There is something quite abnormal about approaching a pool of water in the earth, and seeing that it is boiling.

In this valley of hot springs a few hours from Reykjavik is the original "Geysir," which gave its name to the geothermal phenomenon of water erupting in a huge plume from a subterranean shaft and reservoir. Geysir was famous, attaining heights of as much as 170 metres -- even Napoleon came to see it -- but it now erupts infrequently. Geological research indicates that Geysir has been active for more than 10,000 years; the activity of all the geysers in this region seems to vary depending on earthquake activity.

A neighboring geyser, Strokkur, first mentioned in 1789, erupts less spectacularly, but is very reliable. While we were in this valley, it erupted four times, about every ten minutes. Even more amazing than the eruption itself is the way the pool seems to "breathe" and finally gather strength, rising in a great bubble-like curve of water, and then exploding upward in a tall plume of sulfurous steam and water. (The Wikipedia link for Strokkur, above, shows a sequence of eruption photos.)

Elsa and I watch Strokkur erupt. In the photograph below, you can see how close the path (and the people) are to the geyser.

The valley also contains pools of extraordinary color, apparently from living algae and dissolved minerals, in water that is far too hot to touch, and the gravelly soil is also colored with hues of red, ochre, and yellow; on the flanks of the pools that eject streams of water there is a slippery, hard deposit of minerals. The smell is difficult. We didn't stay very long, in this valley that reminds one of Dante's vision of hell, but is actually closer to the birthing of worlds. Iceland, one of the geologically youngest places on earth, shows us something of what the earth was like in its infancy.

I found that fact both fascinating and sobering. The landscape is extraordinary, and - to me - extremely beautiful. It can be dangerous. But most of all, it moved me profoundly.

We spend so much of our life in populated places, looking at what human beings have created, and even when we manage to find some wildness, it's often in the company of others. Most of Iceland is unpopulated, or very sparsely settled. In the astounding places we visited, we were often the only people there. There are almost no warning signs -- here a small sign mentioning not to touch the water, which was 80-100 degrees C -- a flimsy rope, no disclaimers; you and your common sense are on their own.

Cultural differences can be huge about the assumptions surrounding perceived danger. After my friend G. read my initial account of this place, he wrote me a letter about his experience visiting geysers and hot springs in Yellowstone National Park in the western United States, under the apt subject heading: "Tiptoe to the Portals of Geothermal Hell:"

"On our road trip west, August 2010, we drove through and walked around parts of Yellowstone Park, which makes an interesting contrast with your geothermal adventures in Iceland.  It is a huge park with dense clusters of visitors in a handful of accessible places, and lots of remote but regulated wilderness that we, like most visitors, never approached. The thermal areas are just unlike anything we are used to.  Approaching a wooded area with steam rising all around might lead you to think of the first or last stages of forest fire -- until the sulfur fumes hit you.  The carefully curated thermal areas around Old Faithful are polar opposite of the "visitor beware" ethos you describe in Iceland.  Boardwalks, rangers, warning signs, and wheelchair accessible ramps with numbered and annotated viewpoints give you no chance to do (or feel proud for refraining from doing) the stupid things you might otherwise be tempted to do in the vicinity of weird and smelly gurgling springs of boiling water, mud or extremophile bacterial colonies. I had thoughts, not of birthing planets, but of native Americans or early explorers coming upon such a place without the commercial buildup or grade school science projects that almost make these things trite.  The ground between these steaming springs can be a shallow and fragile layer over subterranean hot and wet: fatal attractions, with a danger obvious  to thinking folks. The bison like it here in the summer because the sulfur fumes keep the bugs away, and in the winter because the shallower snowpack gives better access to grazing.  Once in a while, one falls into a steaming pool and can't get out."

Iceland is wilderness, but not merely a national preserve or an unspoiled stretch of beach -- it is wilderness that, in and of itself, is changing, mutating, moving, growing. There are old volcanoes, rifts, and relics of lava flows that happened long ago, but there is the constant possibility -- probability -- of new events, and the measurable drift of the tectonic plates away from each other, as the mid-Atlantic ridge rises from the sea in this northern land-that-is-still-becoming.

Who am I, I wondered, in this landscape? Not the same person, surely, as I naively was in the streets of Montreal.

-- This post is my submission to the anniversary edition of the Language/Place blog carnival, hosted this month by Dorothee Lang, on the theme of "Streets, Signs, Directions." I'll post the link as soon as it become active.

The Hand-Brain Connection

A dozen black Ticonderoga HB birthday pencils from my niece - what a great gift!

Several FB friends have recently linked to an interesting article, How Handwriting Trains the Brain, in the Wall Street Journal. It talks about why writing by hand is important in training the mind to recognize and recall shapes.  It's a skill that many children, practically born with keyboards and touch screen under their fingers, have trouble with, but research indicates it may benefit older adults as well.

My purpose here isn't to bash technology, but to think about the hand-brain connection. My handwriting has definitely suffered in hte decades since we switched to computers, but I do a lot of other things, usually without thinking about it much, that require fine manipulation and control of the hands. I was struck the other day when my husband, talking to a friend about the art of drawing, said he didn't think he had ever developed the manual deterity or fine motor skills it seems to require. "Beth has always used her hands that way," he said. "But maybe because I was left-handed, and had trouble with cursive writing, I taught myself to type when I was really young and have never used pens or pencils the way she does." He was, in fact, an early keyboarder, long before there were computers, but as soon as that became a possibility, he was immediately hooked.

I have no doubt that our brains are affected by seeing and then manually reproducing shapes, and that when we practice this a lot, over time, it changes our brain structure. One reason that skills like drawing, reading music, or studying languages (especially those with different character sets) are difficult to pick up when we're older may be because we lack practice in this type of communication between the eye and the brain, and our brains need time and practice to build the ncessary neurological pathways for pattern-recognition, reproduction, and interpretation.

"It seems there is something really important about manually manipulating and drawing out two-dimensional things we see all the time," says Karin Harman James, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Indiana University who led the study.

Adults may benefit similarly when learning a new graphically different language, such as Mandarin, or symbol systems for mathematics, music and chemistry, Dr. James says. For instance, in a 2008 study in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, adults were asked to distinguish between new characters and a mirror image of them after producing the characters using pen-and-paper writing and a computer keyboard. The result: For those writing by hand, there was stronger and longer-lasting recognition of the characters' proper orientation, suggesting that the specific movements memorized when learning how to write aided the visual identification of graphic shapes.

The recent series on drawing for adults, "Line By Line," by illustrator James McMullen in the New York Times is another example, aimed at reviving the love of drawing many of us left behind in grade school: what McMullen calls "The Phantom  Skill." It's been a long time since I've read any "art instruction" and I have mixed feelings about it, but anything that gets people drawing or painting is, I think, good news. Some of the comments have been both illuminating and, to me, almost heart-breaking. Life gets in the way, and -- tragically -- we stop doing things that are good for us because we think we're not good enough. It's never too late, though. I'm curious -- where are you in this picture? Do you still write by hand? Do you draw? Did you enjoy doing things like this and then gave them up? What would it take for you to get back to them? Are there hand-eye practices you've kept doing or taken up again?

Shot

Pierced for herd immunity

I wait quinze minutes

in the salle de surveillance.

That's what my doctor called it: "The Province is out to create 'herd immunity.' That's the best way to keep the virus from spreading. I'd get the shot if I were you." And so, yesterday, we did.

That's the symbol from the Quebec H1N1 info website - good logo, I thought.

In Montreal, large H1N1 immunization clinics have been set up in easy-to-get-to, well-known locations, like the Palais de Congres convention center, and recently opened up to the general public (as opposed to the high risk groups who have been being vaccinated in recent weeks.) We had to be in Westmount early yesterday morning, so we decided to try to the clinic in Place Alexis Nihon, a mall right next to the Forum, where the Canadiens used to play hockey. The clinic was on the level of the metro station that is located right beneath the building, and clear signs pointed us in the right direction. Various "rooms" had been taken over by the provincial health authorites, with a carefully-thought-out crowd-flow plan. We`d heard stories of long waits in the earlier days, but at 8:45 am the clinic had been open since 8:00, and there was no line at all.

A volunteer gave us a number with an appointment time but waved us ahead into the first area, saying with a smile that there would be no wait. This first room had two rows of computers set up on tables, maybe ten in all. The man who processed us asked for our provincial health cards, verified our addresses and birthdates, and printed out a form with several questions on it - in our case, the questions were in English. In the next area, a high counter held pencils and we filled out the five questions on the form; I said I wasn`t pregnant, didn`t have allergies to eggs, had never had a reaction to a flu shot before. We then had a brief interview with another person, who reiterated the questions, making sure we had understood - probably a good precaution in this place of so many different languages. After that we got down to business and were sent to stations for the shot itself, where friendly nurses in ordinary clothing talked to us while swabbing our arms, told us to relax the muscle as much as possible, gave the shot, and then explained our arms might be sore for a few days. Finally she printed and initialed a piece of paper that held our names, birthdates, and health ID numbers, verifying that we`d received a full dose of a particular vaccine on such-and-such a date -- ìn case you`re traveling and this is required,`she said. Then we were waved into the salle de surveillance, where the newly-vaccinated were asked to sit for fifteen minutes prior to leaving - detained by the honor system only, most of us did wait the required time.

The whole thing took no more than half an hour, and impressed me, both by its low-key, non-clinical, reassuring ambience, and by the fact that actually the province was attaining a record of every single person who had been vaccinated that could be used in an epidemiological study, if necessary. The nurse told me that school groups were being bussed into these centers during the day; ``that`s when it gets busy and more difficult,`she said, `because the little kids tend to be scared and you have to spend more time reassuring them.`` In general, though, there`s been no hysteria here at all, and I think the way the clinics have been handled has a lot to do with that. People in the higher risk groups were able to receive shots several weeks earlier, but Canadians have been assured that there is enough vaccine for everyone who wants it.

Today my arm was a bit sore, but not as much as for a tetanus shot, and I was definitely more tired than usual, but as the day has gone on I`ve felt less and less effect. Apparently immunity takes about two weeks to develop, so I`ll keep on washing my hands, which I guess I do out of habit anyway...

I`m curious how many of you have gotten a shot, and what it`s been like where you are.

Osmotic Power

Norway opens the world's first osmotic power plant.

The plant is driven by osmosis that naturally draws fresh water across a membrane and toward the seawater side. This creates higher pressure on the sea water side, driving a turbine and producing electricity.

At first the plant will be producing a very small amount of power --  enough to run a coffee maker. A full-size plant would be the size of a football stadium and produce enough electricity for 30,000 European households; much of the engineering challenge, it seems, is to work on the membrane itself, trying to make it smaller and more efficient. The process would then be possible anywhere there is seawater.

Europe's osmotic power potential is seen at 180 TWh, or about 5 percent of total consumption -- which could help the bloc reach renewable energy goals set to curb emissions of heat-trapping gases and limit global warming.

I'm interested in all of these renewable sources of energy; seeing our friends from Iceland recently reminded me of the potential of geo-thermal energy, a source which is also being explored in Canada.

H1N1 Self-care Guide

I was at the my doctor's today for an annual check-up, and on my list of questions was whether or not I should be vaccinated for the swine flu/H1N1 virus.

"Yes," she said, and explained that she's listening to the advice given by the health officials of the province of Quebec, who are trying to achieve what she called (rather unflatteringly but accurately, I'm sure) "herd immunity," by vaccinating a large percentage of the population. There will be free, widespread clinics in Montreal, in shopping centers and other big public locations, over the next month, with the vaccine available first to the populations most at risk. The general public will be able to get shots about one month from now, and I'll probably follow her advice and go myself. Besides, there's something eminently bloggable about getting a flu shot in the Olympic Stadium, n'est-ce pas?

But I did want to pass along this link to the Quebec H1N1 Self-care Guide that arrived in the mail a few days ago. I thought it was particularly well done - full of important information, calmly presented, designed to keep public anxiety at a low level and help alleviate the pressure on the delivery system. (This is the English edition; it's also available in French of course, and you might find it interesting to take a look at the edition adapted for people of the First Nations.) The decision chart on page 15, which describes symptoms and what you should do in each case, seemed especially helpful to me, and applicable to anyone, anywhere.

Meanwhile, wash your hands and don't lose sleep over this.

Icebergs, Inuit hymns, and a Patriarch

The image above was taken near Greenland, during the Arctic Symposium 2007, the seventh voyage organized by the Orthodox Patriarch, His All Holiness, Bartholemew, as part of Religion, Science and the Environment, a symposium conceived in 1988 to study the fate of the world's largest bodies of water. Prior symposiums have focussed on the Aegean, the Black Sea, the Danube, the Adriatic, the Baltic, and the Amazon.

Like many of us, I'm often too weary and depressed about climate change to read new articles about it. This piece by Neal Ascherson, in the London Review of Books, is a notable exception: fine writing, and an unusual setting featuring an Orthodox patriarch and Greenland villagers.

Before us, on a motionless turquoise sea, the icebergs towered in the evening light, each vast as a city. I looked at the spectators and saw that every one of us, the Greenlanders as well as the patriarch’s retinue of scientists and theologians, stood like a row of Caspar David Friedrich solitaries, facing the ice as if facing their judge.

Climate change is already changing nearly everything about Greenland and its inhabitants, most of whom are descended from the Inuit with some Danish and Norse genes. Some changes are welcomed: the improving economy -- due to greater opportunity because of less cold and ice, and better fishing -- will mean independence from Denmark. Other changes, like not being able to trust that the ice sheet will hold a dog sled, will alter Greenland's culture forever.

Some of us climbed the hill until the group around Tjodhilde’s chapel was a dab of colour on the grey-green shore. Up here, a flock of redpolls swooped about drying cod nailed to posts, and a raven croaked. Inuits have another belief, not quite translatable, in what they call ‘Sila’: the force that brings alarming, unexpected things. Sudden storms are part of it, and disastrous changes in the ice, and caribou migrations shifting out of reach. Sila is also a spirit, and occasionally warns shamanic children that it is coming.