asakiyume | Entries tagged with rivers

There are rivers whose personhood has been recognized--in New Zealand, Colombia, Bangladesh, Canada, elsewhere too. And now, on the occasion of COP16, the 2024 UN Biodiversity Conference currently underway in Cali, Colombia, there's a legal petition to have Ecuador's Los Cedros cloud forest recognized as a co-copyright holder for a song, created by writer Robert McFarlane, musician Cosmo Sheldrake, mycologist Giuliana Furci, legal scholar César Rodríguez-Garavito--and the forest.

In this Guardian article, McFarlane says,

It wasn’t written within the forest, it was written with the forest. This was absolutely and inextricably an act of co-authorship with the set of processes and relations and beings that that forest and its rivers comprise. We were briefly part of that ongoing being of the forest, and we couldn’t have written it without the forest. The forest wrote it with us.

The organization they're working through is the More Than Human Life (MOTH) project, which describes itself as "an interdisciplinary initiative advancing rights and well-being for humans, non-humans, and the web of life that sustains us all." They have a book, MORE THAN HUMAN RIGHTS
An Ecology of Law, Thought and Narrative for Earthly Flourishing, edited by Rodríguez-Garavito, which is free to download on their site (link here), as they want people to have access to the ideas and thinking.

In other news, an owl perched in a lilac right by our door this morning, looking for all the world like a person in a parka with a fur-lined hood. Her feet were invisible where she perched, her eyes were black and only black when she swiveled around to look at Wakanomori and me. We had come to see what the disturbance was--crows were making such a racket. Apparently they don't like Madam Owl.

Current Music: Joe Hisaishi: 6 Banme no Eki (No. 6 Station)

When we lived in Japan (nigh on 30 years ago--yikes!), the signs at various trains stations, advertising businesses in the towns, were often hand-painted. A dentist's office, an ob-gyn, a grocery store, a florist, etc. Sometimes we'd see someone painting a new one.

I hear from my kids in Japan that now, as here in America, they're mainly printed.

But in Leticia they are still hand-painted. We rented bikes one day and passed this guy, just short of the airport, painting a new sign (I asked him if it was okay to take a picture; he said yes).

I've been painting signs myself, recently--first for a neighborhood picnic and this time for a movie night. Normally I like to use markers or cut-out letters on bright poster board, but I didn't have any bright poster board, and neither did the nearby supermarket, so I made do with paint on kraft paper. It would be better if the paint were black instead of white, but white was what I had:

It's not a very exciting presentation--it could be done better!--but I love the concentration and control involved in painting the letters. I'd love to know more about the guy painting the sign for the colchones (mattresses) shop. Do people hire someone professional to do this work, or does each company get one of their employees to do it? The signs are pretty good... I'm thinking it must be professional work. But how do you get to be one of the people doing the painting?

There were all kinds of paintings around--in buildings, on buildings, but I'll save those for another time and will close with a photo of a magnificent stormcloud over the Amazon, because--well!

Current Music: Rio Mira: Aguacerito

I've started volunteering--just a little bit--helping high school kids with essay writing, both at my town's high school and in a troubled school district nearby. The kids at my local high school are relatively privileged (but still so various--one told me about moving from Maine, another about his Soundcloud page, another about being the child of Indian immigrants), the other are in a program for kids struggling to graduate for one reason or another.

That second bunch of kids--I love them so much already. They've picked some excellent research topics. One wanted to write about how miscarriages affect fathers (his girlfriend had a miscarriage). Another wanted to write about school lunches. Another, with Tourettes, wanted to write about Tourettes. Another wanted to write about the effect of cellphones and other electronics on kids in elementary school.

I want these kids to have the same chances that the kids at my local school have. They have so much good stuff to share with the world.

Here's the mighty Connecticut River. Just across it, over there, is where those kids go to school. See the water spurting and pluming through the dam? The city generates electricity from that.

Here are geese in the shoals.

And here's the view further down the river--well, two weekends ago. Most leaves have fallen now.

>

Here is graffiti under a bridge that crosses the river. Do you see the "RIP" on a piece of wood in the foreground? The dates were 1993 to 2016. My younger daughter's age.

Wake up, this graffito tells us. Are you sufficiently awake?

Behind this grand old mill building is the Mill River, which

teenybuffalo took me to several years ago.

Little Springtime, the healing angel, and I went down to the very spot she had shown me (and, actually, the healing angel was along on that trip too), but really what we wanted to get to was a sandy island a bit upstream. The problem was that there was a waterfall between us and upriver at this point.

The healing angel hopped quite nimbly across the river and signaled to us, after a time, that we would find a place to scramble down on our side if we walked back along the highway a bit.

We walked back up the highway, and sure enough, did find a place to scramble down to the water.

Here is the healing angel, already on the island we want to get to.

( a few more photos )

Current Music: Milla Jovovich: Clock

I believe I've mentioned Nicola White and mudlarking before: mudlarking is scavenging for found items on the banks of the Thames. Nicola White, an artist, keeps a blog of her finds--a marvelous blog (link here; the top entry is on vulcanite screw bottle stoppers: fascinating).

One thing she looks for in particular is messages in bottles. The BBC did a five-minute report on her search for the messages of the Thames. She reckons that about one in every 200 bottles that she finds has a message in it. She has words of advice for message writers, too: write in pencil, as the sun tends to bleach the ink in pen messages.

Watch on YouTube

Today on Twitter she posted this magnificent mermaid that she came across. It's made of some sort of cast metal, and she thinks it may have religious significance:

Here's a post she did on votive images and other religious items she's found by the water's edge.

Current Music: Johnny Flynn: Lost and Found

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Asakiyume mita

Entries tagged with rivers

(c) The Los Cedros Cloud Forest

painting signs

across this powerful river

late afternoon picnic

Mudlarker Nicola White on searching for messages in bottles

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May 2025

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