Cedar

 close up of the trunk of an old cedar tree 

in the cloister of Pedralbes monastery, Barccelona

 

 

Notes

 Not every journey is downhill........  A view of one of the entrances to Antoni Gaudí's beautiful Parc Güell. Not a bad place for inspiration, like many parks. And then, it occurs, sometimes going downhill is more strenuous than going up.

Summer holidays

 

 

It isn’t only short trips like our recent ones between Barcelona and Vilanova i La Geltrú. Summer inspires longer trips as well, the kind that may require air travel, which obviously means adding to the world’s large carbon footprint. So thinking about ways to make travelling a part of the sustainable environment, I’ve looked around the web a bit for some ideas. An organisation called Sustainable Travel has information on this topic, including things like staying closer to home, investing in carbon offsets, generally slowing down. Their website is worth a read:

 

https://sustainabletravel.org/how-to-reduce-travel-carbon-footprint/

 

Also, on the theme of airplane travel, the Environmental Defense Fund speaks about the same themes but with a focus primarily on the aviation industry and vacationers. New information (to me, at least) includes the Carbon Offsetting Reduction Scheme for International Aviation. As much as 2.5 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions could be kept out of the atmosphere with full implementation of Corsia. The link on this is:

 

https://www.edf.org/climate/aviation

 

Finally, I looked in the direction of architecture. What I found is surprising and I’m going to save it. Don’t worry, you won’t have to wait long. I hope some good poetry (in the ample sense, whatever your creative activity) comes out of this. Stretch those desires….

Barcelona Poetry Week (Jocs Florals, 2021)

 

Jocs Florals

Barcelona is celebrating its Jocs Florals 2021, a celebration derived from the ancient Roman games celebrated to honor the deity Flora (ludi floreales).

Barcelona Town Hall’s website has information on this in Catalan and Castilian. This brings up the difficulty of translation, of course, but it seems to me interesting to point up the fact that the website (this year, in any case) includes a selection of the poems that were presented to the competition for last year’s event. Obviously those who read Romance languages will have an advantage here, but my suggestion is that, if interested, once you reach the website (at  https://www.barcelona.cat/barcelonapoesia/ca/jocs-florals

) you might want to scroll down or in-page search for “llibre dels jocs florals 2021” without the quotes. This will take you to the event’s book (llibre or libro).

You can then search inside the book for “selecció de poemes any 2020” without quotes. The poems there were chosen by Ingrid Guardiola, who also introduces this section of the book. The poems will speak for themselves of course. But personally I find many interesting surprises in the lines chosen. Enjoy!

Barcelona, winter 2020/2021 (revision)

 

Barcelona, winter 2020/2021

 

And light rain

developing out of mist—

meet the cold snap as

a friend of old,

lingering present

to walk with.

 

Bright voices

sing the city cheer.

 

Still mostly sunny days,

wintering sheer from harbor to hills—

large portions of hope

range forth,

frosty breath

through new shutters.

Barcelona, winter 2020/2021

 

Barcelona, winter 2020/2021

 

And light rain

developing out of mist—

meet the cold snap as

a friend of old,

lingering present

to walk with.

 

Still mostly sunny days,

wintering sheer from harbor to hills—

large portions of hope

range forth,

frosty breath

through new shutters.

A December haiku

 

Early December, Barcelona

 

Misty rain,

an early winter cold snap—

yellow elm leaves drift streetward.

winter holidays, Barcelona 2020-2021

 

winter holidays, Barcelona 2020-2021

 

myriad tiny bulbs

           electric picturing

 rangy skies’ assortments

           cling through distance

to this fence          these stalks

          grains

          color returns

 a tree

 a star

 these lights

Euryops pectinatus

 Walking in the Parc del Guinardó in Barcelona on Sunday morning. Great to see so many people out and enjoying the sunshine and warm weather. Everyone wearing protective masks of course. But how important it is to be able to meet up and walk around together!

Below is a picure of the flower referenced above. Unable to resist using only the Latin name...... In this age of easy dictionary & encyclopedia searches. Have an enjoyable week!

Water

Water

Or looking for visuals to accompany poetry readings. This one didn't come out very well but it's the shortest one I have and at the moment the only one I can fit here. Hopefully half a minute of haptic pleasure......

States of emergency

 

States of emergency

 In Spain as well the pandemic is hitting hard. This weekend marks the beginning of emergency measures whereby cafés and restaurants are allowed to open only for takeaway service, cinemas that open require mask use and spacing measures, and shops limit numbers of shoppers. The general rule is to remain at home unless you truly need to go out, although parks and wide avenues are open for exercise.

Today is the final day of Barcelona Poesia. My original intention was to announce this here as it began, but in the end I left that at likes and shares of the information on Twitter and Facebook. The Barcelona City Hall (Ajuntament) website informs only in Catalan and Spanish (top bar). Late as it is, smacking my own wrist for not acting sooner, I’ll leave the link below.

The current perceived emergency has brought a lot of thought about space/place and human roles. Informed about the safety of staying inside I find articles on this dyadic relationship merging with news articles (often unsolicited so to speak) on space/place travel. So one swivels around the /. In any case here is the Barcelona Poesia link:

https://www.barcelona.cat/barcelonapoesia/

color study

work in progress

Barcelona

Up and down the Passeig de Sant Joan. Along the carrer de Mallorca as far as the Rambla de Catalunya. My meanders around our neighbourhood and beyond grow longer.

Barcelona is famously a walker's city. But Phase Three in Barcelona means we still have to wear protective masks even if we can at least we can be out and about, working slowly toward a routine closer to what we consider our ordinary schedules.

“Phase Three”! Who would have thought our lives would come to anything like this? But it’s false to think a bad pandemic wasn’t foreseen and warned against. The signs were there in the specialized press, magazines like The Atlantic, not to mention Nature and others such as Virology Journal. They were there when hand washing and wearing protective gloves in supermarkets began to be advised. 

We simply didn’t know when this would happen or how harsh it was going to be.

So, yes, we go out, but we continue to take care….

First steps

First steps

Sunday, 7 June 2020. Today Barcelona, like so many other cities, was the scene of a demonstration to denounce police brutality and, more specifically, the recent police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Interlinked oppressive acts like this cut right into the heart of our societies. Such treatment by the police is appalling at any time, but in this case there is the added factor that Afro-Americans are known to be proportionately at greater risk of mistreatment.

This is not only a question of Minneapolis. It involves the entire country. By extension, in a globilizing world, we really are “all in it together.” The United States prides itself on justice for all, and yet race seems somehow to continue to be a factor that sparks injustice and further inequality. The underlying racism and authoritarianism of the Trump administration and our inability to come to terms with an endemic racism makes us look ridiculous. As Jennifer Rubin, writing in the op-ed section of The Washington Post on the hypocrisy of the Trump administration, has written: “Should we feel the need to rebuke a strongman in another country (e.g., Turkey, China, Russia, Hungary) one can only imagine the guffaws that would ensue.”*

The announcement in today’s papers that Minneapolis aims to dismantle its police force and newly rebuild it to promote public safety is a welcome first step.** Obviously many details will have to be attended to in order to carry out such an extensive move. Two questions immediately come to mind: Will it work? If so, can other cities follow suit?

* “How the United States might have condemned the Trump regime”, The Washington Post, 4 June 2020.

** https://www.startribune.com/mpls-council-majority-backs-dismantling-police-department/571088302/

Walks and ways

I’ve resumed my longer walks, now, daily or almost so. All of this in accordance with my interpretations of the official information in our area regarding the situation with the Covid-19 pandemic. In Barcelona, as in many other places, the quarantine restrictions are being relaxed with caution.

Meanwhile my account on Facebook is @WBainPoetry (with or without upper case). I’ll be linking accounts here soon but I should add that my Facebook posts primarily deal with more general information, especially things related to current events and the influence of social media. I’ve noticed that searches for the previously mentioned “@” tag brings up my FB page in a simple search on Google. The other search engines I’ve tried don’t do this, however.

In the context of conversations about social media usage this seems worth mentioning.

Barcelona

In the Barcelona area…… As restrictions begin to ease we’re going for short walks around our neighbourhood. So good to be out on the street! At the same time it’s disheartening to see how lightly some people take the cautions about using masks or maintaining safe distances.

More inspiring are the measures that are already visible of adapting the City’s streets with more bike lanes and designated parking areas for motor bikes. From some of the press I’ve seen this is another initiative that’s global. London is planning similar moves, also San Francisco, I think.

For years, for decades now, there have been plans to cut down on motorized traffic in cities. If memory serves one of the architectural solutions for Barcelona—the idea of having commuters coming into the City park in special areas outside the metropolitan area—was mooted 30 years ago or more. An accompanying shuttle system would then be used to get drivers back and forth to their cars.

So, hoping for healthier measures…… On we go!

#staysafestayhome

Out on the street last Friday for the first time in nearly two months. The quarantine has been hard to deal with generally, but perhaps especially in tersms of creativity.

But then… all of this is global, which in many ways is something positive because we’ve known for some time that the world has to work together more than ever to confront the Coronavirus-19 pandemic and many other environmental threats.

Global warning has to be addressed. The destruction of Earth’s rainforests has to be addressed.

So while unable to go out for those refreshing walks and get togethers, telematics and informatics have become an even greater part of our lives.

Underlying the ways we look at the quarantine are ideas about the human biome, both macro and micro—especially micro just now, with regard to the virus that has sparked this global response.

It’s still a pretty big shock to see TV news broadcasts showing the streets of Barcelona empty of crowds of walkers.

There is the upside of course that atmospheric pollution has dropped by something like 70 per cent. But there is also the very sad occurrence of lost lives and suffering. As in so many places the world over, every evening we stand on our small balcony and along with our neighbors applaud the courage of our health workers and others who are directly confronting the pandemic.

Continuing to create is obviously harder just now. But part of the job of dealing with the challenge is precisely to find ways of going on in life positive ways.

At the moment we’re forced to teach by conference call, to samizdat using WhatsApp, to enjoy a Sunday chat with friends using Zoom or similar techno calls…..

#staysafestayhome

Earth Day 2020

Earth Day in times of emergency….. If not for the pandemic and the quarantine currently in force we might be out in the country somewhere celebrating the arrival of spring. Well…. perhaps if not for the rains. 

Instead of an Easter season trip this year what comes is a series of memories of walking a patch of land that alternates areas of flowering clover with balding places giving over to dandelions, chickweeds and some other wilds I can’t even guess the name of.

Then notes I made from a trip we took to Viladrau jog my memory back to flowers seen—dandelions (again) in seed and flowering; nipplewort, violets, something like coltsfoot. Some tiny white flowers. 

And then that beautiful scrubland with Spanish broom and what I think is gorse. Of the trees in Viladrau—holm oak, cork oak, innumerable firs, pines, birch, hazel. Animals? Not so many, aside from different birds like magpies, sparrows, blackbirds there were the insects—3 bee types, ants, spider…

As people have been saying (including Greta Thunberg and earth systems scientist Johann Rockström in today’s The Guardian), after this emergency we are/will be in a changed world owing to such things as global warming, the related loss of Earth’s polar ice caps, the destruction of the Amazon and other rainforests.

This crisis is surmountable but it will take work and patience and far better decision making to learn from our past errors. Below, two links I believe to be of interest.

https://www.nytimes.com/1971/11/14/archives/our-oceans-are-dying.html

https://notesfromgalilee.wordpress.com/tag/mediterranean-is-dying/

Storm Gloria

Very concerned at the destruction caused by the recent storm. There has been loss of life on the Iberian peninsula and in Catalonia the infrastructure of roads, railways and agriculture has been hit especially hard. I'm sure people will already know of some of this but the link below provides more information.

https://www.euronews.com/2020/01/23/storm-gloria-death-toll-and-fears-of-floods-rise