Solastalgia: Yes, And

Mary in Maine

 Sunday morning I was listening to With Good Reason, a program produced by Virginia Humanities and I was introduced to the idea of solastalgia. I learned that solastalgia is the sadness or pain that we feel when a beloved aspect of our landscape no longer exists. Paul Bogard is the editor of the book, Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World and he was the guest on the show. Bogard spoke of a childhood spent in intimate contact with wildlife and skies dark enough to experience a starry night properly. I was so enchanted by the description of his world that I immediately ordered the book, published by the University of Virginia Press. 

I looked forward to cracking open this book which offers reflections by thirty-four writers. They share their solastagia for their particular loved places. I was immediately drawn in, and I've only begun reading, so I'm sure more extraordinary observations will be revealed to me, but an early essay by Kathryn Miles gave me an intense notion of what solastagia is about. Miles grew up in places that have seen great change and manmade alteration. She speaks with true fondness for childhood vacations at Lake Powell when her family lived in Arizona's red rock desert. That lake is a travesty for many who recognize the land as Glen Canyon. Later family homes were in Iowa and Illinois where industrial agriculture dominated the landscape. But, her overwhelming emotion in regards to the landscape as she knew it is joy. 

After graduate school, Kathryn Miles dropped her anchor along Mid-Coast Maine where she felt reassured by the 'glacier-swept granite defining that landscape'. My antenna tuned in to this because my mother lived in Maine and we visited there each summer for twenty-two years. And now, my mother has been gone for about the same amount of time that Miles has made Maine home. My connection with Maine mostly died with my mother, but as Miles tells it, that Maine no longer exists. The water in the Gulf of Maine is warming seven times faster than 99 percent of the world's ocean. Lobsters are moving north and new species are moving in. Miles vividly describes the grief of Mainers and summertime visitors over losing the iconic coastline. I grieve it, too. I understand I can never go back and part of me feels glad that my mother, but particularly my stepfather, is not having to experience this grief. 

But, what to do? Here, our writer is as compelling as she was in her rendering of joy and sorrow over landscapes found and lost. Miles points to inspiration from an unexpected source: the Chicago improv school and theater Second City. Two words convey the idea: yes, and. There is even a book written by Second City executives by the same name. The idea is that reality is accepted (yes) and then you build upon that reality creatively (and).  This is the process of improvisation. And, it is funny because just earlier last night, I was partaking in a Q + A session with my online harp circle. We were talking a lot about improvisation. My contribution was to point out that we can learn how to improvise in a different discipline by understanding how we improvise in another area of our life. Don't we all improvise in some fashion? Life simply couldn't happen if we didn't know how to! I loved and appreciated that this is the answer for each of us as we face the future. Our own contribution to the solution will be what only we can offer. Change is the only constant and it is a constant opportunity for creativity. 

  

Mary reading on the rocks

I so appreciate that Kathryn Miles acknowledges her struggle to "understand why it wasn't okay to simultaneously love a place and to mourn the damage that has occurred there--to hold both sentiments as equally valid and true." With her words I also understand that I will never be able to go back to the Maine that refreshed so many summers and was the vacation 'home' for my children. They will never test that frigid water again! Maybe they will enjoy a more tepid temperature! And yet, creative things will happen. My stepfather told the story from his youth that lobsters were so plentiful and regarded as pests (clearly before they became fine dining and stuffing for lobster rolls!) that they would be thrown on the garden as fertilizer! So, some creativity probably happened to make the shift from fertilizer to roll stuffing...

I highly recommend Solastalgia even as I look forward to reading the rest of the offerings.

Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World. Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2023