nature connection

If there is one thing that living off grid teaches you that we can be blissfully oblivious to living on grid, it’s about power. Not the Nietzschean will to power master of the universe type power, but actual power. Energy.

Like this rather ugly mistake of a plastic cat fountain above that I had a moment of weakness for and bought on sale, but my cats loathed and ignored and I have attempted to salvage by turning it into a hummingbird fountain to see if it might be of interest to them with the dry heat up here. I got my long suffering dh to cart this up when I met him at Scout camp back in May, and was all excited to plug this into our Jackery, which runs on solar power, and watch all the hummingbirds in the neighbourhood flock to the latest bougie bird spa in the sound. Welp, not only did the hummingbirds completely ignore it—they didn’t even sit on a branch! This innocuous looking beast actually completely drained my power bank running for a few hours!

Zero percent! So this isn’t like some of the gargantua solar setups like some of the neighbours have around here who have luxuries like four solid walls in their lives. No. It’s a Jackery Explorer 2000 V2 that can handle surge to 4400 W and ran our hammer drill just fine when we had to drill holes in the local granite bedrock. It also has been (up until now) a reliable power source for our Dometic cooler. But plug a ridiculous little water fountain into it, and you will drain its lifeblood in no time.

So it looks like the Desolacium Found Bird Spa is offline due to technical difficulties and the hummingbirds are going to have to wait some more for me to build their watery oasis of their dreams. I will look into some solar bird fountains and see what I can come up with next, but since it’s going to be raining for the next week, I think the birds will have so many options they wont need my services in the meantime. What do you think? Should the search to build the ultimate bougie biophilic hummingbird spa continue or should I drop this errant quest? Please let me know in the comments!

When I was a child I had a strange dream. I was standing out on a pier, similar to the one at Huntington Beach in California, and there were several tourists casually milling about. Someone over by the side gasped and yelled about something in the water, and everyone, including myself, went over to look. I climbed up and leaned over the railing and looked down. The sea was a this kind of deep turquoise, milky and luminous at the same time. Through it I could see the shapes of several large forms slowly gliding through the water.

It was so amazing. So many sea creatures! So many fish! Sharks! Whales!!! I wanted to get a better look so leaned out juuust a little bit more, and then before I knew it I lost my balance (or perhaps I felt a little push?) and was falling—-right down towards the water! Panic ensued as I tumbled through the air and down down down, sploosh! Into the sea. I plunged down deep, almost to the bottom, got my bearings and then looked around. The water was this amazing azure colour with sunlight streaming through and I could see the forms of the whales going by, feeling massive, like enormous dirigibles. My panic subsided as I realized nothing was coming to eat me, and I soon realized that I must be breathing underwater since I didn’t feel like I needed to go to the surface. I started to swim upwards and towards the whales as if pulled by a magnetic draw and as I got closer I felt like they were sending me this deep feeling of peace. I felt like I belonged there and they wanted to show me something, and so I started to swim with them to wherever they would take me. And then my mother woke up and I was terribly upset with her for ruining only the best dream of my life. But luckily for me, a week, or a month, or a year later (I don’t recall now) I did have the dream again. And then again. It was one of just a few that was recurrent.

And so it was that I felt like, after many a long year of not having this dream anymore, that at 11:11 am last Saturday, when I took this video standing on the land and looking out at the Inlet, I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming of swimming out to sea with the whales once more.

How many orcas do you count? It seems to me at least three? And is that a baby orca I spot with the little fin? 🥹 It would be great to know which pod this is and which individuals.

“They live on the edge, between the village and the forest… messengers… travellers, moving between worlds.” ~Jay Griffiths

Tag: nature connection

Power Awareness

Dreams about Whales