Listening to the waves

and letting them guide us

Ok, so don’t laugh. I dipped my toes in fiction. It is way more fun than I thought!

Laretta dear,

I'm sitting here by the blue pond, cold to the point of freezing. It looks sad and still, full of leaves and bugs, but I keep coming here to stare at the water surface every morning. I'm hundreds of kilometers inland. I dream of the sea.

When I was a child in the 30's, the sea was a constant. I would spend all of my summers near or in the waves. One could be offline for days. The autumns I would spend looking out at those little white foam sheep far on the horizon.

I miss the wind, the seagulls and the way the cliff smelled of salt and thistle.

The fishermen knew me and I think, even respected me a bit. Maybe because I listened and tried to understand. Their lives were simple and - in my young eyes - glamorous. Their stories were of selkies and mermaids. You would have loved them.

Once in a while, the news of a big boat coming into the small harbor made everyone chatty and excited. It would bring things unseen to us, or at least to me, from faraway people who didn't know us. Cocoa, cassava, pawpaws, coffee. The boats came from across the seas with those and left with small furniture and jewelry and salt and ale.

That is what we had best in my village when I was a kid.

That and fish stew. But you couldn't send fish stew to the Caribbean could you.

Back then, in the Age of Peak Carbon, we rarely saw anything but local crops or products. Fish and salt and ale. A proper harbor village. We started to understand our context on the other hand.

We had forgotten that what we are is sea people.

That the waves lead us where we need, if we just listen to them.

And that together we are stronger.

In the Age of the Anthropocene, we had forgotten all of that and where burning away black juice just like everybody else. And when the black juice was gone and the weather stopped being friendly, we where stuck just like everybody else.

At first there was panic, then there was silence. No more commerce, no more movement, no more trade.

Except for the Voyagers.

They had listened to the wind and whispered to the seas and the waves where taking them where they needed.

They knew once more what had been forgotten.

They remembered the smell of the cliffs.

Today in the post-carbon era, the same trade routes are active, only now they are so much more diverse than the salt and ale of the olden days. Even the river routes have been reestablished, back when the Decree for Natural River Flows was signed, in 2045. Now both salmon and sail cargo can freely go where their needs take them. And so the tiny harbor flourished and the faraway people are now neighbors, linked to each other by the sailing routes.

Where commerce had once dwindled, squeezed out by the centralized powers of the time, and by the black juice crisis, trade is now flourishing, bringing in goods every day from everywhere. The faraway people who would sell us dried fruit once a year when I was young are now brokering sail cargo and lifting their whole region into a New Dawn. The first voyage co-ops and alliances for carbon-free supply chains started out there, near my childhood village, in the Age of the Anthropocene.

They are the pioneers who led us where we are now.

I sit here by the pool water Laretta dear, and I long for the sea, the faraway people and the dreams of voyage. I long to remember how to listen to the wind.

Love,

Jo