Empowerment and the Power Grid

The lights are back on today after an all-day blackout yesterday in Panajachel.  After two years in the whistling metropolis of Shanghai, where artificial lights and virtual reality dazzle the urban brain, the primary colors of Lake Atitlan and pure sunshine are boring holes in me, cleaning me out and making me lighter. A blackout in a city equals total chaos, but the people here marched on as if nothing was wrong. Businesses all lost a day, or sold what they could in darkened shops, knowing that the lights would come back on at the end of the day. If something like that were to occur in Shanghai or New York, the chaos would be unmanageable. Of course, this leads to speculating on life without the power grid. The survivors would undoubtedly be the local people everywhere who don’t rely on electronic transactions and the blazing binary.

Morning stretches and Crossroads Coffee to start the day, clouds hanging low over the tips of the volcanoes. Settling into the house is taking longer than expected. The accumulation of stuff has overtaken our lives. Now, the winnowing…