The First Water The First Day.

#WaterIsTheBody #NatalieDiaz #TheFirstWaterIsTheBody
#OkimizuRiver #MimataTown
#沖水川 #三股沖水川

#NatalieDiaz #Quote

All the cannonball splash jump practice at the river put me in need of a down day: too much fun and now the ears and back won't work for a day or two.. But it was still good to do a quick bike-ride down to the river with Maron: _The First Water is The Body_ . Even at 8AM it was too hot to be comfortable. I should have avoided doing on-lines stuff and rushed down at around 6 or so, but then I might have forgotten to hang the wash with the Silky Help..

She saw an old-farmer's K-truck in the distance ad thought a chance to play was coming up. When the guy finally came buy he ignored us but maybe I missed the eye contact opportunity being in the state where you need a few days to recover from the vacation...

I'll have to remember to visit this river, the watershed for the house more often. Maybe go early, before the heat. But that's a good time to get yard work done. Maybe just wait for the fall. I guess jumping into a nice little forested river serves the same sort of purpose but that beautiful river isn't quite in the immediate watershed where I live.. That water probably runs into the same OyodoGawa river that this Okimizu river runs into... Hmmm. I wonder what Natalie Diaz would say?

https://emergencemagazine.org/poem/the-first-water-is-the-body/

#OkiMizuRiver #MaronTheShiba #ShibaDog #柴犬 #沖水川
#NatalieDiaz #TheFirstWaterIsTheBody

River walk with Maron.
I keep reading and thinking more and more that we should all get more intimate with our watersheds. Maybe the earth should be organized by watershed, rivers. Natalie Diaz's writing^1 got me visiting the nearest rivers more often, and Andreas Malm^2 has me thinking organization, politics(real policy, survival scale).

- ^1The First Water is the Body, Natalie Diaz
- https://emergencemagazine.org/poem/the-first-water-is-the-body/
- https://www.poetrybooks.co.uk/blogs/news/poem-a-day-natalie-diaz
- ^2 _Fossil Capital_ by Andreas Malm
> Peasants were tied together in what Mikhail terms ‘communities of water’. They adhered to ‘the physical properties of the liquid’s movement, viscosity, and flow rate’ and
> > the notion that the welfare of the whole always trumped the interests and desires of the few. This ideal of cooperative and collective responsibility arose from the fact that, throughout the countryside, scores of villages relied on the function of a single set of irrigation features for their entire supply of water – some combination of a canal, a dam, a section of the Nile, a waterwheel, a sluice gate, and other irrigation works. In these hundreds of ecosystems organized around the shared usage of water and irrigation features, the actions of a few directly affected the welfare of the whole community.34
> Consequently there had to be some protocol for conflict resolution, usually of an informal nature...
> Spanning wide distances, similar phenomena have been charted in Yemen and Peru: close coordination between upstream and downstream users, community assemblies, mechanisms for conflict resolution, customary norms of fairness in operation up to the present day...
> What are the requirements for the successful management of ‘common-pool resources’ such as water for irrigation?

#Watersheds #FlowForLoveofWater #BlueGoldWaterWars #MaudeBarlowe #AndreasMalm #NatalieDiaz #EllinorOstrom

Thanks to Maron, the Shiba dog, I have an excuse to get down the river. It would be hard to justify so many visit just out of curiousity, but if it's also part of accomplishing a daily task, (or chore: dealing with the dog's need to exercise and poop) well, then it's more acceptable I guess. Weird to think we need excuses to go outside and see our local rivers. I was at a community meeting about a national Ministry's plans to ruin what's left of the beaches just north of Miyazaki city. One of the concerned citizend, a short stout surfer guy, urged the locals to visit the shore, to go out and see what's happening to the rapidly eroding and disappearing beach along the big mistake of a toll road built over dunes... Orrin Pilky should be required reading for all citizens within a day's walk of the beach!?!? When we don't live near the ocean (Amitav Ghosh mentions how primary people's avoided shorefront property...) should see our rivers too. That image from _Spirited Away_ comes to mind: with the river god visiting the bath and spewing out the sludge and bicycles and various things that had polluted the sacred river. There are a lot of bridges from which you see bikes in the river.

I addition to Natalie Diaz's _The First Water is The Body_ ^1 I started reading Ruthanna Emrys's _A Half-Built Garden_.. The hints about organizing things by watershed units are fascinating. People have been thinking with the ideas I saw introduced in the documentaris _Flow: For Love of Water_ and _Blue Gold_ with Maude Barlowe.

^1 https://emergencemagazine.org/poem/the-first-water-is-the-body/
^2 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/31.7440/131.1131

#三股町 #NatalieDiaz #RuthannaEmrys #沖水川 #三股町沖水川

Mimata-cho Kabayama, Okimizu River

Natalie Diaz's writing inspired me to start visiting the nearest river again.

> How can I translate—not in words but in belief—that a river is a body, as alive as you or I, that there can be no life without it?

- https://emergencemagazine.org/

#NatalieDiaz #BodyRiver #RiverBody #OkimizuRiver #MimataKabayama #KabayamaOkimizuRiver #三股町沖水川 #樺山沖水川