The toxified land and waters

I was just thinking, how the land I was in, feels bad... feels like poison. It's a really vast landscape of forested wilderness home to wolves and moose and deer and foxes and so many birds, but it feels wrong, negative, which makes me very uncomfortable. It's not like what nature is like in the places that feel welcoming, like home. I was thinking about this because I wanted to bring some lake water when I go home, as an offering to an old tree with spirit, a tree with Ga, that had comforted and guided me when I felt really lost and alone. (Maybe, the kami of the tree.) But I decided that I shouldn't bring back water from here, because it just feels... wrong, I don't know how else to describe it. Water is a very important thing to me and I can feel it, more than other things like stones and even animals.

The water here, and the land - the plants, the rivers, the entire forest in all its pieces - feels like it's been poisoned, badly, and it feels like the land reacts by also being a little poisonous in its energy? Poisoned by really nasty human activities, wounded so deeply in so many ways. Being in pain, and so, hostile.

It reminds me of something from the Studio Ghibli film, Nausicaa of the Valley Wind.  think it's a very good film, but part of it that's very interesting, is how the wilderness is all poisonous, all the plants are deadly and so some human societies try as much as they can to wage war on it and suppress it, to very extreme points.

But then there's a scene where princess Nausicaa is crying in a secret chamber in her castle and the sensei who has been looking for her discovers the secret entrance and finds her in the room, and the room was like a garden filled with the most toxic plants from all over. So the sensei was shocked and immediately recoils in terror.

But the princess explains that all of the plants are harmless, and actually have wonderful properties, magical and medicinal... because they've been grown using purified water from a spring beneath the castle, the whole castle is actually a windmill and it brings up clean water from deep in the Earth. And that it's just the humans poisoning the land that has turned the land dangerous and hostile and poisonous... but then when given the chance to live in a healthy place with clean water they're actually so beautiful and wonderful.

This place feels like that, it feels like the tragedy from the film being enacted... the land is in pain, it saddens me, and the people on the land are afflicted by some kind of malaise that spreads and makes even the cities, the culture here, the people from here, feel so different and discomforting, even dangerous, like they're trying to spread the disease to me... and yet by being here I feel like I'm contributing to it somehow, making it worse for myself and the land. I'm supposed to be working for conservation but it really seems meaningless, because the industrial activity will continue, and the industry controls the society here, and I'm supporting and a part of the industry actually while trying to do some good at my job... which is dragging me down actually... so my job actually feels really meaningless because of that, it's just a thing to earn my freedom as a person allowed to exist and maybe earn a tiny bit of money, but I really want to get out of here. There is so much more life in other places. Here, only industrial activity and a decaying earth.

I have some water from Lake Superior, and Lake Huron, I've been keeping it specially for some ritual purpose, and I think maybe I'll make that purpose to make an offering to the tree, to thank and honour it. Those two lakes are to me the greatest of the great lakes, strong and pure and true, and welcoming like home. I carry a jar of lake superior water with me when I travel, it's not much, but it really helps.