i hugged an eskimo today...

and he melted some of the ice around my heart!

tonight i went to an event called "Ice Wisdom", where Angaangaq, an Eskimo-Kalaallit Elder from Greenland, gave a simple yet powerful presentation about climate change. his name means “the man who looks like his uncle”, but he reminded me of "the ideal grandpa".

most of the facts that Uncle told were not new to the audience, but the thing that was new was to hear from someone who lives in the north pole, in a village of 3 homes with 20 people, who has to hunt all his food (polar bears, walruses, seals), including the seaweed, (which are his only vegies because nothing grows there) and hear how the rubber from the tyres of the 6 000 000 cars that drive on the roads every day in São Paulo ends up melting the ice that his life depends on...how the melting of the ice means softer ice which means he cant build igloos when he goes hunting and travelling in his land, and so he has to take a normal tent which weighs a lot more, which means he has to take more dogs with him to carry the weight on his sleigh, which means he has to kill more animals to feed the dogs on the journey, which means more gasoline for the boat to go and catch them and so on and so on...

the theme of his lecture was "melting the ice in the heart of man", and he sees this as the only solution to sustainability and climate change issues...and the message i took away from his speech was that we can melt this ice by humanising this (and any social) issue and showing people how we are all so interconnected, and as he said, there is but one planet, with one country and humankind its only citizen...we are all equal, and that is a beautiful thing...

i think it is great that sustainability and climate change issues have become more main stream and there seems to be more general awareness and action about these issues...but i have noticed within myself that lately i have become kind of cynical and less interested in the theme as it feels somehow to have become cliché and lost a deeper and broader meaning...

Uncle's presentation tonight reminded me of this often missing element - the human interconnectedness....between neighbours of the same city, country, planet and generations...as he said, he lives 17 300 kilometres from São Paulo, but

The greatest distance
in the existence of man

is not from here to there nor from there to here.

Nay, the greatest distance in the existence of man
is from his mind to his heart.

Unless he conquers this distance he can never
learn to soar like an eagle,
and realize the immensity within.