I’ll have more to say, later today. Think ANTHROPOCENE.

Anthropocene | Definition of Anthropocene by Merriam-Webster

Anthropocene definition is - the period of time during which human activities have had an environmental impact on the Earth regarded as constituting a distinct geological age.

Online dicdtionary:

Anthropocene adjective: relating to or denoting the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. .• (as noun: the Anthropocene) the Anthropocene period. ORIGIN early 21st cent.: from anthropo-, on the pattern of Holocene,Pleistocene, etc.

You must be as aware of this and as worried as I am, so I won’t go into too much detail. It’s all out there. I saw the documentary film Anthropocene at the LightBox (in Toronto) a week or so ago and then I went to the Anthropocene installation at the AGO this past week.

I can’t even take comfort in my age and the thought that I wont’ be here to see the worst of it as it comes to pass, because I have grand and great grand children who will inherit the dearth. I can’t say, as Louis X!V is supposed to have said: “Après moi, le déluge”, secure in the comforting knowledge that he wouldn’t be aroiund to see the disaster he had created. He didn’t care. I do.

What humans have done to this planet is terrifying. The films and photographs and moving pictures that I saw are stunningly beautiful and horrifically terrifying. I’m still reeling, realizing that I don’t live in the world I used to live in.I’ll do what I can, me in my small corner - and you in yours, I hope.

It’s really tomorrow now and I have more to say, on an approachable level.

Stay with me.

That’s the name of the play I saw yesterday, by Lucy Kirkwood (b. 1984), a British playwright with a number of awards and productions already to her credit in Britain, New York and Toronto.. Wow.

I can’t help making personal comparisons, to my detriment. What was I doing at age 34? I had four children by that time, from 4 to 10 years old, the youngest one challenged. I’d written 4 or 5 puppet plays, produced and touring the Winnipeg elementary schools and in the Junior League library for productions in the U.S. I’d had my first main-stage production at the Manitoba Theatre Centre - a Canadian adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, set in Saskatchewan, and at the Workshop (forget what it was called), a production and provincial tour of my translation and adaptation of Molière’’s George Dandin, set in late 19th century Manitoba - all very local, nothing significant or world-changing. I was still learning (still am). When I was a student at the University of Manitoba, there were no playwriting classes, anywhere in Canada. (The National Theatre School was established in 1960, 8 years after I graduated.

The first play by a Manitoba playwright (Lulu Street by Ann Henry) was produced some time there, not published until 1975, by which time I was widowed and struggling to survive in Toronto. I did not enter the contest she won for a new play at MTC before my husband and I left for Stratford (in 1967) because I was learning how to teach my challenged son (see The Book of Matthew, McClelland and Stewart, 1984).

Ah, well, “ life is what happens to you while you were making other plans.” This line is most famously attributed to John Lennon, but it is credited to a number of other authors dating back into the 1950s, at least.

And my blog is what happens to you when I digress into other paths.

Tune in tomorrow (it’s already here).