After a very tiring and challenging month on the ship, we are home. In the ocean. It is very tempting to form kinship relationships with various substances and bacteria with pieces of floating plastic. Thinking about these relationships could help us to imagine how to create, consume and live in the context of planetary health. Although we may find this idea in any way distasteful, we find this way of thinking quite inescapable. We should accept the intruder into our skin and guts.

  photo © Sea-Water Amplification (SWA) Azores Atlantic Ocean 2025

The affective experience of weather can also be reached by moving to unknown places or countries.

Weather happens through the mobility of rays that are not external to the planet, but are a sticky web of links between our planet and a wider network of deep spaces, places and energies.

Weather is a medium that moves material forms across the universe. And so, too, are weather flows diverted by material entities in the landscape. Accordingly, the way we move also affects the weather.

Lighter than a feather,
but strong enough
to support the heaviest bodies.

As it moves through the world, the weather moves with other material elements. The wind carries dust and sand that it has picked up somewhere else. The weather affects rock formations that may seem stationary, but never are. Rocks change shape in response to heat and cold, moisture or dryness over epochs. Meteorological systems move across oceans and land masses, absolutely denying any sense of ownership.

photo © Sea-Water Amplification (SWA) Azores Atlantic Ocean 2025

Weather continually creates and reshapes the physical properties of a place. Wind scatters seeds, erodes surface material and shapes the growth of vegetation. The particular material elements that dominate every landscape respond in a distinctive way to the play of the place. Knowledge of the environment, and especially of weather changes, requires a relational understanding of materiality beyond the human. Weather also influences our moods and emotions. Clouds are often good indicators of these causes, as are the state of mind or our own bodies.

By looking from space at how the weather moves, new ways can be explored to understand the gigantic scales at which the weather emerges and dissipates. The idea of weather interconnectedness in the open world can be expanded to include off-planet openness.

The merging and blending of earth and sky –
extends beyond Earth, into an off-planet realm.

Being more open to the openness of our meteorological worlds is important for understanding how we think about the meteorological worlds we are experiencing.

Space is a realm
that allows differences to coexist.

Photo © Sea-Water Amplification (SWA) Atlantic Ocean Azores 2025