Weathering the Winter

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Although it’s been cold out, in many ways this feels like the year without a winter.  Around here we’ve had no real measurable snowfall and temperatures have generally hovered around 40 F, mostly cloudy.  I get cold easily, however, so I need to know how to dress for jogging.  During a warm spell I looked at WeatherBug.  It’s my go-to app for such things.  It told me the current temperature was 49.  Since it’d been in the sixties the day before, that was believable.  Then I glanced at our outdoor thermometer.  It read 39.  A ten-degree difference is significant for jogging, so I called in a third party.  Weather.com said it was 40, much closer to my actual feeling of things—it was chilly inside that morning.  WeatherBug also said it was cloudy, but Weather.com disagreed.  A glance outside showed thin, hazy cloud cover.

Now, I know apps can’t cater to individual needs, but it does seem that WeatherBug was using projections rather than real-time information.  Either that, or somebody was standing too close to the thermometer at the local reporting station, and perhaps breathing on it.  I’m not one of those people who rely on my phone for everything.  I do use it for navigation and snapping quick pictures, but until today I also used it for checking the weather.  I’ve been surprised how often WeatherBug tells me it’s sunny out when I can see nothing but clouds.  Sometimes looking out the window is the best way to learn what your individual weather is like.  Weather is terribly local.

The capriciousness of weather is one of the main factors that led me to write Weathering the Psalms.  Another, of course, was the hope that an academic post might actually consider a guy like me.  The weather has always been a source of personal fascination.  The threat of severe weather, particularly in the Midwest, was a source of naked awe.  I remember standing outside in Illinois with the wide, expansive horizon all around, and staring straight up to a brewing storm cloud thousands of feet overhead.  I didn’t need an app to tell me to take shelter.  Or that time in Wisconsin when a weather system led to repeated, identical cycles of storms that lasted days, leading to localized flooding with rain following a clockwork regularity.  Even then I was a jogger, and for a jogger knowing the weather in advance is important.  These days all that majestic sky drama comes via a device that fits inside my pocket.  It seems we’ve lost something, even though we’re safer this way.  At least within ten degrees.

After It’s News

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We live our lives by the news cycle.  It tells us what to think about and worry about, often beyond our local, daily concerns.  And sometimes we forget about yesterday’s headliners.  If you’re curious about whatever became of actual Hurricane Ian, I can tell you.  He’s been hanging around here.  Oh, he’s a mere shadow of his former self, becoming just a low-pressure system sitting off the Atlantic coast between New York and Philadelphia.  And spinning, and spinning, and spinning.  Around here we haven’t seen the sun since last Thursday.  The rain has been intermittent, but yesterday it was pretty much all day and he’s set to continue dominating the skies here at least through today.  Your typical hurricane, if there is such a thing, just keeps moving until it reaches unpopulated areas and nobody cares any more.  This one has been a long-term guest.

With the first few days of lassitudinous rain we had maybe an inch.  Rainfall spat and sputtered and sprinkled.  Yesterday it began to really come down and as I write this it’s too dark to tell but I can hear it splashing on my windows.  The toadstools popping up in the yard are impressive.  As has been the wind and below average temperatures.  I’m wearing my winter-level protection and dodging raindrops on my morning jogs.  Some days I’ve had to delay them for the water.  Not too many other people are out taking their exercise, I notice.  The Weather Channel’s taken to calling it just a low-pressure system, but we’re on a first-name basis now.  Ian is still very much a thing.  At the end of “daylight” yesterday the rain gauge read about three inches.

The thing about these “unusual” storms is they’re becoming the norm.  Global warming has been affecting us for years now, even as we deny it exists.  Our summer around here was very hot and very dry.  The dry was okay by me, but the heat prevented any outdoor work or play for a good deal of the time.  Days when you’d stay inside and try your hardest not to move.  We had maybe one or two days of transitional weather then boom, straight to November.  The leaves around here are still mostly green although they’ve been starting to change more readily now that October’s arrived with December in it’s train.  Forecasters tell us, like Annie says, the sun will come out tomorrow.  Around here we sure hope that’s right.  I wonder what else is happening hidden behind the news?

Not Ian, but you get the picture

Is It That Time Already?

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Maybe it’s just me, but August seems to be the new October.  If any of you are experiencing the heat wave that’s (oddly enough) like global warming, my apologies.  Around here—and local is what we all are—nights are cool enough to require blankets after our very hot July.  In fact, I need long sleeves and long pants in the mornings, it’s so chilly.  By mid-afternoon I’m starting to roast, but the grass is brown and that October feeling is in the air.  Or maybe it’s just that I’m awake at odd hours and the perspective from this time of day is somehow prescient.  Who knows?  As I try to sneak a jog in before work I see the walnuts have already gone yellow.  And I wonder.

We idealize the weather of our youth.  That sense of oughtness sets in early.  This is the way the weather should go.  We’ve been pouring greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, however, for all of my life and before.  The warning signs have been around for decades but somehow liars with false hair convince us that any progress ought to be reversed.  I wonder if he’s been outside lately.  The planet is constantly changing based on the larger picture.  It has been doing this for eons, well before our species evolved.  Thinking it was created for us distorts our thinking.  The real question is whether we’ll be able to adapt.  I can’t say the prognosis is rosy, given how we’re constantly trying to kill those who live just across that mountain range, or that wide river.  We can’t seem to coexist.

I like October.  Still, I can’t help but think of all the things we didn’t get done this summer because it was too hot to be working outside.  Or we couldn’t get contractors to return our calls.  Seasons change as the atmosphere tries to adjust to all the chemicals we cough out.  October and its monsters seem to arrive earlier each year.  I’ve been feeling it for weeks already.  Seasons are really negotiations.  Around here, in this temperate zone, we spend most of the year with the furnace on, taking the edge off cold mornings and trying to keep this drafty house habitable for about six months of the year.  Everything’s constantly in flux and we simply try to adjust.  Not even the sun will last forever.  But for now I see the signs of harvest season beginning, and I feel the change in the air.  And I can sense October just around the corner. So goes August.

Free Research

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I’ve lost track of how many times it’s happened, but it has been relatively few.  Someone I don’t know will approach me and ask me to post about something on my blog.  Sometimes they’ll even send me a book to highlight.  Perhaps not the most effective way to build a library, I’ll admit.  And some of the books haven’t been great.  I admire them nonetheless.  It takes great effort to write a book.  And not a small amount of faith, too.  Many books—perhaps most—never get published.  A great many are self-published.  (Those who work in publishing can be a stuck-up lot sometimes.)  Even those professionally published can use a push from time to time.  On this blog I’ve actively resisted the urge to make it about one thing.  Why?  Is life just one thing?

In a recent conversation I laid out for someone new what had been my research agenda as a young professor.  It had a direction still reflected in some of the categories you’ll find on the right column of this blog.  After writing on Asherah, I was going to give similar treatment to the other ancient goddesses attested at Ugarit.  This was perhaps ambitious for an academic waif at Nashotah House, but it was well underway.  My book on Shapshu was making good progress when the market (that dragon to every St. George) led friends to suggest turning biblical, which led to Weathering the Psalms.  A new research agenda—explore the weather terminology (the meteorotheology) of other biblical books—arose.  There were storms, after all, becalmed over lakes.  Horror entered in the jobless period and beyond.

And social justice.  I’m not a thrice-failed minister for nothing!  In fact, a recent freebie was a book on social justice.  I have a colleague as interested in monsters as me.  This particular scholar had decided to focus on the cause of the poor.  Even economists are starting to say the unequal distribution of wealth is hurting us.  While the rich fly to space on personally owned rockets, the rest of us have trouble filling up at the service station, even if we have jobs.  So it is that this blog is eclectic.  A friend told me early on that it would be more popular if I just stuck to one topic.  That’s probably true, but my mind can’t settle down like that.  And when people send me things to talk about, I’m happy to do so, if it fits somewhere in my mind.

Easter Weather

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The weather doesn’t always cooperate for holidays.  Easter is, at heart, a celebration of spring—life after death.  Around here this holiday has been accompanied by fits and starts in warmer weather and instead of warmer it’s actually colder again.  Just a week ago there was snow in the air.  Life’s that way; you don’t always know what to expect.  I guess I’m still in hibernation mode.  No matter the season, there never seems to be enough time to sleep.  As a youth I always attended sunrise services on Easter.  These days I regularly rise before the sun, so as long as I’m capable it’s like every day is Easter.  But with work.  Even on what many recognize as Easter—which overlaps with Passover this year—the Orthodox feel we have it too early, what with the Julian calendar still being in effect.  It’s all a matter of how we look at time.

As much as I hate mowing, I admire the exuberance of grass.  It’s ready to welcome the longer days by stretching toward the sun.  Drinking in the plenteous rain.  The dandelions have already begun to spread, opening their yellow eyes to all and sundry passing insects.  Easter is a time to reflect on life returning after winter.  And I can’t help but think of those in the southern hemisphere for which Easter falls in the autumn.  The theology fails to match the seasons as life springs up just as winter is about to set in.  The Christian viewpoint is a northern one, keyed to our seasons.  The weather doesn’t always observe the prevailing theology.

Around here Good Friday was a fine, sunny day.  Like most of the fine, sunny days it was a work day.  Now it’s a chillier Easter, the Saturday between being a mix with some rain.  When I was young—eagerly awaking for sunrise services, which I often had a hand in designing—I marveled at how the weather often seemed to cooperate.  Now as I think back, I remember coming out of Good Friday services into the incongruous sunshine and finding many an Easter still bearing an unseasonal chill.  Weather is, of course, a local and global phenomenon.  One person’s chilly Easter is too hot for someone further away.  And for yet others the onset of autumn.  Globalism has taught us to look further, to think in terms of how others might be experiencing this world.  Easter seems an appropriate time to do just that.

Footprints in the Snow

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Although my back’s grateful, many of the snowstorms rolling across the country have left just a small bit of snow here so far.  Small bits of snow create their own hazards, however.  A snow covered trail quickly becomes hazardous for jogging, so I walk.  This past week we had a little snow and temperatures low enough to dissuade many of those who normally walk or run the trail.  Those of us with desk jobs really have to make an effort to move.  When I was out I was surprised by a couple of things.  There were no other lunch-time walkers and it was above freezing.  The almost untrodden snow gave under my feet and in the patches where the sun made it through, was actually wet.  I took my usual constitutional and headed back to work.

These short, cold winter days are too treacherous for walking in the dark.  Black ice isn’t a myth unless you can slip and fall on a myth.  The next day it was bitterly cold.  Still, skipping exercise a day is a slippery slope.  I headed back to the trail.  At first my footsteps from the previous day had led to a regular set of tracks where the snow had melted down and the pea gravel had dried out.  Walking was safe here.  As I reached the further, more wooded end of the trail it was quite different.  Sheltered by the trees, my foot prints from the previous day had slightly melted and then refroze, leaving a track of ice that could easily twist an ankle.  I began to think of the concept of following.

We find those whose wisdom compels us.  We hear them in the classroom, the pulpit, or the street corner.  Or we read them in a book.  We might even see them on television or the internet.  They seem to have something we lack, so we follow them.  Their tracks often start out secure enough.  Dry patches in an otherwise slippery covering of snow.  We follow on, thinking we’ve found our way.  Somewhat further down the path, however, the tracks become icy, showing us that even the great leaders have their own hidden secrets.  The places where they too slip and fall.  The wisdom we seek is collective.  No one person has all the answers.  If that were so it should be obvious to us all.  Instead we need to strike out on that nearly unbroken snow to discover for ourselves.

Weathering the Sleep

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Weather still has a tremendous, if incremental, effect on life.  Patterns where a repeating weather cycle seems stuck in place are a good example.  While not exactly uncommon in summer around here, thunderstorms develop during the hot and humid days.  Our current pattern is that thunderstorms arrive in the middle of the night.  For days in a row.  We had a few days in our current series.  Some of us can’t sleep through thunderstorms, not least because we have to get up and close the windows, pulling fans out, so that the water doesn’t invade.  This means several nights of interrupted sleep and rather unforgiving work schedules the next day.  Companies don’t often take this fact of the weather into consideration.  I’m not the only one yawning all day.

Of course, other things interrupt sleep as well.  Any parent of a newborn has those perpetually baggy eyes that we’ve come to associate with trying to get an infant to sleep through the night.  Work doesn’t smile on that kindly either.  Both of these (and many others) are very real human concerns regarding slumber.  HR, on the other hand, looks at the clock with a frown.  This sort of work ethic is particularly bad in America where work is a kind of sacred obligation (unless you’re a minor, rich, or retired).  You owe that time, no matter how sleepy you are or sloppily you may work because of it.  In my case it’s the weather that’s been causing my drowsy days.  I guess I shouldn’t have given up caffeine a few years back.

Weather, although it’s treated as a “neutral” subject, affects everything.  There are deniers, but climate change is real.  It’s measured across centuries and millennia, however, and our point of view spans only the few decades of our own lifetimes.  We come again and again to the myth that this planet was created for us rather than the more factual realization that we grew organically out of it.  Our civilization is complex and grows more so all the time, requiring less and less time in nature.  Nature isn’t predisposed to be nice to us, or to any species.  It’s a matter of balance.  So it is with the weather.  This massive atmosphere above us seeks to balance itself out but we’re making it hotter than it should be.  Many suppose that God will sort it all out, if, indeed, forcing a crisis won’t compel divine intervention.  I just hope the “man upstairs” has been getting enough sleep.

Ever-Changing Skies

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The weather is something we like to think is trivial.  We’ve got more important things to do than worry about it.  Yet even our most important ways of dealing with life’s issues have to take the humble weather into account.  The fact that I was awoken by a thunderstorm at around 1:30, and, given my schedule, thus began my day, perhaps has something to do with it.  And perhaps so does a conversation I overheard on a trip to Ithaca.  Now, upstate New York isn’t known for its cooperative weather.  In fact, the alma mater of Binghamton University includes the phrase “ever-changing skies.”  I was in a public place and a conversation was being had between two men who were strangers to me.  My ears perked up when I realized they were discussing higher education.

This should surprise none of my regular readers.  Higher education has been the stand-offish lover in my life.  In any case, as one guy was explaining to the other, he worked at Cornell University—one of the Ivy League schools—and he opined that the reason it had trouble recruiting faculty was, well, the weather.  Now, I’m one to sometimes take weather personally.  (I’m still wondering what the point of last night’s thunderstorm was.  Anything that wakes me after midnight essentially personally ends my night’s sleep.)  In any case, being one of those under-employed academics I had to think about this.  I’d be glad for a university post—would I turn one down because of the weather?  Is meteorological preference really that strong?  Especially since in polite conversation the weather is considered the shallowest of topics.

Weather is vitally important.  Perhaps because of its ubiquity we tend to overlook it.  Think about rain on a wedding day.  Or a moving day.  In the latter case it can be more than inconvenient.  Sports events can be cancelled due to weather (baseball is especially prone to this).  Extreme weather (which is becoming more common) can shut everything down.  Is is just me, or does every thunderstorm now come with a “severe” warning attached?  Weather is more than just inconvenient; our lives depend upon it.  Thoughts not unrelated to these were in my mind as I wrote Weathering the Psalms.  I’ve only ever lived in rainy climates.  I realize many others aren’t nearly so lucky.  The drought in our western states is troubling.  Perhaps higher education might be able to rise above it?  Or will the most educated turn down jobs because of the inconvenience of ever-changing skies?

All Day Long

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The summer solstice is always a bittersweet day.  The longest day of the year.  From now on the days will begin, almost imperceptibly at first, to get shorter.  The wheel begins its six-month roll toward the cold, dark days of winter.  Although the year whiplashes through these extremes in the temperate zones, I wouldn’t have it any other way.  The changes are slow right now.  In fact, the celebration of Midsummer doesn’t usually come until about the 24th.  These long, languorous days can be like that.  

I’ve been studying holidays for well over a decade by now.  Some have origins that are obvious, such as the solstices and equinoxes.  Although ancient peoples were quite capable of observing and marking these days, it seems their perceptions of the seasons were somewhat different than ours.  Midsummer, to us, is the official beginning of summer.  We all know, however, that we’ve had days that’ve felt like summer already.  They start to come, often in May.  “Meteorological summer” is actually June through August while “astronomical summer” begins today.  Our calendars are a matter of convention.  Not only that, but the motivation to mark special days began as a religious impulse.  Otherwise we’d have no particular reason to tell one day from another.

But think of the ancients again.  People were generally illiterate, and although the elites could mark and know the actual solstice, Midsummer marks what the weather feels like on the ground.  Seasons, in antiquity, were understood by what was happening on the ground.  For example, in Ireland February 1, the festival of Imbolc, was considered the start of spring.  Ewes were lambing and that was a sure sign winter was beginning to end.  With such and outlook, folk wisdom reckoned that summer began on May Day, or Beltane.  In such a perspective, the longest day marks midsummer.  Yes, the heat and humidity have really yet to set in, but the climate in Ireland and the British Isles is tempered by the Gulf Stream and doesn’t reach, say, Midwestern extremes.

Those of us raised in scientific worldviews have been taught from youth that summer begins today.  People haven’t always seen it that way.  Not everyone experiences the extremes of weather that temperate regions of the United States do.    In the northern hemisphere—for the global south experiences its shortest day of the year today—the days get no longer than this.  Wheels by their very nature spin.  Our round planet now gives us shorter days until the other extreme is reached.

Thoughts of Christmas

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Christmas, in merry old England, used to be the day when bills were due.  There are vestiges of that still.  Just this past week, when my mind was on upcoming celebrations and family time, companies continue to email me their bills, reminding me that all celebrations are but temporary.  Money’s the real thing, and it takes no holidays.  While the holiday season may be subdued for some due to lack of travel, for me any day that I don’t need to leave the house is a good one.  We had a pretty nasty patch of weather on Christmas Eve, and one might be tempted to say that the atmospheric conditions outside are frightful.  There’s a coziness about staying indoors around the holidays.  Besides, there’s a pandemic out there too.

We’ve got a quiet day planned at home with our usual traditions.  We added a Yule log to our celebrations this year—much of what we now recognize as Christmas derived from the teutonic Yule.  Otherwise, we are quiet people with rather simple tastes.  Even if we can’t afford much, the holidays mean time off work.  Time for those close to us without constantly having to auto-correct back to earning money at work.  I frequently reflect on how distorted capitalism has made us.  Our European colleagues have far more time off work than Americans do.  They don’t seem to suffer for it.  There’s not much light outside anyway, so why not hunker down a while?  Reflect on what’s really important?

First thing this morning, after watering the tree, I fired up the computer to write a few words before the festivities began.  The first two emails in my inbox were, as if on cue, bills.  Computers have no idea this is a holiday, and our neighbor’s early morning car announcing its lock secured tells me that he’s just getting home from work.  The fiction that we all have today off, as time home with family, plays out every year.  Holidays are often the privilege of the affluent, which is why, I suppose, Saturnalia was marked by a reversal of roles for several days.  Rome wasn’t exactly a friendly empire, but it wasn’t a capitalist one either.  This Christmas I’m hoping that those who have to work today—healthcare workers, those who keep stores open for last-minute supplies, emergency workers of all kinds—will have adequate time for peace coming to them.  Even non-essential work can be wearying.  Let’s celebrate, thankful that we’ve survived these last few years at all.  The bills will wait until tomorrow.

Weathering Frights

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It reminded me of a nightmare.  The box, containing a book, was soaked through.  A sudden thunderstorm had come before we knew the box was even there on the porch and memories of several boxes of rain-ruined books came back uninvited.  Water and books just don’t mix.  This particular book, I knew, was Peter Thuesen’s Tornado God, which I had ordered back in December and which has just been released.  The irony wasn’t lost on me.  My own second book, Weathering the Psalms, was a rather inelegant treatment on a similar topic and I’ll discuss Thuesen’s book in further detail here once I’ve read it.  The point is that no matter how arrogant we become as a species the weather just remains beyond our control.  The rainbow at the end of this small storm was that although the packaging was soaked, I found the box before the book itself had time to get wet.

My research, ever since my first book, has largely been about making connections.  The weather is so quotidian, so common, that we discuss it without trepidation in casual conversation.  It is, however, one of the most dangerous things on our planet.  Severe storms kill both directly and indirectly.  Cyclones, typhoons, and hurricanes can do so on a massive scale.  So can their dramatic opposite, drought.  Snow and melting ice caps also threaten life, as do floating chunks of ice in chilly oceans.  It’s no wonder that the weather has been associated with gods from the earliest times.  Even today literalists will say God is in the sky although meteorologists and astronomers can find no pearly gates when they look up.  We just can’t shake the idea that weather is some kind of reflection of divine moodiness.

As weather becomes more and more extreme—it’s already a system that we’ve tipped seriously off balance—I suspect more and more people will start to assign it some kind of divine agency.  This June we’ve already gone from shivering mornings with frost on the roof to nights when sleep is impossible because it’s so warm and humid, all within a matter of a couple of days.  And this isn’t that unusual.  Wait’l the gods really get angry.  Weather is closely related to the water cycle, of course.  We can learn about such things from books.  We can’t take them out during a storm, however, and homeownership is all about keeping water out, or only in prescribed locations indoors.  When the delivery driver leaves a box on your porch, however, it remains within reach of the storm gods.

Cold Psalms

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“Ne’er cast a cloot ’til May be oot,” as we heard it in Scotland, was a warning, loosely translated, to “never take off a layer until May is over.”  That bit of lowland wisdom fits this spring pretty well.  As I was donning full winter regalia for my jog this morning my thoughts naturally turned toward the weather.  Memory distorts things, of course, but I keep coming back to my youth and thinking late May used to be reliably warm.  There were chilly mornings from time to time, but yesterday held a touch of November in the air, as if the world somehow switched axes.  Even the usual animals I see—deer, groundhogs, ducks, and the occasional fox or raccoon—all seemed to be sleeping in this morning.  Who could blame them?

I postulated in Weathering the Psalms that the weather is somehow connected in our psyches with the divine.  It’s God’s big blue heaven, after all.  The weather is something we can only control in a bad way, though.  While other people are fixated on surviving the coronavirus outbreak Trump has been quietly (although well documentedly) been relaxing environmental regulations so that when this is all over the beleaguered wealthy will have further income streams.  And so global warming gets a head start on opening the doors of industry again.  Those older than even me tell me the weather is far wilder than when they were young.  Perhaps it’s just the Anthropocene hadn’t had time to settle in yet.  Or maybe environmental degradation is spitting in the face of God.

First light is beautiful.  I’ve been awakening before the sun for so many years now that I can’t recall what it’s like to stumble out of bed when blue begins edging the curtains.  When it does I pull on my sneakers and head out the door.  It’s easy to pretend out here that everything’s okay.  When I do spot a deer, statue-still until I’m mere feet away, I wonder what life was like before the koyaanisqatsi of industrialization.  When our human impact on the earth was humble, like that of our fellow animals.  Now the weather has turned.  It’s chilly out here this morning.  I’m wearing a stocking cap and gloves and I’m watching my own breath forming the only clouds in the sky.  The weather is a kind of psalm, I guess.  I should pull on another clout and consider the wisdom of my elders.

Really Celebrate

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It’s a dilemma.  How do we celebrate Mother’s Day during a lockdown?  The COVID-19 pandemic has changed a lot of things.  Given that it was snowing around here yesterday (not to be blamed on the virus), even May doesn’t seem very cooperative this year.  On Friday night I made an emergency trip to Target for essentials.  One of my ulterior motives was to purchase a Mother’s Day card for my wife.  Given the lack of social distancing at the card rack, I wasn’t the only one who had this in mind.  The remainder of the store had shelves of daily necessities picked clean.  How to celebrate moms during a pandemic?  I guess by trying to stay alive.

Those of us far from childhood homes can’t visit our mothers.  Even if we could we couldn’t take them out for dinner.  If we send flowers we can’t send gloves to protect their fingers—the stores are out of those.  If we send flowers to plant we have to send plastic to cover them too, having had four nights with freeze warnings in a row.  Talking to my Mom yesterday she recollected the year that it snowed on Memorial Day.  I shouldn’t complain.  Mom would rather I didn’t.

Perhaps the best we can do for Mother’s Day is to start treating all women better.  One commemorative day a year doesn’t make up for a lifetime of second-class citizenship.  Our mothers are the reason all of us are here.  Isn’t that reason enough to see we’re all part of a single family?  Women put up with a lot to take care of us.  Even so we deny them an amendment granting them equal rights.  Politicians are saying “Happy Mother’s Day” even as they continue to withhold basic human rights from women.  We could celebrate Mother’s Day by putting our sentiments into action, transforming daily life into equal pay and equal protections.

There’s a pandemic outside.  There’s some snow out there too.  But there’s a warmth inside and for that we have our mothers to thank.  If we really mean it when we send our mothers cards and flowers, if we really mean it when we call, if we really mean it when we give her a hug, we’ll show it by our actions every other day of the year.  We need to be sincere when we say it, or don’t say it at all.  Happy Mother’s Day!

Peaceful Lessons

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We are all, I think, looking for hope.  Probably due to the way I was raised, I often seek signs.  There’s no way to know if said signs are mere coincidences or the more intense variety known as synchronicities, yet we have a hopeful sign here at home.  On our front porch we have some plant hangers.  Spring crept up on us this year and we haven’t got around to putting any pansies in them yet.  The other day when I was stepping out to get the mail, I noticed feathers in one of them and feared there’d been a bird-related accident there.  As I took a step toward the planter, the head of a mourning dove popped up.  She blinked at me curiously, but didn’t fly away.  I knew then that she had built a nest in the as-yet unused planter and she was sitting on her eggs.

Monday was fiercely windy around here.  And rainy.  I wondered how any birds could fly in such weather.  A mourning dove flew up—perhaps one of the pair on our porch—and landed on the electric wire leading to our house.  The wire was swaying and bucking so furiously that the dove constantly had to shift and fluff and flutter just to stay in place.  The poor bird was in constant motion.  Then it showed a sign of animal intelligence.  There’s a much larger wire that runs down our street, from which other houses are supplied.  It’s more stable in the wind due to its girth.  The dove flew up to that wire instead.  There it was able to perch without having to constantly adjust itself to the gusts.  Peaceful and intelligent.  That’s what the world needs.  I have hope.

The dove has long been a sign of peace.  It’s understood that way in the Bible.  It was the dove that brought an olive twig to Noah, indicating that although all he could see was water there was, somewhere, dry land.  These days we need to be reminded that although it seems that the storm will last forever, even hurricanes eventually exhaust themselves.  The dove, clearly not happy about the horrendous wind buffeting it on that wire, nevertheless persisted in a kind of stoic optimism that things are as they should be.  There is great wisdom in the natural world.  If we can get to a window we can see it playing out before our very eyes.  Now when I step out the door, I glance at the dove, and she looks back at me.  We wink at each other.  She doesn’t fly away, for she understands.  She has a wisdom to which we all should aspire.

Future Warming

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It’s a good thing global warming is a myth, but somebody forgot to tell the hyacinths and lilies in my backyard.  February in Pennsylvania is not when you expect to see spring flowers.  Now I’m fully aware that unseasonal warm snaps and cold spells aren’t an indication of the global climate; they’re far too localized.  One thing I’ve learned in my several decades of life is that heat takes time to transfer.  If you’ve ever had to wait for a pan of water to boil when you’re hungry, you know that to be true.  On cold morning’s my coffee’s ice coffee before I finish the mug, but it does take time for that transition to happen as the cup empties.  With something so inconceivably large as the atmosphere, it takes time.  As our hemispheres take turns pointing at the sun and warming up, the air tries to reach equilibrium and so the weather goes.

Scientists are now talking about, once we get the deniers out of the White House, what long-term remediation plans we have to make.  We’ve already set in motion extreme weather events.  We’ve had decades of warning, but those who control the money just can’t bear to let any of it go.  It’s a safer bet to wreck the planet.  You can just cash in your insurance money and buy a new one.  That’s the way it works, isn’t it?  So I’m standing outside in my shirtsleeves in February staring at April flowers who think winter’s over already.  I don’t know what to say to them.

You can’t drive a car without a license, nor can you practice law or medicine.  To be a world leader you don’t even have to be literate.  I often imagine what the future survivors will say.  They’ll likely be there, since people have a way of getting by.  They may wonder if we knew this was coming.  Of course, the internet won’t be up and running then, and who knows what’ll happen to electronic information when there’s no power left to keep the servers going.  In any case, my perhaps futile answer to their imagined question is yes.  We did see this coming.  Some of tried every legitimate tool in the box called “democracy” (you’ll need a dictionary for that one) to introduce sanity into the discussion, but bluster wins over hard thinking every time.  I cup my hands around the tender, if resilient leaves.  They’re only doing as nature directs.  If only our species could pay such attention to what the planet is saying.