Heat, wind, no rain – and is it part of climate change?

Back on line: two weeks off. That wind had come straight at 91 miles per hour – hurricane force is in the range of 70 to 75. Trees went helter and whatever, mostly over electric power lines, not people and houses, thanks be. Then came a week of four days with the temperature over a 100 degrees. The drought here in the Mid West is largely without relief, did I say? Then a second surge of windstorm, and more trees down, more telephone lines, more computer interruptions. Still, no one even hurt.

Now the telephone lines are up, electrical power is on, the computer works again. The service crews must be out with their families buying new cars with all that overtime!

Unusual weather, indeed. Single events do not make for significance – such as a record setting day when we had 106 degrees. Given a range of years and it does add up. The climate is changing, the weather warming. Some doubt, I don’t. 

About fifteen years ago my wife and I were on a cruise to Alaska, finally circling in Glacier Bay. The glacier was staggeringly immense: a mile on our left, a mile in front of us, a seemingly endless reach upwards when the captain turned to closely parallel the whiteness.  About five years ago we went back with our sons. The glacier had peaks and valleys, rotting greyish holes everywhere. It was an open mouthed grasp of articles written about the formerly unrelenting ice fields of the far north and far south.

So what is my individual responsibility – our collective responsibility? We are posed with questions unforgiving in their confrontations; I had never felt them before, we did not know the outlines before. There is much denial, much manipulation for immediate corporate self interest, while other persons persist in living within a bubble of disinterest.

 If a person were a person of prayer, now is the time to let fall the assumptions, loose the mind, the ego, to allow for the kinship of our earth. Answers are uncertain, as prayer itself is uncertain, but now is the time for an expanding spirituality, is it not?