ANOTHER NEW YEAR -- MAY IT BE KIND

It has been another exhausting year.  Covid has continued to circulate, even as climate change has become ever more difficult to ignore, bringing terrible heat here to the Pacific Northwest and fires, tornados, floods, and drought elsewhere.  

There have been blessings, of course.  A new baby born to one of my two daughters, and the other daughter looking forward to the birth of twins next spring.  There have been days spent with friends and family and hours spent in my garden.  There have been walks and writing projects and books to read.  

 

There has been love and there has been sorrow.

 

It is difficult to know how to approach this next year, which will bring the start of year three of our living with the virus, along with everyday blessings in each of our lives.  So, because I haven’t the words for my wish that the new year will be kind to us all, and because the Irish mystic John O’Donohue left us so many beautiful words, I give you his Blessing For The New Year from his book, To Bless the Space Between Us:

 

BEANACHT (A Blessing For the New Year)

 

On the day when

The weight deadens

On your shoulders

And you stumble, 

May the clay dance

To balance you.

 

And when your eyes

Freeze behind

The gray window 

And the ghost of loss

Gets into you,

May a flock of colors, 

Indigo, red, green

And azure blue,

Come to awaken in you

A meadow of delight.

 

When the canvas frays

In the curraagh of thought

And a stain of ocean

Blackens beneath you,

May there come across the waters

A path of yellow moonlight

To bring you safely home.

 

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

May the clarity of light be yours,

May the fluency of the ocean be yours,

May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

 

And so may a slow

Wind work these words

Or love around you,

An invisible cloak 

To mind your life.

 

                                

As we enter this new year, may your joys outweigh your sorrows and may you have an invisible cloak to mind your life. 

OF HEAT WAVES AND TRAIN WRECKS

I’m on a train and I know it’s about to crash.  There is no way to stop the crash or to get off the train.  I can only brace myself and hope I will survive.

No. I’m not describing a vivid dream.   I’m describing how I have felt this week while compulsively checking and rechecking the weather forecast.

 

Here’s what it looks like today:

 

OK, so maybe the train wreck analogy is a bit dramatic.  I don’t expect to die of this heat wave or even sustain injuries.  But, I do feel like a sitting duck – nowhere to hide—and, come on, this is the Pacific Northwest, not Arizona.  

 

When I moved out here from New Jersey many years ago, I had lots of reasons, not least among which was NJ’s heat and humidity.  I may have grown up there, but (in those pre-air-conditioning days) I never got used to the summer weather.  The PNW would be perfect for me – the climate much like Scotland, the country my folks had left behind.   

 

And it worked out well for me.  Most years we would have one heat wave—generally in August—usually in the 90s – very occasionally over 100, and almost never lasting more than three or four days.

 

And then things started to change.  Was it two years ago or three that we had more than one heat wave?  I think we had three last year and we’re into our third one this year.  

 

Friends, it’s only June. 

 

What the ever-loving #&*%  ?

 

Last year, I finally gave in to my husband’s lobbying and agreed to have AC installed in the form of a heat pump.  I was not gracious about this.  Our house, after all, is surrounded by trees and generally stays quite cool.  Only our bedroom would get hot, and this only during the above-mentioned one heat wave per year.  For those few days, we could sleep in our lower level, which is always cool.

 

The truth is I don’t like air conditioning.  I am always cold when it is on.  But, I will be glad to have it this weekend.  Big trees notwithstanding, three days of 100+ temps, followed by multiple days in the 90s will cause quite a heat build-up.   

 

And there’s this.  The train wreck won’t kill us this weekend, but the wrecks will keep coming; they will keep piling on.  Heat waves and fires here.  Drought in California.  Melting glaciers causing rising sea levels.  You know the litany. I don’t need to spell out the dangers.

 

Climate change isn’t going to come in some far-off future. It’s here now. Last summer’s fires and accompanying smoke (which kept us indoors for a week) and this year’s heat waves have brought this home to me. 

 

I have lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the JFK and MLK and RFK assassinations, the Viet Nam war, the gulf wars, 9/11, and four years of you-know-who in the White House.  All of these were awful.  But, nothing has scared or shaken me quite as much as climate change bringing its train wreck to my doorstep.  

 

I recently read a novel called The Ministry For the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.  It takes place in the near future, and opens with a description of an unsurvivable heat wave in India that kills a huge number of people.  The  description was so horrific that I had to walk away from the book for a while.  When I returned to it, I was relieved to find that the novel went on to posit many climate fixes.  In fact, it turned near utopian.  

 

Utopia seems unlikely. My wish today is simply that we and our leaders will wake up in time to stop the train wreck. 

May it be so.