Solstice

The Summer Solstice comes this weekend. The longest day of the year. Here in New England, this day of most sunlight has always held significance for me. Our winters are fairly long. January and February are dismal months. So, I often think of this solstice time in those dark days. While revelers are celebrating Christmas and New Year, I am mourning the loss of light. Perhaps I have never lost the genetic memories of my Druid roots.

As I have grown older, I have become more and more sensitive to the seasons and their light. I have developed empathy for the plants in my small front garden. Every morning, I check in with them, as we respond to the weather and light of the day. This has healed my relationship with the planet, I believe. That relationship was horribly narcissistic on my part for many decades. Raised as a selfish human, I had lived as though the planet existed only for me, my comfort, my pleasure.

I know better now. It has taken quite a lot of reality-testing to get my attention. I understand the nearly universal human denial of global climate destruction. However, I also know that this will bring horrors yet unimagined to the human species in the not-too-distant future. I shake my head at those human beings who have procreated and are not rabid environmentalists. This seems to me the height of human ignorance and folly.

I will try to enjoy the long, lavender twilight of another year. The cycle goes on, as it will after I am gone. I am learning to find comfort within my small place on the planet and in The Universe. This deepens my human experience. It does not lessen it.

Fire

The media interest in the recent wildfires in California has been focused on the rich and their losses. Multimillion-dollar homes destroyed near the beach. The obsession (attachment) of the society with money and things is reflected in these stories.

Fire, like flood, is a predictable force in the environment. It is man's dysfunction in Nature which worsens the effects of fire. Nature is not the enemy. That attitude is responsible for the deterioration of our planetary environment.

Overpopulation, greed, selfishness, materialism...these are the enemies of the planet, which will adjust to their onslaught with pure, unprejudiced physical and chemical reactions. It is not a moral, or even human, struggle. We are one species, a species which has intentionally abused the planet and many other species.

Effective practice for personal evolution demands confronting these realities daily in your own life. Practice includes taking responsibility for your own relationship to the planet. Without contact with Nature and education about it, there is no understanding of your own place in it.