Through Thick and Thin

 I've just returned from North Carolina where I attended both my grandsons' graduations, one from middle school and one from high school. It was a fun trip, and Asheville was lush and beautiful. I was hoping it had rained while I was gone, but no. Parts of Iowa are still in a very severe drought. Yesterday I drove out to the family pond and cabin in the heart of farming country, and the fields of beans and corn were very sad. The corn is still alive but not growing. The beans looked worse, just kind of lying on the ground. Farmers are really worried, for today there was a slight chance of rain, and then none in the forecast for quite a long time. So many times in the last two months, the chances of rain diminished as the day grew closer. Even though there was a 30% chance of rain last night, we were trying not to get our hopes up. Yet around 1:00 o'clock I awoke to thunder and wet sidewalks. I went back to sleep, opening my window wide in case that tempted the rain! And when I got up this morning I found that we had gotten 3/8 of an inch of rain! Maybe that doesn't sound like much, but it is significant, enough to help out this thirsty earth. And just now as I am writing this, I heard thunder again. Could we be lucky enough to get a bit more rain before it goes out of the forecast altogether? I hope so!

It looks like we will have to get used to the unusual weather manifesting now. Several years ago, climate scientists were saying that in 20 years, Iowa would have the weather of Texas, hotter and drier. What we're actually seeing is that climate change is happening much quicker than originally forecast. No wonder the farmers here are worried. An occasional drought can be survived. But if this becomes the norm, modern farming in the midwest will not succeed. Irrigating huge fields of grain would never be economically feasible. So what will happen? I wonder. A changing and uncertain climate will be one of our challenges into the foreseeable future.

While I was in Asheville, I was away from the political news for a week, and when I got back I was shaken by what is happening in this country. Yes, climate change is a challenge. But what seems much worse is the dissonance and divisiveness happening in our culture. Of course I've been watching that for a long time, but having a break from it and then watching the news again makes it more real and more alarming. To tell the truth, it is hard for me to imagine how we will heal from this. I remember a Star Trek episode long ago where they encountered a ship floating out in space, and when they climbed aboard, they found a crew that had become infected with a sickness that turned them all against each other. So what Star Trek's crew found was a ship full of dead people, killed by each other. It feels like a psychological pandemic like this has infected many people in this country these days. They seem to be inspired by fear of the other and hatred and greed. Not as bad as that ship in space yet, but heading that way. Whatever we can do to stay that tide, even if it's just sending calming and positive thoughts out into the universe, will be so very important in the immediate future. 

The night before I left Asheville, my son-in-law showed us a recorded interview with a whistleblower who is telling the world about a secret US government agency dealing with alien spacecraft since the 1930's. Apparently, according to him, our government has a number of these high tech alien spacecraft and has also found a number of bodies of aliens over the years, pilots of the spacecrafts. After this alleged disclosure, of course there has been much debunking of these "facts": maybe the whistleblower is going crazy, or was manipulated by someone, or is only doing this to be famous and making it all up. As for me, I have no idea if what he is saying is true. But it seems the height of self-centeredness to suppose that we are the only life in the whole universe. And if there is life from other planets checking us out, flying around above the earth, I wonder what they think of us. If this has been going on a long time, and we have had no trouble with them, it would appear that it is our own species that we need to be worried about. Despite movies about other-worlders attacking the earth, it is us who are attacking each other around the globe. Maybe if they exist, these alien presences could help us get along better! We seem to need an intervention of some sort. 

In the meantime, it helps to learn from the non-human life here at home. There's a calm peacefulness to be had in a forest. Since flying back this week, it has struck me how very isolated we humans have become from the rest of life. You can go for days only seeing artificial surroundings, concrete, large built landscapes like airports. It has happened gradually over eons, but we have successfully fabricated our own world to such an extent that for many people, Nature is not even present. And gradually we seem to have lost our way as a successful, cooperative species, our very accomplishments threatening our survival. Let's hope that despite the rough patch we're in now, we can swing back with the pendulum into a more conscious and positive collective. Fingers crossed!

By the way, we only got a couple drops of rain after the thunder at the beginning of this post. Oh well.