Connected

 

After weeks (months?) of 'too warm, too dry' weather, we are being advised to buckle up because winter is coming.

Starting next week the temps will drop to -20 to -30 C.  Today we have -10 and weak sun shining on the thin layer of snow that drifted down over the past few days.  It's too little and far too late, but we desperately need precipitation.  In our part of the country, we want much higher levels of snow than we currently have in order to do a number of things - hold moisture for the summer, to be released slowly during spring.  To store moisture in the ground to help reduce the danger of wildfires raging through the northern boreal forests - already ravaged last year with millions of hectares of forest burned to the ground.  This damage has negatively affected the entire ecosystem of the north, destroying the habitat of the animals who live there - yes, including humans.  To increase the ground water levels to provide water for our very lives (we can live for weeks without food, only 3-4 days without water.)

I grow weary of the people who don't understand the connectedness of life expressing delight that they 'don't have to shovel snow', then complain because they can't go skiing.  As if the snow should only be on the ski slopes, not on the city streets.  

As if life on earth should bow to their convenience, their desires, not that life is a vast global web of effects, each reliant on determining if this planet, and the beings that live on it will survive - or not.  As if they have and continue to have, an impact on what is happening and that they could make different choices.  That oligarchs don't give a flying fig about people like me, and yet I am constantly being told it's 'my' fault for the way things are, and if I can't afford food I should just eat less, while they buy their 9th yacht or 3rd private jet and dodge paying taxes just so they can hoard more 'wealth'.  Which can't buy potable water or safe air once we've finished destroying this planet.

I grow weary of people who deny that some humans don't deserve to be safely housed, receive the health care they need, when they need it.  That when they cry 'freedom' they only mean for themselves, or the people who look like them, not for every person on the planet.

This morning I read a beautiful expression of how every thing on this earth is connected.  That we all interact with each other, and I just...wept.  I wept for the people currently being bombarded, pounded into dust.  I wept for the people who only want to live their life true to themselves, to love who they love without the state interfering in their lives, trying to erase them.  I wept for the children being murdered, wholesale, robbed of their dreams, their families, their chance to be the best they can be.  I wept because of the desire of some to force others to be who and what they wanted, not what or who the person actually was.  I wept because we are ignoring the very real present dangers, and being manipulated into fearing others, based on their skin colour or the god they may - or may not - worship.

I don't know the people who participated in this exchange. But I am grateful to the last person who chimed in.  I don't think I will ever look at another being in the same way.  I will endeavour to remember that we interact, on a molecular level.  Every single day.

That we are all connected.  We are made of stardust. 

And now I'm going to go to the loom and connect some warp and some weft and think about the vastness of the universe and what I can bring to it - my creativity, my acceptance that this is a marvelous place, and work on loving everyone, as best I can.