The mystery at the heart of reality
What stories help you cope with the grief of these times?
"There is good reason to believe that Sunday was the hottest day on Earth since the start of the last Ice Age more than 100,000 years ago. Research from paleoclimate scientists — who use tree rings, ice cores, lake sediments and other ancient material to understand past environments — suggests that recent heat would have been all but impossible over the last stretch of geologic time.
"Sunday’s record-setting heat was felt on nearly every continent. Huge swaths of Asia sweltered amid scorching days and dangerously hot nights. Triple-digit temperatures in the western United States fueled out-of-control wildfires. Around much of Antarctica, Copernicus data show, temperatures were as much as 12 degrees Celsius (22 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal.
"According to the National Centers for Environmental Information, 550 places around the planet saw record high daily temperatures in the last 7 days alone."
Some people revel in heat. Me, I wilt. I seek out cold places, I'm happy to layer up in wool, fleece and down.
But the future is hot. Hell, it's already hot in most places in the world this summer, and all life on Earth is struggling to adapt as the temperatures soar. We're talking radical temperature changes that might have taken thousands of years to occur in past geologic periods—now occurring in a mere matter of years.
Some of us can crank up our air conditioning. Others, including all the wild animals, birds, fish and corals, have no AC to take the edge off the heat.
The wild creatures are bearing the brunt of human-induced climate disruption. Each year, here in Nova Scotia, there are fewer shore birds. This year there have been no wild ducks in my home bay at all.
The grief and heartache mounts.
I must admit that the temptation to spiritual bypass is strong.
Not the fatalism of the Abrahamic religions (God's will be done) or the Eastern religions (we'll have endless lifetimes to figure this out) but my own quirky form of spiritualism: we humans are part of terrestrial nature, Gaia will rebalance and continue to evolve, and this physical reality is only one of infinite quantum realities, anyway. In other folds of the great Consciousness, dolphins play happily in cool oceans and the whole horrible nightmare of colonial capitalist industrialism never happened.
Even oh-so-rational science tells us that our universe is mostly "dark energy" and "dark matter"—"dark" because we don't know what it is.
Mysteries abound.
I believe that our current sad, violent, tortured physical reality is a blip in a much vaster plane of non-physical reality, which every sentient being on the planet visits in sleep, and returns to in death.
Maybe this is just a fairytale to help me deal with my overwhelming grief at the suffering of so many innocents in this time.
If so, so be it. Humans have always needed fairytales to help us cope with all we could not understand.
Tell me, what stories help you sleep at night?
Many organized religions that center on an afterlife do engage in a kind of spiritual bypass that allows adherents to relinquish responsibility for the here and now on this earth. I believe that no matter what one believes about what comes after death, we can only be certain of this moment, so we'd better treat it and the environment in which it unfolds as precious.