By far, the most intriguing item of news I saw this morning was the report that the vast majority of sea turtles being born in Florida and elsewhere around the world are female. As in, nearly all of them. Of course, the culprit is global warming, and the high temperatures of the sand where they nest. And of course, this isn't good for the future of sea turtles, or, presumably, for the rest of us.
I know I should read more about climate chaos. I am capable of understanding scientific material for general readers and perhaps even at a higher level. This trend doesn't surprise me, and perhaps I would attract more readers if I approached our current dilemmas from a more well-read perspective. Heck, I am a former Time Inc-er with master's in historical musicology. I can "do" these things.
But a sea change has happened within me too, shifting sands, whatever ocean-based metaphor you want to use. I think it started years ago, when my move to Duluth made reading the daily New York Times an impossibility. Even after I returned back East, I was no longer as engaged as I had been in the perspective of our elite institutions. Several years of soaking in the wisdom of Nature herself (in the form of a daily view of Lake Superior) had all but washed away my personal need to read articles and books and (now) web sites in order to understand things. I began to follow my own inner wisdom, even though doing that made it increasingly impossible to function in our system. In the midst of my push to return to the field of English church music, I researched and wrote two articles about composer Herbert Howells, and I did it well...but since then, all I seem to be able to write is this blog...and the personal and sometimes "channelled" material in my own journal. I reached a tipping point, and went over it. I read very little traditional fiction or news/non-fiction now. I'm almost exclusively interested in trying to intuit, from a more Goddess-centered perspective, what is going on in the world.
The sea turtle situation is a case in point. It is so extreme, that if we were wise, our whole society would bring itself to a voluntary screeching halt to study its implications; that seems unlikely, doesn't it? But maybe a few of us have time to consider it metaphorically: Is it a sign of the future? Will human women tolerate upcoming environmental changes better than men? Is this Mother Nature saying, effectively, "I am all that matters any more"? I am curious too. Science is so informed by notions of duality and conflict, that it, too, may change in upcoming decades. Our world will change, and how we explain our world's changes will undoubtedly change. This doesn't mean that an all-female population of sea turtles is a good thing. But let's stay open to the possibility that there is a process going on here that is entirely too big for us to grasp, and a wisdom behind it much greater than ours.
