(I wrote this as a draft last Saturday, but due to snow and other factors, couldn't get back to it until now. It still seems relevant. PS: As I update this, snow is falling again.)
Well, Mother Nature was definitely in charge on Thanksgiving...heavy, wet snow ended up cancelling many family get-togethers. The apple crumble I made ended up feeding the few, not the many. I think it elicited one or two smiles...
And yet, the blanket of snow and the enforced time off seemed to focus a spotlight on the "excessiveness" of this whole upcoming month. The excessive amounts of food, the excessive travel, the excessive spending, the excessive materialism. While other countries seem to take part in some of this end-of-the-year activity, I don't believe anyone does it quite like the "good old US of A". For years, I have found December to be hard, increasingly impossible, but in the last few years it has become almost grotesque. Truly. If we are still admired around the world, it is hard to see how. The rapaciousness of it all -- from top billionaires on down to people lining up to race into stores for good deals -- is jaw-dropping and embarrassing. And I guess the question in my heart at least every other minute and a half is, where is the Goddess in all this? Where? She's not in grocery stores crammed with plastic-covered food, She's not in big box stores crammed with plastic-covered home goods, She's not in all the resources necessary to fly or drive or otherwise motor people and goods from place to place. She's not in urban and suburban sprawl. She's not in overeating, or over-binging on TV shows, or violent sports, or war, or "artificial" intelligence. In fact, I've reached the point where I am hard-pressed to imagine anywhere She might be in this world we've created. No wonder it took me almost seventy years to find Her. She's still largely invisible to the eye.
For the first time, I am reading Marianne Williamson's A Woman's Worth, and the first two chapters are simply awesome. It's basically about a woman's heart and divinity being within, which is, of course, why it is so hard for most of us to link up with them outside ourselves. As with so many of the other books that have meant a lot to me the last few years, it was written thirty years ago. Clearly I wasn't ready back then to make that inward journey so completely. Now I have done it.
Forgive me, repeating myself. This is what I think Mother Earth wants and needs from us now -- respect and love. Only respect and love. She doesn't need us fighting the forces that are hurting Her. She needs us to stop, stand still, and love the earth. Accept Her agency and power over the planet. Allow Her to go through the processes She needs to go through. We don't need new inventions to fight global warming -- the "fight" is part of the warming. We don't need new financial investments in clean energy -- "investing" in anything but Nature's wellbeing is at least part of what got us into this pickle in the first place. Earth will not be saved as we want it to function. It will be "saved" in the manner that guarantees the planet's longterm viability for many forms of life. We have to release our personal and societal expectations, or they will be released for us.
The snow is melting. For upstate New York, anyway, it was sort of a "teaser" storm. The day after Thanksgiving, things started to go back to "normal". Or did they?
