Cosmic Reflections

This winter begins steeped in gloom: clouds and rain coming in from the Pacific have blocked the sun and the moon. Milt makes sure I get up to view the lunar eclipse anyway. I pull a raincoat on over my pajamas and prepare to sit it out in my lawn chair set up at the far edge of the porch. But it’s pretty hopeless: mist shrouds infrequent glimpses of the earth’s shadow as it slowly creeps across the disc of lunar fullness.
Ah, weather: the great creator, sustainer, and destroyer of all life upon our precious planet! Astronauts have repeatedly beamed back to us images of our earth enshrouded by clouds, bearing witness to the reality that weather systems move beyond geopolitical boundaries and affect everything on Earth.
Yet earlier this month, these forty-plus years after the Christmas Eve astronauts described our planet as “an beautiful oasis in the desert of infinite space,” the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Cancun had scant representation by the major perpetrators of the most pressing problem in the history of the planet. It’s as if ignoring the elephant in the middle of the room will make it go away. It won’t. Rather, it is growing larger, taking up ever more and more of the room. Because global warming is already a looming reality on many parts of the planet, indigenous people from everywhere protested at the Conference, trying to get the rest of us to pay attention to how we are affecting the whole ecosystem of Earth.
Why would we?! Lack of weather is why so may retirees settle here in Las Vegas; we have escaped the winters we experienced elsewhere, and yet still expect the ‘fruits’ of winter’s snow and rain: lush lawns and green golf courses, functioning swimming pools and lots of shade trees. Lake Mead continues to drop and we’ve pretty much drained the underground aquifer of its fossil water. There is a plan in place to pipe water in from the center of the state, but the farmers there are protesting this ‘great water grab.’
Even in the face of alarming evidence to the contrary, we continue to be the ‘poster child’ for mindless, conspicuous, and irresponsible consumption of the earth’s natural resources.
My mind has run away with me out here in the cold darkness!
Unable to see anymore of the moon through the rain and mist, I give up on my vigil. But first I sit still at the beginning of this solstice (which means ‘standing still’) and feel the weather on my face. I even catch the scent of the mock orange bush beyond my gate even though its blossoms are months away. And for a few moments I remember, and savor, the insights of Rebecca Parker, president of my seminary:
“Let this be the time we wake to life,
like spring wakes, in the moment of winter solstice”