Cosmic Reflections

Awakening in the pre-dawn of another Groundhog’s Day, I find myself wondering what’s the matter with ‘we the people’ on the North American Plate of Planet Earth?! We have just lived through the second warmest January ever recorded and are jokingly renaming it June-uary!
Here in the Mojave Desert, where summer temps have gone from 104 to 114 degrees in these last ten years, I’m already dreading next July. I wonder whether any mainline media meteorologist will dare to connect the dots between the rising temperatures, the newly discovered rivers running beneath the Antarctica, and the end-run the Republican Congress is making around the President’s decision against the XLKeystone Pipeline. Do their corporate sponsors pay them not to?
I am personally hoping that the groundhog does indeed see its shadow and scurry back down its hole so that we might have six weeks of some sort of winter! I always route for the rodent, hoping it bites the silly man in the top hat yanking it out of its burrow and into the glare of television cameras.
Yet this ridiculous ritual that’s re-enacted each year is a great metaphor for human unawareness. Instead of facing the shadow of climate change that is looming over us, we stay in denial about our addiction to fossil energy and how we’re destroying the earth. But what is stuffed down into the shadows of our collective unconscious doesn’t go away just because we choose ignore the addiction that Big Oil that will feed (like a drug dealer?) as it continues to extract and burn every drop of ancient sunlight it can find for its own greed.
And why would we confront our addiction when it’s easier to complain at the gas pump and blame any rising cost on radical environmentalists?! But radical means root: at the root of our humanness, we’re programmed to act on information rather than react with the instincts of our favorite mammal prognosticator. Our bigger brains have the capacity to change beliefs and behaviors as science uncovers cause and effect.
As I post this, the famous Pennsylvanian groundhog has seen its Shadow…yeah for six (more) weeks of winter!
But my focus is on the resident reptile here in Nevada: if Mojave Max makes an appearance much before mid-March……