We Must Adapt

For the past month, we have had some weather up here in Northern California. The smoke plus the fog in the Bay Area has been a realness. It is not pleasant. I am beyond-grateful to be safely sheltered with my family, and to want for almost nothing.

I understand Cal Fire has dubbed the Northern Bay Area fires of the last couple of weeks the August Lightning Siege of 2020, and that Earth’s new burn scars are visible from space.

Right.

I’d say that’s incredible, but I don’t need to be in space to see it with my own eyes to believe it: I trust the satellite imagery. I’m down with my local newspapers and media outlets, and I believe they are trustworthy (for sure, I don’t always like how they do certain things, but that’s a much different conversation).

And I trust my eyes…and my nose. It’s hella smoky, and where there’s smoke….

I took a consistently masked quick trip to L.A. last week (so hot down there), and on the (delayed-by-weather) way back, I could see out the airplane window the rusty red of the smoke caused by the great, still-to-be-fully contained August Lightning Siege of 2020, OK. And it felt like a glimpse of a future for which we are not anywhere near ready to getting ready to get prepared – which boggles the mind, because here we are, this far into our story, and still grappling with this sick collective denial and this unbalanced playing field and these like, absolutely fucked-up priorities; I mean, for real, are y’all really, really serious with this thing where one single football player can cost $825 million to transfer. As if Lionel Messi’s some spring chicken….

C’mon now. That’s just us being super-silly. We know better.

Earth is changing. Growing. Dying. Just like us. We must adapt.

We do when we get sick, no? If we break a bone, say, a foot bone, we don’t dance on it. We tend to it, fit a cast around it, nurse it back to optimum health. Duh, same goes with our third rock from the Sun – it is sick of us, by us. (Here’s looking at that Japanese-owned cargo vessel that shot its oily and fuel-y wad all over the Indian Ocean at the southeast tip of Mauritius on July 25, and, hey, asking for a friend: Why was the Wakashio simply sunk, or allowed to sink, so swiftly and nonchalantly thereafter, anyway?)

Good thing we are also our best solution.

All it takes is reflection and (better, healthier) intentionality and common, modern sense, which we can do, set, and seek and gain for ourselves and to offer to our communities because charity begins at home. Yeah!

It is time we start taking a real good look around us, as well as some stock of what serves us and what doesn’t anymore, so that we can make the necessary adjustments and live better and be better. There is a more humane way to be a human on this planet. We best sort out ho we need to be on this Earth moving forward but now. Like, yesterday.

We are gonna get it together. I know we can, and I know we are.

All it takes is some acceptance.