THEY WON'T EVEN LEAVE THE SKIES ALONE! IS NOTHING SACRED?

For the past weeks the temp here has been consistently zero fahrenheit, a little above/a little below.  We’re in the crosshairs of two weather forces: cold cells that come down from the north pole (the geographical one -- they are saying that the magnetic north pole is moving into Russia now, enough of a change to perturb guidance directional systems that are based on compasses) and the jet stream that roars across the continent from the Pacific Coast, always west to east but moving its “stream bed” north in summer and south in winter.  The edge between the two systems rakes back and forth over the land, controlling drought and blizzard, bumper crop and green-tomato years, human comfort and even human death.  It appears that the Farmer’s Almanac, a kind of Bible, has nailed the forecast: cold, deep snow, lasting late into spring.  The climatologists call it an El Nino Year when this specific pattern of weather temperature appears in the southern Pacific Ocean.

They call it El Nino because it happens at about Christmas:  they mean the infant Jesus.    It’s an intrusion of religion into science.  When the reverse pattern appears, scientists are even-handed metaphorically and call it “la Nina.”  People like dyads, two extremes pulling and pushing. (Good/evil)  What will they do if a third pattern appears?  Le Neuter?  Or should it be LA Neuter?  If it’s neuter, there no article in the romance languages that will do.  It will have to be THE Neuter.  Or just Neuter.  Null.

No one know why these huge macro-patterns develop.  We do know why the planet is warming: us.  Walking through the room, I heard Al Gore’s voice on the radio asking,  “Don’t they know the glaciers are melting?  Don’t they know the currents in the ocean are changing?  Don’t they know that sea level is rising?”  The paper today told about remains of people, sometimes ancient, and airplane wreckage being revealed by receding ice.   Specific anecdotes about missing people and their grateful mothers gets our attention.  The idea that the ice leaving Greenland is making it so much lighter that it is causing the weight dynamics of the underlying tectonic plates to change, possibly causing readjustments in the form of earthquakes all over the planet, or the idea that Tibet, which gets ALL its water from melting glaciers, will have to emigrate -- those ideas are too big to grasp.

Not even the skies are safe.  The scientists have trespassed on traditional systems of interpretation, first by saying that Pluto is not a planet after all -- just a big asteroid -- and now by saying that the Zodiac has changed.  Here’s the new system:

Capricorn
January 20- to February 16

Aquarius
February 16 to March 11

Pisces
March 11 to April 18.

Aries
April 18 to May 13

Taurus
May 13 to June 21.

Gemini
June 21 to July 20

Cancer
July 20 to August 10

Leo
August 10 to September 16

Virgo
September 16 to October 30

Libra
October 30 to November 23

Scorpio
November 23 to November 29

Ophiuchus
November 29 to December 17

Sagittarius
December 17 to January 20 

I’m kind of miffed.  I mean, many of my assumptions about myself are “scorpionic,” as my friend Aad puts it.  I mean, Scorpios are supposed to be very sexy and passionate.  I’m just older, not milder.  But then I have to admit the zodiac is partly a distant observed real pattern -- well, from our point of view -- and partly a human construct, overlay of images.  One woman remarked, “Astrologers these days pay more attention to what’s happening on earth than what’s happening in the stars.”  Tim says,  “We are all overwhelmed -- get over it.”  

So I looked up “whelm” and discover that “over” whelm is redundant.  It means to cover something with an overturned vessel or bowl and it also means an engulfing flood.  We’re all whelmed.  At one time people thought that the sky was a big blue bowl, black with stars at night.  At one time people who were caught in floods thought they were the only ones, that the world was destroyed and would have to be made new.  Religious institutions (not the spiritual impulse but the human organizations who try to capture the traffic) were quick to assure everyone that the only way to be safe was to be obedient, to follow rules.  THEIR rules.

But their rules are no more dependable than the weather.  Take our most personal aspects, our bodies, our selves.  We are whelmed with new information about how it works, what is bad for us, what we should do to save ourselves.  We are whelmed by a new universe within that is a system of whirling morphing molecules that intensely affects the weather of our minds.  And we realize that our inner floating Greenland is underlain by the floating, clashing tectonic plates of our cultures, ideas mixing, birthing, dying.

This is rhetoric, not reality.  I would use it as the early part of a liturgy in which the old-think Christians would confess their sins.  Most of our sins are only limitations, real or not.  Right after this Confession of Sins comes the Assurance of Pardon, which depends upon a big Force in the sky.  (Yeah, that dependable sky -- sarcastic voice here.)  Instead, I go to the Assurance of Participation, which is located in the person.  (Individual -- sorry: I grew up in the USA.)  Classically, the definition of Sin is Separation from God.  So I’ll just conflate God with the world.  (The churches who claim access to some other world are irrelevant anyway.)  

If you participate in the world, you are part of it and therefore immortal by definition.  (A mortal is a human.  An IMmortal is more than that.  If you are part of the world, you are more than one mortal.  Goodbye, individualism.)  Participation means giving up control.  Churches don’t like that.  

I’m just waffling around.  Maybe later the ideas will gather into a pattern.  Maybe later than that the ideas will suggest practical things to do when one is whelmed.

What I learned when I was the flood plain lady for the City of Portland, was that human systems are only provisional guesses about what might really happen.  You can make all the maps you want -- in the end you’ll have to watch and maybe swim.  But the danger for houses is not so much in whether they will float away or withstand the water.  The danger is in all the debris that the flood smashes into your house.  Broken bridges, lost autos, and your neighbor’s house.  Take that metaphorically.