This year I'm really (really) noticing how our world is changing. I fear much of the change is the result of human influence, and probably doesn't bode well for some of Earth's species—us, for example.
There's no doubt we are heading into a time of weather extremes, with massive hurricanes, monster tornados, melting glaciers, rising salt water levels, diminishing fresh water reserves, heat waves and cold snaps. The Earth also has her own weather pendulum, and whether or not we can survive at the far reaches of its movements, it may be swinging toward an ice age.
Interesting. It is said that the human ability for symbolic thought and speech developed into language around campfires inside ice caves. I wonder what we might come up with if we survive during the wild weather that may be ahead for us.
I've read that poison ivy will begin to grow larger and more potent in the years ahead. There's a pleasant thought. Here on the farm we're well acquainted with this plant's current power, and I admit I'm not inclined to think too hard about our prospects with this green neighbor.
As always, there are glorious bright spots as well. This spring we had one of the most prolific displays of flowering plants I've ever seen. The lilacs bent their branches and filled the air with their intense perfume. (Lilacs produce one of my particular "memory smells"; I played under lilac bushes as a child, and one wee sniff sends me right back to 1950's northern Indiana.)
Right now we are enjoying monarch and swallowtail butterfly displays, and it seems to me they are particularly large this year. I watched a yellow swallowtail on the anise hyssop yesterday, and it looked to be about 6" across. Have they always been this big, or am I just beginning to take note?
Carpenter bees, deer, robins, turkey vultures, click beetles, even the duck eggs ... so much seems either larger, more prolific, or both this year. I hope this isn't a last Cenozoicc gasp, though it could be.
Or maybe it's Mother Earth doing what she knows how to do: being beautiful, providing something wonderful to enjoy, giving her human offspring as much leeway as possible (though even loving parents have limits), simply delighting in the vast power of creation that blesses her existence.
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Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that I learned some years ago that Mother Nature blesses us with particularly expansive bounty when she is about to curse us with a particularly brutal winter. She seems to be hoping that we have the brains to put some of that bounty aside for the coming long cold spell. Does that thought dull the beauty that you see? I sure hope not!
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