My Wind and a Prayer
We had a half-inch of rain on the last Monday in September, and at least some of the flora decided to make a break for the sky. Grass sprouted up — to a full few inches already — in that delicious rich green which we normally think of as a spring color. Maybe it's that the only moisture the earth has known for five months has come from animals as the heavens have been blotter-dry; even the notion of a drink was seared out of our consciousness by Old Sol.
With the quicksilver column climbing back through the century mark, ya gotta think the grass might be wondering if it awoke to the wrong alarm. At least the sun shimmies down behind the ridge, now even before the cocktail hour, which means the fresh sprouting in the valley faces the fearsome rays for a much shorter time than the hellish sentence of July.
At some point, I'll stop being wrong when I say we've seen the last of the triple-digit temperatures. I won't need to change into shorts after lunch. I'll be able to turn the watering system from twice to once a day. More leaves will fall, more new shoots will climb through the surface. And then the rains will come, Yippee!
The reddened sky is bled of its color as all of the lights come on in the valley to the southwest. People are in their houses, knowing the shorter days and the longer nights; more time at home in the fall and winter. A sense of nesting; a time to be quiet. Who knows what will be the response to our response to the terror, but no one will feel as safe as they did on September 10th, not ever if they ever think about it.
It is almost too much to hope that mankind — what we fondly refer to as civilization — will retool into a peaceful world community. Not so long as guns and money control the program. It may just be, however, that despite my ineptitude at forecasting better weather — my wind and a prayer — I just can't imagine that we've come all this way to fail. At some point, we need to take control of our lives, and live in harmony with the grass and the rain and each other.
It will take a higher consciousness, what Einstein referred to as a new way of thinking, but it certainly seems plausible if not likely. All these people who are saying let's make sure we know who's where before we start bombing anything. Standing peaceably amidst the vast frolic of waving flags and gritted brows. That's a good sign, methinks.
What will be the path to our self-salvation? How will we discover that we must not look to others but recognize that we are the heroes of our own time? Dunno. Stay tuned. What else?
And that's SetonnoteS...I'm Tony Seton.