We knew the winds were going to blow last weekend. The tail end of Hurricane Ike was predicted to slap through our area with forty mile-per-hour gusts. The weather mavens were unable to predict that instead, the straight-line gales would be clocked at seventy to eighty miles per hour.
When the winds died down at last at dusk on Sunday, the city of Louisville was mostly out of power. One interstate highway was shut down, with massive trees hanging over its guard rails and right across the mighty highway. Eighty percent of the power substations in the metropolitan area were either partially or completely off-line. Predictions for the time it will take to get the over half a million residential customers back on the grid started at one week and escalated to two weeks. Our actual time out of power may well end up at three weeks.
Add to the power outage a synchronistically inconvenient dish-washing-related injury which has turned my entire left side, from the tip of my head down through my fingers, into a mass of toothache-keen nerve pain, and I am experiencing the feelings of powerlessness intensely right now.
I have been thinking about this issue of powerlessness from a couple of viewpoints. Firstly, take the physical aspect of being literally out of power. In the common run of days, we take electrical power for granted. Our houses are set up for it. The air is conditioned electrically in our house and we cannot open very many of our windows to let nature condition our indoor air. We do have a fireplace with a good wood stove in it, and when necessary we can camp out by that stove and stay warm if we are out of power in wintertime. But by no means can we heat the whole house.
We are fortunate enough to have a gas cook-top, and a neighbor with a generator has given us an extension cord, so we have our refrigerator going, one light and this laptop. Of course right now I can only use the laptop in short bursts because of the nerve pain, but being able to continue working at all has been a wonderful blessing!
We will run out of warm water shortly, but at this time of year in Kentucky, it is warm enough still outside to make a cold shower sound pretty good. So the edge of panic that showed in my husband’s and my eyes when this emergency first blew in four days ago has receded. We will make it through.
However it becomes obvious at a time like this that we are not well set up in this house to function on wood-stove warmth and kerosene and battery-powered lanterns. Neither are 95% or more of the houses around us. Melissa, our caretaker on Avalon Farm, is in better shape in her primitive cabin than we are currently (now there’s a nice pun) because Avalon has solar-powered batteries which generate the farm’s power.
Mick and I have been yearning towards living on Avalon for years, but we cannot afford to do so right now. We have a good plan for a passive solar house, but not the funds to build it! Perhaps time will change that situation. I hope so! Until then we are finding it difficult to respond adequately to the increasing likelihood that these times of powerlessness will come again.
I know that it is controversial to blame the increasing number of extreme weather events on humans and their pollution of the water, ground and sky. The government sources now sound like the tobacco companies back when smoking tobacco was first linked to cancer. Yet I believe that most ordinary citizens can see right through the weaselly political cover-ups and bland denials of the obvious. We are reaping what we have so carelessly sown, as Mother Earth strives to heal herself of the wounds we have inflicted upon her and restore her balance.
And there are increasing signs that people are beginning to want to respond to this realization. People are driving less, going back to drinking tap water from the tap instead of from plastic bottles, using energy-saving light bulbs and carrying fabric totes instead of plastic bags to bring their shopping home. It’s a start!
There is a deeper issue here, though. If we look at Mother Earth as a living being, she, just like us, has an energy body as well as a physical body. Just as what we do physically with our environment directly affects Gaia’s physical body, so what we do within our energy bodies directly affects her energy body.
Since we are living in Harvest times, there are many service-to-self, negatively polarizing people actively increasing the levels of hostility, hate, aggression, war, cheating, stealing and other emotions and activities which increase the heat of our energy bodies and of the energy body of the Earth. Far worse for us than our physical sins, these intangible sins of lack of love are causing our poor planet to work harder and harder to rebalance and heal from this fever of humankind.
Let me give thanks for Gaia’s incredible effort to heal and balance herself without having to shake us off like fleas in some global catastrophe. We have been hit hard all over the globe lately with horrendous cataclysms, earthquakes tumbling into the news along with floods, hurricanes and tornadoes. Many people have died as a direct result of the catastrophes. Many more will eventually die because of collateral damage to food and water supplies causing famine and disease. But the main body of humankind has so far been able to survive. Gaia is gracious indeed!
The Confederation entities have spoken several times of how our planet is using these catastrophes to balance her energy field. The figure they use is that of a rubber band being moved from a stretched position to a position at rest by small increments instead of in one big snap. That explanation of all of these recent inconveniences resonates to me. And it gives me hope.
It is difficult to change our physical ways of relating to the planet by the way we configure our environment. It is doubly difficult to change the ways we relate to each other energetically. War has become so institutionalized that experts talk of an unending war, a necessary, perpetual state of warfare. Open discussion of ways to establish peace and bring our troops home is now considered to be unpatriotic, at least where I live.
But we can and we must respond to the challenge of changing the way we relate to each other. We need to break the fever of Earth. And that starts with breaking the fever we find within ourselves.
Trying to impress others by what we know or do, how much of the world’s supply we have or how much power we wield causes energetic heat. Seeing others at the soul level and listening to them with ears of love causes blessed coolness. Becoming angry with others pushes up the planetary fever while forgiving them and ourselves for being human cools it off. We can make a difference in the world strictly by how we conduct our inner emotional life.
This is the power we have that cannot go out. We have the power to use our free will in order to make healing choices in our lives. We can live the Law of One. We can live in love and light. We can learn more and more to think of all of humankind as one being, interconnected infinitely between its constituent parts.
It may be hard to keep our focus sometimes. At those times, Holly had wonderful advice for me today. She said, “Come to the Lord, dear child, and look into his eyes of love if you become weary. In your mind’s eye, rest with Him. Your Beloved will see you through.”
As I lay in bed last night, in the deep, velvet darkness of a neighborhood totally without power, I thought of my physical body as a vehicle. A good deal of catalyst is with me right now and I saw that catalyst as the fuel needed for driving my vehicle. Everything depends on how I hook up the engine or furnace of processing that catalyst to the drive train of my life.
If I see the fuel of catalyst as a negative thing and treat it accordingly, I will run a very polluting vehicle, emotionally speaking. On the other hand, if I perceive the catalyst as a blessing, positive and good, and welcome the tempering effect of burning that catalyst as though my engine were an athanor and the fuel were base metal which I can turn into gold, my energy body will burn that same fuel cleanly, powering me to a greater and more finely tempered strength of will and a more focused spiritual balance and maturity. I gratefully choose the tempering!
I open my arms and embrace your spirit. May we all relate to our beautiful Mother Earth and to each other with ever increasing respect and love. May we find pleasure in being kind and in doing what we can to heal our world. May we be rigorous in attending to our ethical choices. May we become fully human