The Unease of Climate Disruption
In my part of the world, this summer has seen abnormally high heat and uncharacteristically low rainfall. It started in what is usually a wet spring and has seemingly gone on day after day and month after month. For me this has been a daily reminder of the extreme weather conditions attributed to climate change.
After about one and a half months of essentially no rain, one night it rained – in fact it poured. I was so relieved that I ran like a child through the rain in our backyard, and at night, I slept soundly. I woke to realize how relieved I felt with the rain. I had a window into what our ancestors might have experienced in the face of their water sources drying up, then being revived. As a human living at this time, where I live, and with what culture I was born into, I am afforded the privilege of having endless access to clean drinking water. My response was not based on personal lack of water.
Before the rain I had not acknowledged how impacted I was emotionally by these specific signs of climate disruption. For me that one rainfall felt like such a weight off, as though life on earth could go back to the way it had been. It was as though all the impacts of our tinkering with the earth’s natural rhythms and life could once again be in synchrony and balance. What I experienced after waking up that morning was how intimately impacted I as a human am by the health and ill health of nature. I wonder if earth is speaking to us, uttering a wakeup call into new ways of being.