Mother Earth is sending me messages, I see them every night.

Every evening I run out with my camera to catch one of the beautiful storms sailing in night after night, the sky angry, emotional, full of color. But a new sky, a different one. It was inevitable that one of these would knock the power out, and last night, this one did, just minutes after I took the picture. Maria and I were sitting on the porch when a huge bolt of lightning struck across the road, accompanied by window-rattling booms of thunder. The power was out for several hours, I lit up the Kindle and read and  sweltered. It came on during the night.

We are all experiencing weather, everyone reading and seeing this  – heat here, rain, there, tornados in one place, storms and wind in another. We all talk about the weather and squawk about it, but weather has become the elephant in the room, Congress pretends it isn’t happening, we talk about the economy, we all focus on our own storms, our own heat, our own weather, yet weather has the potential for connecting us, it is a universal experience, like losing a dog, we each lament our own weather, but seem unwilling to see that it is a universal, not an individual experience. Weather troubles seem to be the norm, no longer an anomaly.

The media is happy to frighten us with weather alerts, but nobody really wants to focus on what they mean, what the real story is. How this binds our divided world. We are like the masses of cowed people in those old sci-fi movies, denying reality until it knocks us off our computers and away from the TV screens, we end up running through the streets in terror and confusion. In the movies, at least, it is usually too late. People pay for hiding their heads in the sand, for being selfish. I do not believe it is too late, it is surely waking me.

I am always struck when people talk about their grief over losing an animal that they seem to not realize that everyone around them, everyone they are talking to, everyone reading their comments,  has lost an animal, it is not just their grief. It is not our suffering individually, it is a collective experience yet we are all lost in our own narcissistic worlds.

Last night, sitting in the dark, in the sticky heat, I was thinking of the people out west in 120-degree heat, the people in Southwest, still digging out from tornado damage, the firefighters lost in Arizona, homes underwater in Florida and Virginia, the devastated Jersey shore. I decided to think about them, not me. We are feeling the same things, even if no one wants to see that.  We are living in a universal experience. I wonder when we will choose to connect the dots and think of Mother Earth, who is crying out to us to pay attention to her, and to heal her, and then, perhaps heal ourselves. Her messages are getting louder every day, they are written in the sky.