Crashing and Burning at The End of The World

Dear fellow Earthlings,

While I sit on a log on Dungeness Spit in the Pacific Northwest, with 40 mile an hour winds whipping at my face and waves crashing on the shore, I'm thinking about Australia burning. Just the other day a friend said on a blog post she shared with me said,
"THE WORLD IS GOING CRAZY!"

It's a very strange feeling to be way out here where nearly a dozen deer come to my window and graze on the grass each day. These docile, gentle beings remind me that there is still softness in the world, while in other parts there is FIRE burning all around!

As I see my Australian friends' pictures from their backyards of air that is thick with gray smoke and hear them speak about itchy throats and teary eyes, I feel hopeless. I am here in the Pacific Northwest in winter where it mostly rains. However, I have strong memories of the fires that blazed through our own forests all the way down to the California coast the past several summers. I remember sitting at Carkeek Park looking at a couple sitting on a log in the haze and a man in the distance wading up to his waist in Puget Sound. He looked like he was baptizing himself for the end of times.

What are we to do?

And now there is talk of war. Facebook, news and social media sites are buzzing with opinions and theories and fear and anger and...

I have to turn it off.

Throwing my own energy into the fire will only stir it up even more.

The way inside is very subtle. I find it in the forest next to two huge cedar trees with bark graying from the dampness of the air. They are like very old, wise grandfathers. They must be more than 200 years old. Their top branches sway in the wind, but they are grounded with deep roots that I imagine reach the core of he Earth. They call me to stand still and listen. I breathe in the air and raise my hands over head for a minute and then bring them down to hold my heart in gratitude for being with these elders.

I tread further down the moist, pine-needled path to the ocean that roars with tsunami-like waves. They crash through my chest and blow me wide open so that all of the molecules that make up who I am are now blowing in the wind across the Sound and when I sit down on a log with the wind whipping at my face, those same molecules come back into place as if the log were a buoy pulling everything back to its center.

Crashing, Crashing....the waves are relentless in their fury. Fallen trees that are now logs riding the waves come barreling on to the shore. Even the seagulls hunker down behind old stumps and sticks in the sand. Walking down the spit was easy, but when I turn around to walk back to the forest, every inch of me has to fight the wind. I cover my face with my scarf and pull my hat down so I only have a tiny window for my eyes which are shut tight and wet with salty tears.

When I reach the upward slope back to the forest from the Sound, I lift my gaze past the waves and I almost detect a calm smoothness out between the Spit and the land mass on the other side. And then my mind imagines sitting on the bottom of the ocean with the sea creatures there. All of the bottom fish barely moving while so much activity happens on the surface.

 If it is the end of the world as we know it, I don't want to be crashing and burning and fighting and fearing. I don't want to add fuel to the fire. I don't want to predict, judge, criticize, hypothesize  or even proselytize.

The only thing I can do now is look up when I hear the piercing shrill of an eagle overhead. He swoops down and lands right on a high branch of a cedar tree above me. When he lands, he does not move, but stares with that all-knowing gaze that actually brings me a deep peace for the moment.