Summer and the Seasons

"Too hot!"  That has long been a common complaint by many people on the hottest days of summer.  However, when the extreme becomes even more extreme (aggravated in part by climate change), it can be very hard to dreamily sing "Summertime, and the livin' is easy."  Perhaps the following article, first published five years ago, can help make us more appreciative of summer as part of the recurring cycle of the seasons.

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It was a late summer.  There were more clouds than typical for a summer day, but that felt good because it gave relief from the hot summer sun.  What felt even better was a breeze that brushed across my face, bringing the promise of a respite from the summer heat we had endured for weeks.  "Maybe we'll get a cooling rain," I thought.  My slight elation at the change in weather was, however, kept in bounds by a larger awareness.  Namely, I knew that the pleasant shift in weather I was experiencing was the result of a distant hurricane that was coming ashore farther away, bringing destruction upon other people.

The soothing breeze that brushed my face thus raises the question of how I should think and feel about those things in Nature that bring both good and bad.  That tiny breeze raises spiritual and theological questions far beyond its small size.  To my way of thinking, the most distasteful responses to a hurricane during the past few years have been by people who claimed that God steered the hurricane away from them in response to their prayers.  Those people were thinking only of themselves, and seem to have had little concern about the other people who would be hurt by a re-directed hurricane.  Nor do such comments display an awareness of a long tradition of theological thought about the matter.

A less selfish response does not require more scientific understanding of storms.  It only requires a "compassionate heart," to use a Buddhist phrase.  A wiser and more  open-hearted response to tragedy was modeled by Jesus after a tower fell, killing people.  Even without a knowledge of Newtonian physics, Jesus knew that natural disasters do not injure just bad people, and that they do not spare just good people.  Challenging his listeners to join him in that enlightened response, he asked rhetorically,  "Those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them -- do you think that they were worse offenders...?  No, I tell you." (Luke 13:4-5, NRSV).  Jesus's reminder to us that "bad things can happen to good people," as we say today, echoes that same insight form the Jewish tradition's book of Job in the Bible. Job's suffering from natural forces was not a punishment.

Although in English we have separate words for "wind" and "spirit," in the Bible's original languages, the two are the same word.  We might think "wind-spirit." That equivalence can remind me when that light wind touches my face, to ask myself what my own spirit is like, especially when I know of the dangerous hurricane further away.

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There is another side of the coin to this matter of the uncertainties of the natural world -- the fact that natural forces can bring both damaging winds and needed rain.  I easily notice when bad luck befalls me.  In contrast, I easily overlook all the ways I have been helped by good things that were just as much beyond my control. The light wind that brushes my face can, therefore, widen my awareness even further.  The double meaning of wind-spirit can remind me to remember a larger spirit of unseen forces that support my life.  A native American Ojibwe song put it this way:

"Sometimes I go about pitying myself,

But all the while

I am being carried by great winds across the sky."

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Is there a way you have come to think about the uncontrollable uncertainties of life?

Friendly Competition by Fahrenheit

The United States is positioned on latitudes that stretch from semitropical climates in the south to winter temperatures in the north that approach those of Russia.  That wide range within a single nation with one main language allows for some friendly competition during winters and summers. When winter extremes hit more northern states, those who live in balmier climates can tweet, email, or phone their northern friends, bragging about relatively comfortable environments.  Of course, the danger is that come next summer, those in the north will get their revenge by communicating long-distance about their refreshingly cool nighttime temperatures while those in the south are baking.  Another way to try to gain advantage in this friendly game is for me to turn my own weather extreme to my advantage by bragging about the hardship I am enduring!

 "Various Meteorological Phenomena" (1856)

Comparing weather notes in some fashion is nothing new.  The 18th-century British lexicographer Samuel Johnson observed:  "When two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather."  Our modern means of communication, however, allow us to share simultaneous but dissimilar experiences of weather, all within our single nation.

Behind the extremes of winter and summer lies a larger truth about life on planet Earth.  Namely, that species on this planet have evolved so as to be able to usually live within such extremes.  Even more broadly, some scientists have put forward the "anthropic principle" as a way of pointing to a kind of "fine-tuning" of certain characteristics of the universe that match the conditions necessary for life.  Such as the forces that make possible certain chemical elements in the universe.  The extremes of weather and the extremes of what various species can tolerate are, however, one place we can observe directly a "fit" between life and its environments.

We humans, with our complex cultures, tool-making, and accumulation of knowledge have stretched our natural limits.  We have found ways to dress ourselves for extreme colds, and invented ways to artificially warm or cool our burrows.

We might ask though: Can we also extend ourselves spiritually to encompass the extremes that press in upon our lives?  The friendly game of contrasting temperatures sometimes needs to be set aside.  When the extremes of weather bring injury, or even death, we need to shift to another mode, remembering the religious leader Paul's reminder to "Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep."

Thus, the extremes we endure can call us to rise above a concern centered just upon ourselves, recognizing that the element of unfortunate chance can strike any life.  Rising above a narrow self-concern can be something like rising above this planet's surface to see all of it as a whole. The Saudi Arabian astronaut Prince Sulatan Bin Salmon Al-Saud described his experience with fellow astronauts this way:

"The first day or so, we all pointed to our countries.

The third or fourth day,
 we were pointing to our continents.

By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth."

~~~

How do you deal with the shifting seasons psychologically or spiritually?

(The quote by Samuel Johnson [1709-1784] is taken from

 Bloomsbury Treasury of Quotations, ed. John Dainith, © 1994, p. 763.)

(The quote by Paul is from Christianity's New Testament, Romans 12:15 [NRSV].)

(The Prince Al-Saud quote is from Weather: How It Works and Why It Matters by Arthur Upgren, p. 42.)

The “Seven-Year” Insect Itch

Of all non-human forms of Nature that many people in the U.S. encounter, there is one form that may be the oddest.  Some people consider the species to be just noisemakers.  Other people find the "background music" they make somehow relaxing.  (Maybe they're an acquired taste.) Whatever you think of them, they are the Cicadidae family, or cicadas.

When I first moved to the southern U.S. and encountered these insects, a few southerners called them "locusts." But that is a misnomer.  Cicadas do not come in Biblical-type plagues sweeping across the sky.  Cicadas don't congregate in those kind of numbers, nor do they travel far.  In fact, they are more of home-bodies, their entire life journey extending not much further than down the height of tree and back up again.

The adult form, which makes that controversial drone, looks like a giant green fly that has bulked up.  However, despite the inescapable summer sound of cicadas in the South, we humans rarely get a close look at the adults with their large delicate wings folded back over the body.  What we can get a close look at is the shell-like remnant of the nymphs that preceded the adults.  Rather than emerging from a cocoon, the adult emerges out of the exoskeleton of a wingless kind of brown "bug," which is left behind on the bark of a tree.

When several such remnants are on a single tree, they demonstrate visually the life story of the cicada.  All the nymphs' empty shells will be oriented away from the ground they left behind and will be marching upward (where the adults went to mate and lay eggs).  The nymphs make this short trek partway toward the treetops after having lived underground, frequently for 13 years.  (Sometimes the cicadas are called "seven-year cicadas," but that number "7" probably comes form our biblical heritage, seven being in the Bible a symbol of completion.)

It is this long life underground that makes the cicadas so odd.  We may think that a cicada population is being reborn every summer, but what we see are in most species the offspring of adults who laid eggs several years ago. There are actually multiple synchronized populations of cicadas, each set waiting for its turn to appear.

This could be real inspiration for a science-fiction story.  Imagine a planet on which there are ten sets of people -- each set looking exactly like each other set.  Only one set at a time appears out of a subterranean hiding place.  But our Star Trek crew who has landed on the planet does not know there are multiple sets of people.  As a result, the Star Trek crew becomes totally baffled in trying to deal with the planet's inhabitants.  It would be bizarre, and yet this is happening with the cicadas on our planet Earth!

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Looking back upon your own life, is there something you now see as having taken years to come to fruition and completion?