Solstice Commentary

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Solstice Commentary

By Susan Cerulean on Florida Public Radio

December 21, 2001

I swear I heard a Carolina wren courting its mate outside my window yesterday morning, just about dawn. That's not so unusual: this cinnamon-brown songbird is one of Florida's most familiar year round residents.

What is unusual is the timing: it's only mid-December. Even repeat-nesting Carolina wrens don't usually set the boundaries of their breeding territories until early spring.

But as every Floridian has surely noticed, this isn't a normal year-in fact, it's the second warmest winter in recorded history.

Global warming is no longer a hypothesis-reliable scientists tell us it's a documented, happening thing. Already it's changing our world. We are witnessing the speeded up metabolism of the earth: our planet's pulse is pounding in response to the human consumption of fossil fuels.

We don't need scientists to tell us our earth is warming this year. We feel it with our bodies. I find myself peering into the shrubbery and trees everywhere I walk, looking for early leaves and flowers, and I'm finding them: the native azaleas are pushing out tiny coppery leaves at their tips, and the ornamental azaleas are blooming in earnest, weeks ahead of schedule.

It's easy to feel as if our very life support system is spinning out of control. We hear that within twenty years, global warming will have caused the melting of all the snow and ice from the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. In Tallahassee, I wince at the felling of the living forest every day, all over town; and watch the trees replaced by a new shopping center here, a wider road there. We seem completely unable to slow the hamster wheel of growth.

Even as scientists document the reality of global warming on our planet, the Bush administration fails to acknowledge what we face, and the necessity of changing our course of action. So for now, we are going to have to work on local and individual levels: and the good news is that in Florida, 13 counties and 7 cities have passed resolutions laying the groundwork for the mitigation of the global warming threats to this vulnerable peninsula we live on.

Those of us who want to make a difference on environmental and social issues feel we must work more feverishly than ever before, to balance out everyone who is not. Yet I have been wondering, lately, if what we need to do isn't exactly the opposite. Each of us is a cell in this living landscape, and I wonder if we might not effect a real slowdown in the earth's out-of-control metabolism, if we simply slow ourselves down. I'm talking about our own daily lives, in particular, the amount of stuff we buy, and the number of miles we drive or fly. The ways we consume fossil fuel. What if we stopped moving so fast on the rounds demanded by our consumer culture, and instead, were to plant that garden, get involved in the neighborhood council, take stock of our own household energy use, figure out how to connect more with ourselves and our real needs, and with our community, and the natural world, and with spirit?

What a perfect time of year this is to go inward and do this contemplative work: we're just at the winter solstice, a time when the hours of sun are shortest, a time when we are biologically intended to rest deeply and await the coming light.

Here is my solstice prayer: Let us find within ourselves the resources to cool our feverish planet. Let our contributions be swift and organic, fierce and deliberate, and all that is needed. For the sake of all the unborn, of all species, waiting for their chance at living, let this be so.