The day before Hurricane Irene was due, had been searching online for info I could relate to, i.e., simply gave just the facts, ma’am: no hysteria, no hype, no overblown videos. And discovered the National Weather Service’s no nonsense site.
Of course, the first thing the site wanted to know was: Where are you? So I typed in my zip code.
I’ve bookmarked that site; now, every morning I read “7-Day Forecast for Latitude, 42.39 degrees N and Longitude, 71.09 degrees W.” (AKA 02143. AKA Somerville, MA.)
So here’s an emerging spiritual exercise: To first take a few moments every morning to envision this precious planet, its globe-ness, its continents and seas, and then to take time to imagine carefully calibrated lines from earth’s poles and from above and below its middle and to feel where I am in relation to the equator and Greenwich, England.
“Ahh,” I think. “So that’s where I am!”
But there’s more to that Ahh than a mental acknowledgement of longitude and latitude, more to that profound sense of place. Here’s what else I contemplate while sipping my coffee: I’m—and you’re and we’re—in It and of It and It. The Soup. The Ball o’ Wax. The Whole Enchilada. Om/Aum. Within God. Deeply interconnected.
And whatever we do to the earth and to one another we do to ourselves and to The Divine.
(This Mindful stuff is exhausting!)
We’re interconnected, and it’s a big place, this planet. From England to here is 70/360, or almost a fifth of the way around the whole world at our latitude. Those other 4 fifths cover a lot of territory. The fact that we are ruining this huge place is just mind-boggling, and, along with denial and self-interest, must be part of why people have trouble with the idea of global warming.