We’ve had two weeks of very cool rainy weather, and that counter-clockwise low pressure weather system has kept away the wildfire smoke from Canada, while folks to our south are facing orange skies and unsafe air. Still, we’ve paid attention, following the news, and thinking about what might happen if it does come our way. It is easy enough for Margy and I to stay inside, or wear our N95 masks outside.

But now that we are deeper in relationship with our land, I am anxious about how such bad air might affect the robins and frogs and squirrels and other critters who live here with us. They don’t have masks and can’t get inside. I wonder if the babies of these critters wouldn’t make it, so vulnerable in those first weeks of life. My heart is wide open to our little microcosm of earth life.

And yet it is the macrocosm that emerges most in this story, because the smoke is coming from far away in Quebec, from wildfires made more destructive by climate change. We aren’t alone in our microcosm, we are all connected by the winds that blow across the globe, undeterred by artificial boundaries. I have been somewhat removed from wildfire problems. I have seen them on the news in California, Alberta, Australia. This is the first time they have come close to where I live. But truly we are all more and more vulnerable. And of course, some much more vulnerable than others. I worry about people without houses, struggling just to survive, in a tent or with a tarp. They can’t get out of the bad air.

There is so little I can personally do about these large issues at this time in my life. That is some of my motivation for trying to tend our little garden–to love this small place of earth in hopes that more and more people can learn to love the larger earth, our great mother. To share the beauty of this earth in writings and photos on this blog, that beauty might inspire love. But love includes grief, and the more we love the earth, the more we grieve for the destruction that human beings are perpetrating.