Gilding Christmas

Paul Gilding is one of any number of authors I admire, who write brilliant prose about the several impending and converging catastrophes - what he has famously labeled, The Great Disruption.  Invariably however, his last chapters like so many others conclude with a sugar-coated happy pill, a prediction where we humans manage to snatch some civility from the chaos and mass extinction of peak oil and climate change to miraculously discover new, more sustainable derivatives of contentment, learning by necessity to live on less.  And so isn't his name, Gilding, delightfully eponymous?  Perhaps that's why Zawacki is a verb.  Or not.

For me preparing for the celebrations this holiday season - the shopping, cooking, and decorating - feels more like navigating a very small and vulnerable boat through the worst tempest, trying frantically to avoid being smashed onto an unyielding rocky shore.   I cannot see the redemption in human "nature",  because by all objective evaluations, we are outside nature - or else our natural condition is moral turpitude.  Thus I envisage instead of a disruption, a Great Convulsion - something far more violent...and looming just over the horizon.

Yesterday I photographed daffodils - and their emergence before Christmas fills me with the darkest foreboding.  Something is seriously awry when it is still 50 degrees F at night in December.

Planes continue to fly, and the parking lot in the mall is crowded, but I cannot escape the knowledge that this cannot continue much longer.  How fitting is it then, for this blog that began in order to warn that trees are dying from pollution, that Anonymous left in a comment a link to this story:  Frankincense trees, too, are dying and that "the forests are running out of trees".  That sounds rather ominous, doesn't it?
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Deep gratitude to RPauli for the tree photograph.