I'm not one to strike a conversation by talking about the weather, but on a day like this, it's inevitable. We were under code 'orange' for ozone (sounds like a futuristic Seuss title) and you can barely see a mile. The mountains that were so crystal, stunningly clear last weekend are now lost in a dull, choking haze. I tried to run and almost instantly became winded and my asthma wheeze kicked in. While the great gushing of touristas driving extremely oversized vehicles could take the blame for this horrendous yuck, a great deal of this gaseous grossness floats over from the Tennessee and Ohio valleys, steel and paper mills, and other sordid toxic outputters.

About two summers ago, we had quite a fire season around here. Everything was coated in ash and all you could smell was smoke. Night came early, and the sun gave us orange light when filtered through the angry breath of sylvan smoldering. It was very surreal, and during that week you couldn't help but dredge up Apocalyptic images, that the fire would soon come and everything would burn. Isn't life built atop cinders? About a week or two later came that awful September Tuesday and the geo-political power structure of the world shifted, slided, into a sudden and scary paradigm of dogma and violence... on both ends. Not to mention the intercontinental suffering exacted by allegiances to those dogmas.

Despite the heat and the lording of smog, this new summer begins with a great surplus of water. We've had a very wet spring, and the French Broad River still is café brown with muddy runoff. Fruit trees are heaving forth bumper crops; my cherry tree is bending over backwards in tartness. It's so vivid, such an outpouring of earthly creativity and verve, that you can't help but to ease into thoughts of abundance and calm while a future harvest quivers and bursts around you. This is a time of ripening... we have burned, our dry and tattered dreams given to ashes, and now we are filling our baskets. Turn, turn, turn.

What this says to me is that we have survived the direness of fire and international tragedy alike, suffered the loss of crop and the mass blinking out of human life by war and premeditated acts of vengeance from all sides, and now, have entered a time if inward contentment and outward crux. Can we maintain and uphold the ideals of the present paradigm any longer? While our appetites are well fed and our need for stimuli eagerly fulfilled, is our present mass condition honestly reflective of the Good Earth? The fruit that I hold in my hand and adore with my senses at the least satisfies and at most is a mystical experience of the flavor of God, but is the whole world sucking down cherries and stuffing their pockets with sweetness? No. Why not? I don't know, and that's my problem.

I feel for the lack, and wish in a way there was more of it in my own life; my comfort, cherished and prized as it is, does not nurture a balance between Earth and I. Yet I feel so close to it; the smell and coolness of the soil, the surprise in the branches overhead, the skunk wandering around the car on Solstice day, the scurry of field mouse through the thicket, the ripples made by a Blue Heron in the lake as it rises to flight. Such Holy things. What about my cheese sandwich? What about my internet? What about the music from Senegal that plays though the speakers, or the suds in the fridge that my friends and I use to chase laughter around and around in tangential thoughtful glee? Where is the balance, the pivot point between luxury and necessity, the luscious and the noble?

Perhaps it is that inviting lushness, this burgeoning of messages, the overflowing river and overly productive cherry tree that are collectively become that delicate point; too little rain, no fruit and forest fires- too much rain, rotting food and flash floods. This pivot point is like a promise; "here's what you need to live, so what will you do now?" Walk steady, don't tip us too far. Walk steady and be aware of what could contribute to our own symbolic spoiling or whithering. Walk steady by changing what you can to stabilize the wobble of society, the wobble of how we think, the wobble of the ecology. Walk steady atop the goodness for your own sake, for doing for yourself does for the Big Self; it's proven in a way by quantum mechanics, and decreed in innumerable ways by ancient scrolls of knowledge and beanie-headed hawkers of a neo-Atlantean new age. It's even proven by honey bees.

What do honey bees have to do with subverting the dominant paradigm? Maybe nuttin' honey, or maybe that's just a symbol that I'm grabbing onto here to strike that tune about balance, which began as a tune about the weather and finding a reason, if not goodness, in it All. We can maintain balance, pollinating our relationships, to secure our needs and the needs of the collective. In politics, this would be called socialism or altruistic madness. So be it, but balance-making is not some selfless tact; it's making the self a microcosm of the whole. The bee is still a bee yet it is intrinsic with the field of flowers you're walking in, or picnicking in with a bottle of wine and a lover with bright eyes. I am still me but intrinsic with this big blue ball of magic and my community upon it, winging through space to some ultimate climax of creativity.

It's almost too quiet outside now, and the cats are half-sleeping and jumping to awakeness as my chair squeaks. I've just written another rant, skipping along on tangents and metaphors like a frog in lily-pad heaven, not knowing and maybe mot entirely caring of the all-hallowed "logical argument for or against something" has been made. Tomorrow there's a 40% chance of thunderstorms, highs in the mid-80s, ozone code yellow, and a good chance that the world, mine and yours, will be changed again in some amazing way, shifting it's weight along the crux of our actions, intentions, and wildest visions.

How do you dress for weather like that? Do you dress for weather like that, or do you just go merrily bare-ass nekkid into the infinite?