A Day of Diamonds

“Most notably, our drama–the play in which we are all acting–has shifted to an enormously larger stage. We live now in a bigger world. It is bigger because the sheer number of humans has tripled in the last century and because we are now better informed about them, but also, even more crucially, because of the way in which our own power has increased. We urban humans have now become capable of doing serious harm all over the world, both to its human and its nonhuman inhabitants. This is something really new in human history. In fact it is possibly the biggest change our species has ever experienced, certainly the biggest since the invention of agriculture.”

“The Myths We Live By” by Mary Midgley, 2003

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Dear Alex,

Raindrops overnight unseen float as diamonds this morning on the hammock of a spider web among lavenders.

Last week I called for the first time in my life the local fire-rescue station. I wanted to ask about the containment of the recent wildfire that had engulfed more than 2,000 homes and incalculable dreams in an adjacent town 5 miles close to my doorsteps. My phone conversation with the non-emergency dispatcher swirled to the likely origin of the Almeda Fire: arson.

For my town on the day and night of the wildfire, nothing flashed on the late-summer sky of Tuesday dawn to signal the crisis that would consume our horizon within the next 24 hours. Yet everything was set from sky to gravel in the paired perfection of high wind and parched soil for the rage of a century to claim lives. The timing and Fahrenheit of wildfire were not accidental. Strife in human narrative had suffocated us sooner than smoke. It scorched our sky.

What could be more spectacular than smoke and strife on sky?

In the weekend that trailed the Almeda Fire, my local hospital turned its educational building into a warehouse of donated bread, aspirin, pajamas, pet food, shaving cream and essentials, including diapers and luggage of assorted sizes, for recovering families and their pets. Churches and companies joined hands to offer hot meals and shelter. Children of volunteering parents moved from playground to parking lots to help carry bags of donated supplies into care centers crammed with people, prayers and poetry.

Heaven on earth happens everyday when you stoop to look down. There was even enough rain last night to embellish the spider web in royalty.

Yours, Kate